MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Gibraltar accuses Spain of incitement to racial hatred and calls for ad hoc talks

CM Picardo said Spain “was chasing Quixotic windmills” instead of tackling the real problems facing Spaniards.

Gibraltar accused Spain before the United Nations Fourth Committee of incitement to racial hatred and called for reasonable dialogue urging the start of ‘ad hoc’ talks to resolve issues Madrid has been expressing concern over.

Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo also accused Spain of “chasing Quixotic windmills” instead of tackling the real problems facing Spaniards.

According to the Gibraltar Chronicle the address took on a more dynamic stride than in previous years where the emphasis has been legalistic. But the time constraints imposed on all speakers meant that he could not deliver the whole speech although that is filed on the UN record.

Mr Picardo reflected on the fact that 50 years have passed since Sir Joshua Hassan and Peter Isola first appeared before the UN, and called for the UN to debate Gibraltar’s current status and, as Gibraltar argues, accept that it is sufficient to meet the so called Fourth Option - a tailored decolonisation that allows delisting.

If it feels it does not then the UN, he said, should detail what the deficiencies are to achieve delisting. “It is now the duty of the C24 and of this (Fourth) Committee to revert to us and advise whether you consider (the 2006 Constitution) a full measure of self-government short of independence that has been achieved,” said Mr Picardo noting that so far there has been only a “deafening silence”.

It is an argument which differs only in approach to that of the arguments put by former GSD Chief Minister Peter Caruana in that he shared the UK position that there was no benefit in attaching great importance to the UN decolonisation committee given its reluctance to take a decision on this matter whilst the differences with Spain continue.

Mr Picardo picked up sharply on the remarks reported in the Chronicle where the C24 Chairman – an Ecuadorian trained at Madrid’s diplomatic school – had said that some colonial situations are defined as “special and particular” because they are involved in a sovereignty dispute.

The Chief Minister said there was no trace of a single UN resolution stating such “nonsense” and accused Spain and Argentina of working in cahoots hoping that “if they repeat a lie often enough it will be believed.”

Instead he put the position starkly to the UN; “It is only through giving effect to the wishes and aspirations of the people of Gibraltar that our territory will ever be decolonised”.

Earlier Mr Picardo rehearsed the events of recent months in Gibraltar waters and at the border but said that the most shocking development was “whole sectors of the Spanish Government and media [launching] headlong into a concerted and unrelenting campaign of lies designed to demonise the Gibraltarians.”

This myth was being sold to Spain’s vulnerable people caught in economic woes but they had led to incidents from arson to the YouTube nasty video and a rift being created between ordinary people on both sides of the frontier.

“Economic sanctions, physical restrictions at our frontier, police and military invasion of our territorial seas, shots fired at innocent Gibraltarians, arson and damage against the property of Gibraltarians in Spain; in Europe; in the 21st century,” declared Mr Picardo.

But the Chief Minister, flanked by his ministers Dr Joseph Garcia and Gilbert Licudi and with SDGG leader Dennis Matthews nearby, turned the focus to dialogue. He said he hoped ad hoc talks would take place soon to address matters that “may deliver benefit to the people of our region.”

“What will never happen are talks between the UK and Spain under the Brussels Process to negotiate a transfer of sovereignty to Spain,” he said, emphasising that the people of Gibraltar are never going to consent to the UK and Spain discussing or negotiating any transfer of sovereignty to Spain.

Gibraltar he declared would win “any fair and just litigation in which it is represented” in relation to sovereignty. Gibraltar’s destiny, he said, is not one of becoming a colony of Spain.