Dear Editor
IN HIS letter Brian Sylvester is right to highlight Denmark’s horrific
treatment of the Greenland Inuit. However I disagree that the horrific
truth is only now being swept under the carpet. The truth has never been widely known, it’s always been swept under the carpet.
The mistreatment of Inuit people is far more widespread than the
forced sterilisation of thousands of women that Brian highlights and
the Canadian government is also guilty of horrific mistreatment of
Inuit people, although in different ways.
For at about a thousand years after migrating to the Canadian Arctic
and Greenland the Inuit were nomadic hunters with their own cultural
traditions and beliefs. Both the Danish and Canadian governments
forced the Inuit to abandon their traditional way of life and settle
in permanent towns.
In order to maintain their nomadic way of life the Inuit relied on
sled dogs/huskies. To force the Inuit to settle in permanent towns the
Canadian government killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of
sled dogs so that it was no longer possible for the Inuit to be
nomadic. Their ‘justification’ was that the dogs carried diseases which
could be transmitted to the Inuit.
In the 1950s the Canadian government relocated Inuit communities from
Labrador to previously uninhabited northern islands such as Elsmere
Island in order to stake their claim on the far north before the
Soviets could do so. The Inuit were promised better hunting compared
to where they were living but were left in places where there was very
little for them to hunt and they could only survive by collecting
discarded food from the rubbish dumps next to military bases.
Since the start of the Cold War the Arctic has been exploited by the
US/Nato to further their geopolitical/strategic aims regardless of the
wishes of the Inuit, and often to their detriment. Is it possible that
one of the reasons that the Greenland Inuit were encouraged/forced to
settle in permanent towns was to enable the US to build secret
military bases? In the 1960s they planned to store hundreds of
nuclear warheads, safe from any Soviet attack, beneath the Greenland
ice sheet.The base was built beneath a scientific research station
but the warheads were never stored there.
This was one of 50 US military bases in Greenland at the height of the Cold War. Initially President Truman tried to buy Greenland for $100million or
$1.6billion at today’s prices.
It seems highly likely that in return for the US not buying or taking
military control of Greenland the Danish government allowed them to do
what they wanted and helped them do so by forcing the Inuit to settle
in permanent towns so they didn’t see the US bases.
By trying to control what happens in Greenland and ensure America’s
strategic security regardless of the wishes/best interests of the
Inuit/Greenlanders Trump isn’t doing anything that previous US
presidents haven’t done.
He seems to be following President Harry Truman’s playbook by
starting with an offer of far more than he wants knowing that
negotiations will give him less than the initial offer but most, if
not all, of what he wants. As he would put it, ‘It’s the art of the
deal’.
The only difference is that he’s doing it far more publicly
than Truman did and since the end of the Cold War these kinds of deals
are far less common and are therefore far more likely to be seen as
wrong.
Matt Dalby
Inverness
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