But the colonisation of a foreign land is now legitimate because the colonists have been there for “100 years”? Still not a very good precedent.

Frankly, as I pointed out earlier, I agree that there is nothing that the Argentine govt. can do now to ‘retake’ the islands as the population is now wholly British. I do think, however, that justifying what is esentially colonisation through talk of democracy and self-determination is a bit rich and that the Argentines should have full or equal fishing rights to the adjacent seas – particularly if the islanders themselves aren’t going to fish there and simply selling their rights as Jester is suggesting. The Falklanders should of course have all the rights to remain on the islands under British rule but to exploit the natural resources as well is treading over the line.

British land ownership laws blur the issue further as they mean that the islanders are simply lease holders on state land. This amounts to a direct case of the British state handing out leases on land that by right should belong to another state.

Well then we go back to the argument that all people of non New Zealand (native New Zealand) should be kicked out and the native New Zealanders should be handed back their country. I am serious. Same goes for Australia, Canada, the USA in fact the whole of North and South America. All people with no non native ancestry should be shipped out and the land handed back to the people who were there first. No arguing, just STFU and get on with it.

The irony is that if you do this, the only people left in the homes that they and their ancestors have inhabited for centuries, without displacing any previous inhabitants……………is the Falkland islanders. But who cares about them eh? Afterall they are only British.

Phil :rolleyes:

This is a fascinating thread and I for one am very interested to read intelligently presented arguments from both ‘sides’ (if I may refer to you as such). The thread has, however, hit upon a very tricky subject, that of the right of self determination.

Sealord,
According to you self determination of peoples is key amongst . And far be it from me to disagree yet this does not really hold true in the world today, nor has it in history.

I’m just briefly going to outline a couple of examples to show how tricky the subject can be. Firstly, in 1999 NATO went to war, ostensibly to fight for the right to self determination of the Kosovo Albanians whose rights had been “trampled” by the Serbian government during the Milosevic administration. All well and good you might say – a victory for the principle of self determination of peoples. Yet in that same year NATO member Turkey launched a massive military campaign against the Kurdish Worker’s Party in Kurdistan (in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq) causing over a million people to be internally displaced, destroying hundreds of villages and killing god knows how many people. In 1999 Turkey for the first time overtook Israel as the major recipient of US foreign military aid. Now this doesn’t, of course reflect too much on the British way of doing things but certainly calls into question the ‘sanity’ of the world order.
Another example is Birmingham, UK. Now I’d read somewhere that the Pakistani population of Birmingham will, according to projected figures (from the same article), explode over the next decade and the Pakistani community would form an outright majority by that time. Now, for the sake of discussion it really isn’t important how questionable this information is (and for the record, I think it very questionable) because we can use the case as a hypothetical scenario. Now if in a few generations the Pakistani community, being the outright majority ethnic and cultural group in Birmingham called for independence from the rest of the UK would they have a case? In my view, certainly not – or at least no form of independence or autonomy would even be considerred by the British government.
Now we could go back to the beginnings of the idea of national self determination at the end of the 19th century and its final applications in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and immediately after WWI. These cases are all full of contradictions and, in almost all cases, certain groups were given the right to run their own affairs at the expense of other groups simply for the benefit of “Great Power Politics”. This pattern appears to have continued, in South Eastern Europe at least, ever since. I would not be surprised if this held true elsewhere in the world.

Ink you are losing the point very badly indeed and so are you Jester. This IS about self determination and you are just going to have to live with it. Ink I live in Birmingham and yes your information is VERY questionable, Birmingham is part of the UK (so too, according to the Falkland islanders is the Flaklands) and until a minority becomes a majority in the country as a whole (and although it is a large minority the Pakistani community in Birmingham is indeed just that, a minority) becoming a majority in a single city simply does not cut the ceasation argument on a national scale. Sorry chap, you used a bad example for a bad argument, you best go back to the drawing board.

Jester, if you are going to blythly ride rough-shod of peoples liberty you are bound to draw comparisons and no, Sealord did not mention the Austrian corporal, you did, don’t put words in peoples mouths.

Phil 🙂

Gaz if you can be arsed there are a plethora of web sites supplied above, a cursory glance will answer many of you questions. :rolleyes:

5000 people came off the top of your head, everything else it seems comes out of your backside.

Phil :p