FALKLANDS CONFLICT DIARY 20TH MAY 1982

As before, actual entry in Courier, comments in Times Roman, marked by numbers in curly brackets like {this}.

20th May.
Suddenly it all seems grotesque. 'Time is running out' at the UN & all parties seem to have resigned themselves to serious fighting. It now seems very clear to me that since the Argentinians do not appreciate the British case -- and neither do most other 3rd world countries -- the point of standing up against unprovoked aggression/wanton infraction of international law is entirely lost. So it is only demonstrated in abstract to ourselves and our allies. Is this worth killing people for, or sacrificing good relations all over the world? {1}


Anyway, how important is "what it looks like"? Is a nation to follow its own principles irrespective of of how its actions may appear to outsiders? I suppose "the propaganda war" addresses itself to this problem -- it's no good Britain taking a stand against aggression unless we can persuade all the onlookers (& potential aggressors & aggressed & actors against aggression) that that is precisely what is going on. 


From other points of view, it is the Argentines who are taking a stand against aggression....


===== 
Heard the emergency debate in the House of Commons. Nothing really new. Maggie gearing everybody up for an assault. Talked to Andrew Leonard, a local farmer who used to teach in the Falklands. He says the Falklands are run by about 8 families who don't really care who is in charge as long as they get their money. Everybody else would be just as happy to live in Scotland or New Zealand. In his view the whole enterprise is loony & the British government should have called on the UN for mandatory sanctions at the outset, and might have got a pretty solid response {2}. He thinks that the Argentinians feel twice as strongly as we do about the legitimacy of their claim. Presumably they regard resolution 502 {3}as simple victimization by a lot of well-heeled nations that do not understand the real issues -- the international 'establishment'.


{1} I think that at the time I had a romantic view of international law, and that the UN was the final arbiter, to which we should defer. A key principle of the modern dispensation is that the recognised borders of member states are inviolable and that 'invasions' of territory recognised as belonging to another state should provoke condemnation, sanctions, or even the involvement of UN troops (recall that the Korean war was prosecuted by notionally UN troops).


I still feel that the UN ought to be supported as the best way to prevent polarisation and to seek reconciliation. For this reason I opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: I thought the UN should be calling the shots, militarily and metaphorically.  Is this a naive view?


{2} This is the same view that I reported for Tom Hopkinson on May 11th. If Andrew Leonard's summary is essentially factual it makes the whole thing seem completely crazy. Surely the UK government must have known all this? Did it expect to gain its results diplomatically because it was backed up by a credible show of force that it never expected to have to use? Was the whole thing just a giant case of panem et circences?


{3} United Nations Resolution 502 called upon all parties to cease fire and withdraw troops. Since this would have restored the status quo ante the Argentinian government understandably did not comply. Its main significance was that if Argentina did not withdraw its troops, it allowed the UK to invoke the 'right of self-defence'.


One wonders about the views of 'Third World Countries'. Presumably they had political and emotional reasons to oppose the colonial tradition: European powers controlling odd bits of territory all over the globe. Because the international 'establishment' set both national borders and the rules of the UN it unavoidably tends to freeze in place past arbitrary power. Is the UN widely regarded as a club of the rich and powerful?