FALKLANDS MEMORIES Never officially a war, the Falklands conflict

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 1, 2007 | by INTRODUCTION

TWENTY-FIVE years ago tomorrow, General Leopoldo Galtieri ordered his forces to seize the Malvinas Islands. Then head of Argentina's military government and the country's de facto president, he referred to this manoeuvre as a legitimate "reoccupation" of sovereign territory. The United Kingdom had its own name for those islands, its own claims over them, and its own word for what was happening to that tiny, lonely British dependency 8000 miles away: the Falklands had been invaded. Over the following 74 days, 258 British soldiers and sailors were killed, and 649 Argentines, in what both sides could, at a push, consider the defence of home ground.

To the citizens of the UK, this seemed the most dramatic turn of international events since the Nazi conquest of Europe. Suez had been a "crisis" (in which Britain tried and failed to protect long- standing interests in the Middle East by opposing Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez canal), but the Falklands was a "war", although war was never officially declared by either nation. Sue Townsend's fictional diarist Adrian Mole celebrated his 15th birthday on the day of the invasion. Like the vast majority of the population, he was excited and supportive of the naval task force sent to retake the islands by amphibious assault. And like most, Mole could not easily find the Falklands on a map . . . in his case they were concealed by digestive biscuit crumbs stuck above the South Atlantic.

Much more recently, the author David Mitchell drew on his own youthful memories of sudden, semi-informed jingoism for his autobiographical novel Black Swan Green.

"People'll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world, " declares the 13-year-old narrator from his vantage point of middle England in the spring of 1982. A quarter of a century later, however, those of us who were even younger at the time can recall only the vaguest TV images of jets and warships, and a few of the more exotic trigger words: Yomp. Exocet. Belgrano. Now, as then, we need our elders to put those terms in context for us.

But still they cannot seem to agree as to whether that war was worth fighting, or whether it is even worth remembering.

The stalwart newspaperman Sir Max Hastings was embedded among the 2nd Battalion Parachute regiment during the conflict, and carried on alone into the Falklands' capital Port Stanley after the troops were ordered to halt their advance, requesting an interview with the Argentine commander when he got there. His is one of the better known Falklands war stories, but Hastings has refused to do or say anything to mark this 25th anniversary, beyond expressing regret for his bygone fascination with "warriors". "Though it appeared right at the time to undo armed aggression, " wrote Hastings last week, "in hindsight what a damnably silly conflict it appears . . . a leftover of empire which had nothing to do with the mainstream interests of Britain."

Carol Thatcher, meanwhile, who then worked for The Daily Telegraph, has made a new documentary for the occasion, entitled Mummy's War. The programme is in her words "a voyage of discovery; to fill in the gaps", following the former prime minister's daughter to Argentina and the disputed islands. The facts, as she found them, are that Margaret Thatcher remains highly esteemed by the Falklands' 3000 or so proud British passport holders, but despised by many Argentines as a war criminal, particularly for her order to sink the cruiser General Belgrano, which was outside the recognised combat zone on May 2, 1982. The Belgrano, the conflict, and the "Malvinas" remain live issues in the country that lost them.

In the country that won, those issues have been slowly diverted and submerged into backwaters of British social and military history. This seems partly because the bodycount turned out to be so much lower than feared when the fleet set sail from Portsmouth on April 5, 1982. Also, the islands themselves were never considered significant in anything but a symbolic sense - and even that symbol, it transpires, was not powerful enough to prevent Margaret Thatcher from planning to return them to Argentina two years before the conflict. In the end, Her Majesty's armed forces only succeeded in preserving the status quo of a place so very far removed from British life that interest at home could begin subsiding almost as soon as the last shot was fired.

The UK's sense of victory was sustained long enough for Thatcher's initially unpopular government to win re-election in 1983. Her critics have since come to believe that the war was fought for no other reason than to secure domestic power. By the same token, most Argentines realised that General Galtieri's move to take back the Malvinas was a transparent attempt to distract them from their opposition to his military junta, and a severe economic crisis, by appealing to older, stronger nationalist sentiments.

(Argentina has always insisted that the islands implicitly became the property of that country when it won independence from Spain in 1810, and never accepted the British claims of sovereignty that date back to a Royal Navy expedition in 1765, which found the so-called Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands unoccupied. ) While Galtieri's war ended in his arrest and eventual prosecution for its "mishandling", Thatcher's imperious leadership was seen as restoring British self-confidence in the world after decades of decline. There were, perhaps, traces of that self-confidence still visible in Tony Blair's readiness to invade Iraq in 2003, and it may now be difficult for the younger generation not to consider the Falklands conflict, if they consider it at all, with a retroactive cynicism developed throughout that recent invasion and the ongoing subsequent insurgency.