Death of a Peace Mission

By Thomas A. Sancton

Disputes over key principles torpedoed the negotiations

"The efforts in which I have been engaged do not offer the present prospect of bringing about an end to the crisis nor, indeed, of preventing the intensification of the conflict." So saying, United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar last week conceded the failure of his three-week effort to mediate a peaceful settlement in the Anglo-Argentine conflict over the disputed Falkland Islands. His final attempts to close the bargaining gap between the two sides, which included personal telephone calls to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Argentine President Leopoldo Galtieri, had been to no avail.

Earlier in the day, the calm, soft-spoken Secretary-General had still held out some hope, saying of the faltering negotiations that "the patient is in intensive care, but still alive." By evening, however, he seemed ready to accept the grim diagnosis of Britain's U.N. Ambassador Sir Anthony Parsons that "the patient" had already died. The stage was then set for death, literally, in the frigid South Atlantic.

Thus a colonial dispute that began under the reign of King William IV, when the British took possession of the islands in 1833, and has smoldered in Argentine hearts ever since, had thrown two nations headlong into the horrors of modern warfare. In hindsight, the tragedy--and the failure of diplomacy--seemed to have been inescapable: ancient wounds left unhealed, basic differences over policy, each side too often misjudging the motives and determination of the other.

When it was over, Perez de Cuellar remarked philosophically: "That I have ended my efforts does not mean the end of the world." Indeed, his ill-fated exercise was only the latest of a series of diplomatic efforts, stretching back 17 years, that have proved unable to resolve the knotty Falklands dispute. U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who undertook three weeks of frantic shuttle diplomacy in the wake of Argentina's April 2 invasion, had fared no better.

Even as British troops were beginning their assault on the Falklands, there was talk of new diplomatic moves. "Negotiations are not broken," insisted Argentina's Foreign Minister Nicanor Costa Mendez at a hasty Buenos Aires press conference. "Argentina will accept whatever forum or road leads to peace." At week's end Costa Mendez flew to New York to attend an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting addressed by Perez de Cuellar, who said that, far from seeking an agreement at the end, both sides had hardened their positions.

Meanwhile, Peru's President Fernando Belaunde Terry offered what he called a "brief and simple" peace plan that was also endorsed by Colombia and Venezuela. Though its contents remained secret, U.S. diplomats held out little hope for the Peruvian initiative. Said one high State Department official: "There is no viable peace plan on the table now, anywhere."

Until last week, Perez de Cuellar's effort had seemed to offer the best chance for peace. The newly elected Secretary-General had first volunteered his services as a mediator on April 30, the day Haig announced the end of his own talks. Perez de Cuellar presented each side with a settlement plan based on a ceasefire, mutual troop withdrawals and an interim U.N. administration of the islands while the two nations held direct negotiations over the crucial issue of sovereignty.

Once talks began in earnest, the Secretary-General met separately each day with Parsons and Argentine Deputy Foreign Minister Enrique Ros in his 38th-floor U.N. suite. As time went on, the Peruvian-born diplomat played an increasingly active part, sometimes suggesting directly ideas of his own. He remained pleasant and courteous, but the strain began to show: his color was gray, his eyes were hollow behind his glasses, and he stooped as he walked.

Perez de Cuellar picked up where the U.S. had left off, with an agreement in principle from both sides to accept the idea of a cease-fire and a phased withdrawal. Like Haig, however, the Secretary-General ran into a major obstacle: the Argentines' insistence that any agreement must "inexorably" lead to their sovereignty over the islands. When Britain continued to balk at this, Argentina appeared to back off by calling sovereignty an ultimate "objective" rather than a precondition to talks. At the same time, however, the Argentines hardened their position on mutual withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Thatcher government, stung by increasing "sellout" charges from Conservative Party backbenchers, stiffened its stance on the role of the islanders in the U.N.-sponsored transitional administration.

The negotiations reached a crucial turning point on May 14, when Parsons was summoned back to London for urgent consultations with Thatcher's War Cabinet. The ambassador returned to New York early last week bearing Britain's "final" bargaining position, which Perez de Cuellar passed on directly to Argentine Deputy Foreign Minister Ros. Late the following evening the Argentines came to the U.N. tower with Galtieri's response to the British ultimatum. Near midnight, Sir Anthony made his now familiar trek to the 38th-floor suite, where Perez de Cuellar translated the Argentines' Spanish-language text for him. The text and an official U.N. translation were sent to the British mission the next day. The biggest problem at that delicate stage of negotiations, observed Perez de Cuellar, was not so much the wording of the two proposals but the "intensity" of the difference between the parties.

Nowhere was that intensity more evident than in the House of Commons, where angry Conservative demands to "get on with" a counterinvasion vied with pleas from the opposition Labor Party to avoid precipitate action. Bolstered by a poll that showed the public in favor of a full-scale invasion, Thatcher made it clear that she would take strong military action if the response to Britain's latest proposals was unsatisfactory.

The day after that response was delivered, Thatcher told an unusually solemn session of the Commons that Argentina had effectively rejected the British conditions. The junta had reacted, she said, "with obduracy and delay, deception and bad faith." Under the circumstances, talks were useless. Said she: "We can't go on and on. Someone has to make a decision." Alluding to the military clash that would follow, the Prime Minister told the Commons and the nation: "Difficult days lie ahead, but Britain will face them in the conviction that our cause is just and in the knowledge that we have been doing everything reasonable to secure a negotiated settlement."

After the talks broke off, Britain published the full text of its final bargaining position, along with a summary of the Argentine counterproposals. These documents revealed fundamental disagreements between the two sides:

>Argentina insisted that any agreement apply equally to the Falkland dependencies of South Georgia, which Britain recaptured on April 25, andthe South Sandwich Islands. Britain said a pact must apply only to the Falkland Islands.

>Argentina wanted all forces to return to their home bases over a 30-day withdrawal period. The British argued that this would put them 8,000 miles from the islands, an enormous disadvantage should the Argentines stage a new invasion from their own bases, only 500 miles away. Britain called instead for a two-stage, 14-day mutual withdrawal to a distance of 150 nautical miles.

> Argentina required that the interim administration should be the exclusive responsibility of the U.N., which should take over all functions of government, rejecting Britain's insistence on retaining some role for the pro-British islanders.

> Argentina demanded free access to the islands for her nationals during the interim period, which the British claimed would "swamp" the island and "prejudge" any future settlement by changing "the nature of the Falklands society and its demographic makeup."

Another key sticking point, which was not addressed directly in the British document, is that of self-determination for the islanders. The Argentines object to this principle, since the residents of the islands rejected the notion of Argentine rule in the past and would undoubtedly do so again. But Britain, which demands that nothing be allowed to "prejudge" the outcome of sovereignty talks, also insists on respecting the will of the islanders. Thatcher, who has never resolved that apparent conflict of principles, told a British radio interviewer last week: "I won't do a deal with the Argentinians without consulting with the people. And I would be false to everything that Britain stands for if I were to contemplate such a deal."

But it was not merely a disagreement on principles that pushed the adversaries into a head-on military clash last week; a combination of errors, miscalculations and inflexibility on both sides seemed to block the road to peaceful, settlement from the beginning. On the Argentine side, the military junta's own secretive, authoritarian-leadership style blinded it to international realities and locked it into a position from which retreat was almost impossible. The junta disregarded the blunt warning from Secretary of State Haig that "U.S. friendship would be at risk" if the Argentines attacked. According to Washington analysts, the original decision to invade was made by a handful of top-ranking officers without even consulting the corps commanders who would have to carry on the fighting. Suddenly saddled with a high-risk war, many of these battlefield commanders became bitter against the junta that pushed them into the fight and so have insisted that Argentina hold out for sovereignty over the islands. Says one State Department analyst: "The top generals were the ones to make the Malvinas the top national objective. So they must take responsibility if they fail."

At the same time, the junta underestimated British and world reaction. "They lived .in their own dreamworld," said one U.S. official. "What seemed to be irrefutable realities of the world did not even strike them as probable." According to this official, the Argentine leaders never expected the British to send a task force so far or to fight for such principles as self-determination and nonuse of force. Once the reality of British determination dawned on them, Galtieri and the other-ranking officers apparently decided that a fight to the finish--even a surrender--would be more honorable and politically safer for the junta than a humiliating compromise.

Nor was there much will to compromise on the part of the Thatcher government. During his many visits to 10 Downing Street, Haig watched time and again as Thatcher pounded the table with the palm of her hand, railing against bowing down to aggression and arguing adamantly for a return to the status quo ante. "You must never forget," she would tell her stunned American guests, evoking the specter of pre-World War II appeasement, "that Neville Chamberlain sat at this very table."

Indeed, some critics have argued that Thatcher's strong initial reaction and abrasive tone may have made it impossible from the beginning for the macho-minded Argentine leaders to make concessions. But Thatcher's supporters--and on the Falklands issue, that includes the vast majority of Britons--would counter that her government's belligerent stance was the only possible response to the original outrage of seizing the islands by force. Possibly Britain's greatest error was allowing the Falklands dispute to come to such a pass in the first place. Snaps one senior U.S. diplomat: "The British cannot escape some responsibility for not dealing with the situation before it blew up."

In the end, Perez de Cuellar's peacemaking efforts foundered on the same fundamental problem as Haig's earlier attempt: the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Argentina's demand for sovereignty and Britain's refusal to grant it under the force of arms. Most observers, including the Secretary-General, expect a new round of peace talks to begin once the belligerents have tested their mettle on the battlefield. Barring an unconditional surrender by either side, the diplomats may still have the final say. "At the end of the day, there will have to be a negotiated settlement of some kind," says Francis Pym, Britain's Foreign Secretary. In the sobering aftermath of combat and casualties, the diplomats may find the essential element that has been missing so far: the will to agree.

--By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Bonnie Angelo/London and Louis Halasz/United Nations

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo, Louis Halasz

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