Edmund Yorke violated the UN Charter. In the Falklands crisis the Argentine Government have violated the UN Charter . . . Suez offers no precedent here. At the same time, with an obvious eye to the attitudes of the Commonwealth and other allies, he warned against any repeat of the Suez debacle: he other danger is that of a large scale military effort with Argentina in circumstances that cost us the support of the UN and world opinion.�3 The British Foreign Office took pains to make it clear that the Falkland Islanders were of British nationality and that Argentina had been the first to use force. This direct contrast to Suez was made abundantly clear, and Britain allies agreed. As Alexander Haig, the United States Secretary of State, later asserted at a meeting of the OAS, t is impossible to speak of colonialism when a people is not subjugated to another, and, as we all know, there is no such subjugation on the islands.�4 The Commonwealth was not slow to respond to the crisis, the vast majority accepting the British case and refuting attempts by the Argentinian Government to play the olonial card� Over a decade earlier the Commonwealth as a whole had signed up to the principles of self-determination and democracy in the ommonwealth Declaration�of January 1971. Argentina was clearly no democracy, with an appalling human rights record, and the obviously ethnically British Falkland Islanders had clearly demonstrated their desire to remain with Britain through free and fair elections. In this context the use of force was widely seen as unacceptable. As the Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal later so aptly put it: In the case of the Falklands, Argentina has attempted to blur that distinction between claims to sovereignty and the attempt to enforce them by arms �by two arguments. In the first place it raised the spectre of colonialism. This in a bid to secure Latin American solidarity and win wider Third World support, for decolonization is a worthy banner to which many will rally. It was a facile ploy. Argentina did not invade the Falklands to liberate the people of the Islands from British rule, but to impose Argentine rule over them against their will.15 The countries of the ld Commonwealth�emphatically shared this view over Argentina use of force, although initially few had any knowledge of the reasons for the crisis, or indeed, the background of the dispute over what President Reagan endearingly termed that far away ce-cold 178
