The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, said that the Falkland Islands “are British and will remain British”, in a session of the country’s Parliament this Wednesday (9).
Starmer has been heavily criticized by the Conservative opposition after last week announcing a deal to hand Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago, which the Indian Ocean country has claimed since it ceased to be a British colony in 1968.
Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell accused the Labor administration of handing over a “key strategic military asset to a state that has never controlled it and with which the Chagossian people feel little, if any, affinity”.
Mitchell also stated that the decision helps “enemies” and “weakens the strategic network of UK defense interests”. Chagos has among its islands Diego Garcia, where there is a British and United States military base.
This Wednesday, Starmer even claimed personal reasons for maintaining British sovereignty over the Falklands, contested by Argentina.
“My uncle almost lost his life when his ship was torpedoed defending the Falklands,” he said, referring to the war between Argentines and British over the archipelago in 1982, won by London.
“The islands are British and will remain British. It’s personal for me. Gibraltar’s sovereignty will also not be negotiated,” he added.
The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, like his Peronist predecessors, demands Buenos Aires’ sovereignty over the archipelago.
In September, in his speech to the UN General Assembly, he accused the United Nations of not fulfilling “its mission of defending the territorial sovereignty of its members, as we Argentines know first-hand in relation to the Falkland Islands”.
In April, when the construction of a joint naval base with the United States was announced in the province of Tierra del Fuego, in the extreme south of the country, Milei said it would be “the first step to start thinking about the recovery of the Falklands”.
In a referendum held in 2013 with inhabitants of the Falklands, 99.8% of the archipelago’s residents said they would prefer it to maintain its status as a British overseas territory.
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