The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1979, Síða 47

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
45
BOOK REVIEW
by George J. Houser, Ph.D.
Sir Andrew Gilchrist: Cod Wars and How
to Lose Them. 122 pages. Edinburgh,
1978. Q Press Ltd. (First published in
Icelandic in 1977 by Almanna Bokafje-
lagid, Reykjavik)
PART II
Were misleading statements and half-
truths confined to the periphery of the work,
one might regard them with some indul-
gence provided the kernel was sound, i.e.
“a serious attempt to explain and assess the
British quarrel with Iceland over fishery
limits,” but such, unfortunately, is not the
case.
Let us, for example, examine in detail
and then analyze the author’s comments on
the message dated 5 May 1952 from the
Icelandic Government to the United Nations
International Law Commission which, he
says, “foreshadowed for the first time Ice-
land’s readiness, if unable to obtain satis-
faction otherwise, to proceed by individual
action without U.N. authorisation, i.e.
what we shall now call unilateral action.”
The pertinent paragraph of this message
reads as follows:
Investigations in Iceland have quite
dearly shown that the country rests on a
platform or continental shelf whose out-
line follows those of the coast itself,
whereupon the depths of the real high seas
follows. On this platform invaluable fish-
ing banks and spawning grounds are found
upon whose preservation the survival of
the Icelandic people depends. The country
itself is barren and almost all necessities of
life have to be imported and financed
through the export of fisheries products. It
can be said that the coastal fishing grounds
are the conditio sine qua non of the Ice-
landic people, for they make the country
habitable. The Icelandic Government
considers itself entitled and indeed bound
to take all necessary steps on a unilateral
basis to preserve these resources and is
doing so as shown by the attached docu-
ments.
Sir Andrew comments: “It is worth
having a look at this interesting document,
because it contains in embryo the argument,
the threat and the justification which
formed the Icelandic case during the dis-
putes of the next 25 years.
“First the argument, which may be
summed up in the words ‘poor little Ice-
land', the argument ad misericordiam:
Iceland is a barren island surrounded by the
sea and can only survive by having exclu-
sive access to the fish — to all fish, in fact,
within a ‘reasonable’ distance from its
coast.
“Let me concede at once the obvious
point in this argument ad misericordiam
that Iceland in recent and indeed in present
stages of her economic development de-
pends far more on her fishing industry than
Britain does, or any country of Western
Europe. Without fish exports, her imports
of oil and motorcars and sugar and whisky
and medicines and flour and timber could
not possibly be maintained. (In 1950 fish
accounted for about 80% of Icelandic ex-
ports, today just over 50%). Thus anything
that affects the fishing industry is of vital
concern to the whole nation, not to one
particular section — a situation quite unlike
ours in Britain, where the fishing interests
are so small in proportion to the rest of the
economy that it was possible for the British
Government to regard them as somewhat
expendable in the context of the Common
Market negotiations.
“But there is a difference between saying
that Iceland depends largely on fish and
alleging that the country otherwise is
barren. Certainly it was not barren in the
ninth century. When the first settlers came
to Iceland it was not so much the fishing as