MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
MLA Barkman: “The UK government stood behind our freedom and our right to decide our own future”
MLA Barkman was interviewed on GBC by Michael Portillo, a former member of the British parliament This week, Falklands' lawmaker MLA Teslyn Barkman was interviewed by Britain News Channel, GBC about her personal experiences in the aftermath of the 1982 war with Argentina, underlining how the UK government “stood behind us, stood behind our freedom...and for our human rights to decide our own future”.
Furthermore how Argentina has since implemented economic sanctions on the Falklands to limit the Islands' involvement in the international stage, and “changed military brutality for an international campaign to brutally state that we don't have a right to exist as a people.”
MLA Barkman was interviewed by Michael Portillo, a former Conservative member of Parliament who also held ministerial positions and visited the Falklands.
MLA Barkman started by saying that “Argentina brought war to our home. My Mom, her family, my friends, my whole country were held captive, and while their homes were invaded, as we have seen, since then the UK government stood behind us, stood behind our freedom, acknowledging the shared history they hold with us, and the support for our people and for our Human Rights, to decide our own future.
However, unfortunately this is not a concept that's respected across the water, and rather than continue with military brutality, they've continued with an international campaign to get other countries to support their views, to remove our Human Rights. But they also lobby illegally economic sanctions against us to try to limit our involvement in the international stage, and to restrict our economy, and to hurt the oceans round us, which is particularly distressing.
Portillo said he had visited the Falklands: ”I've had the privilege to do that, and the kind of insight I had when I was down there, was that you had a very small population, but you had to be extraordinarily aware of world affairs. I think of you as a village where the foreign policy is paramount because you really have to think about how different governments round the world view you. Do you find the position of Argentina is a daily worry for you? does it affect your quality of life.??
Yes most certainly, replied MLA Barkman, as well as being a small population, there is a number of us with post traumatic stress because of the war. I myself was born after the war but I had to grow up with minefields, with the brutality of a country saying that our country, does not have a right to exist as a people.
Finally, ”I realize that we are an inconvenient truth to the government of Argentina, but we are not going to be removed. And I suppose that one of the most distressing things, even if we are the only people the Falklands has ever had, now I have to pass that burden on to my child, that, you know, the idea that we are used as a political pawn.
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Read all commentsJeezus!! Tha' lady lies worse than a New York 42nd St whore! LOL It even shows on her face.
Dec 01st, 2023 - 11:02 am 0You know politicians lie when they have to resort to inflammatory and distortive semantics in order to paint a picture that suggests a situation being something it is not.
Oh we know you exist alright ! We know you exist because you are not supposed to be there! LOL ... and this comment now exists, because you are the ones inventing a situation YOU seek to create and have thus brought on to yourselves because of your decisions and because of how you handled the place where you DO have “self determination”, meaning by saying what you choose to say.
The ONLY mistake Argentina made is being too intimidated and afraid of their genocidal US UK supported Military Occupation, to realize taking back the islands through a show of force was was giving those countries the chance to create a war and move in more strongly onto our region.
Everything else after that, and every other way in which you are describing the past and present is a tirades of lies Madam “Lawyer” - You all know very well what your “ruling government” is using you for. Don't try and put on Argentina your own sad predicament.
Oh bless, Trimonde. Really, one can’t make this stuff up. So the US and UK started the Falklands war?
Dec 01st, 2023 - 03:51 pm 0Fancy the arrogance of the UK to respond to military force with… military force. What sort of monsters are they!
Trimonde is properly crazy.
Dec 01st, 2023 - 04:32 pm 0The Falkland Islanders are there because their ancestors were there for nine or ten generations.
Unfortunately, Argentina has made up a history claiming an Argentine population was evicted from the islands. Historic fact shows that is false.
Spain did indeed have a population on East Falkland that voluntarily left in 1810. These people neither became Argentine, nor fought the insurgents, they returned to Spain.
Argentina tried and failed to settle on the islands and Britain reestablished its historic claim to West Falkland and took sovereignty of the all but empty islands.
The 1982 war is as irrelevant to the Peronist claims.
The UN state clearly the people on NSGTs have the right to self determination, every attempt by the likes of Trimonde to overturn that has failed.
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