Foreign Minister Felipe Solá and the Ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Argentina, Mark Kent, signed an Exchange of Notes regarding the humanitarian initiative to identify the remains buried in mass grave C.1.10 in Darwin Cemetery on the Malvinas Islands.
Excluded from the scope of the Humanitarian Project Plan carried out in 2017 because it was not an anonymous grave, it was found that the remains of three soldiers whose names were on the plaque of said grave were actually found in other graves, which were duly identified at that time.
By signing this Exchange of Notes, both governments agreed on the importance of continuing the identification process and reaffirmed their willingness to grant a new mandate to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) requesting their neutral intermediation for clarification of the identification of the remains buried in the abovementioned grave in Darwin Cemetery. Likewise, both governments agreed to apply the necessary sovereignty formula to the entire negotiation process, to the execution of identification tasks in the Malvinas Islands and to all related activities and their consequences.
This event represents the execution of a State policy that has as a precedent the tasks promoted by the National Government in 2012, when it requested the collaboration of the ICRC to make possible the identification of 122 graves of Argentine soldiers buried in Darwin Cemetery and formed a roundtable made up of the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, the General Government Notary Office and the Ministry of Social Development.
After several years of work, consulting with family members, taking the corresponding genetic samples, and holding a mandate to the ICRC and a Humanitarian Project Plan, forensic work was carried out between June and August 2017. Finally, the humanitarian initiative was successfully concluded and allowed the identification of 115 soldiers, responding to many families who longed to know the exact resting place of their loved ones.
With the same humanitarian perspective, a second phase of identification began last September 3 to provide answers to the families of the soldiers who rest in grave C.1.10.
On the occasion of this meeting with Ambassador Kent, Foreign Minister Solá recalled the legitimate and imprescriptible sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic over the Malvinas, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands and the surrounding maritime spaces and reiterated the permanent and sincere disposition of the country to resume the bilateral negotiating process with the United Kingdom, as demanded by the international community, to find a peaceful and definitive solution to the sovereignty dispute.
