Flavia Dzodan: Falklands Colonialism is Coming from David Cameron, Not Argentina

Flavia Dzodan is a writer, media analyst and marketing consultant based in Amsterdam. 

I laughed heartily as I read the news last night. British prime minister David Cameron accused my birth country, Argentina, of "colonialism" over the Falkland Islands. I originally read about his jibe on an Argentinian news site, and immediately searched for a report in English – I thought this had to be a hilarious "lost in translation" mistake. It wasn't. Indeed, Cameron warned the British parliament: "What the Argentinians have been saying recently, I would argue, is far more like colonialism because these people want to remain British and the Argentinians want them to do something else."

With this comment Cameron did a bit of historical "re-arranging the furniture". He conveniently forgot to mention that the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands were expelled by an act of force in 1833, and the current population descends from the people brought by the British to replace the Argentinian inhabitants. By definition, this is an act of colonialism. Last night the Argentinian vice-president, Amado Boudou, hit back and qualified Cameron's statements as "a fallacy, a clumsy outburst ignorant of historical realities".

While I agree with Boudou that Cameron's outburst is a fallacy, I believe this gauche pronouncement is a warning, and the product of fear. Cameron cannot possibly be afraid of a reprise of the 1982 war, which was a death rattle by a totalitarian dictatorship. However, he does seem to be afraid of the sudden and unexpected common front manifested in the actions undertaken by the member states of Mercosur to impede the entry to their ports of ships that fly the flag of the Falkland Islands...