Veterans in dilemma on visit to UK
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Your support makes all the difference.THE SIMPLE Buenos Aires monument "To the Fallen in the Malvinas Islands and South Atlantic", engraved with almost 700 names and guarded by two sailors with fixed bayonets, is on what used to be known as Plaza de los Ingleses. Opposite is what used to be the English Tower, now the Monumental Tower, a Big Ben lookalike from pre-Falklands days when Britain was respected for building this country's ports and railways and founding its football teams. The names all changed in 1982.
Before leaving for London with President Carlos Menem, a Falklands veteran, Hector Beiroa, walked past the list of his dead comrades and said he would have mixed feelings tomorrow when he joins British veterans of the 1982 war in a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral.
"Stepping on British soil will be like stepping on enemy soil," he said. "But we want to explain our point of view to the British people, what we fought for, that the Malvinas [Falklands] are Argentine, that colonialism should be over."
Mr Beiroa's acceptance of Mr Menem's invitation to join him as the head of Argentina's Federation of War Veterans has already caused controversy here. Other groups, notably the Centre of Ex-combatants of the Malvinas Islands, said his group was a stooge of the government, that it was too close to hardline military officers and should not take part in the London ceremony.
Sixteen years on, the Falklands war arouses less passion in Argentina but few, if any, have changed their opinions. According to a straw poll around the monument here yesterday, the general feeling is: The then junta leader, Leopoldo Galtieri, should not have invaded. Although the Argentine claim to sovereignty is the central part of every child's history classes, most feel the claim would be further forward, diplomatically, had the invasion not taken place. Once their young men were sent there, however, most supported the war effort.
"If Margaret Thatcher came here, she'd be jailed," said Stefano, a writer. "That is if she wasn't ripped to pieces first." He was referring to a widespread feeling that Britain's sinking of the naval vessel Belgrano at the start of the war, in which more than 300 sailors died, was a war crime.
Anti-Thatcher sentiment is widespread, but not across the board. In north Buenos Aires, among the polo and rugby-playing upper middle-class, there are those who will tell you Argentina would have been a better place had Britain, not Spain conquered the country.
Marcel Sanz Pedro, a taxi- driver passing the war memorial, said: "We are flexible. We want an amicable solution. But Britain's stuffy diplomats are so fixed in their 19th-century ways and the islanders are so intransigent, they don't see the benefits that even joint sovereignty could give them."
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