Gibraltar’s top elected official said Tuesday that Madrid should focus on the 5 million Spaniards without work instead of pursuing a long-standing quarrel with London about sovereignty over the Rock, a British Crown Colony for three centuries. Treat Gibraltar with “friendship and as a neighboring people” and “forget about historic declarations,” Fabian Picardo urged Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo. “With 5 million and some jobless, I have the impression that Spaniards have other priorities more important than historic demands about my people,” Gibraltar’s first minister said in an interview with ABC Punto Radio. The solution to the dispute, according to Picardo, lies in Spain’s accepting the reality of Gibraltar and the right of its inhabitants to decide their future. Picardo, who took office in December, spoke out after Garcia-Margallo announced last week that Spain’s new conservative Popular Party government would seek to revive talks with London on sovereignty over Gibraltar. The prior Socialist administration, led by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, decided in 2004 to put the sovereignty dispute to one side in favor of cooperative efforts to benefit people living on both sides of the Spain-Gibraltar border. Zapatero’s policy led to the creation of a trilateral forum, but that body was suspended in November 2010 after Garcia-Margallo’s predecessor, Trinidad Jimenez, rejected a demand from Britain and Gibraltar to discuss maritime boundaries. Spain is not interested in renewing the trilateral form without some progress on the sovereignty question, Garcia-Margallo said. Inviting Garcia-Margallo to visit Gibraltar and understand the reality of the “the small nation,” Picardo said British Prime Minister David Cameron supports the Gibraltarians’ right to self-determination. Picardo also counseled Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy against raising the sovereignty dispute when he visits Britain next month. “I imagine that Rajoy will be listened to with respect, but the response will be the referendum of the Gibraltarian people, and there will be no debate, nor negotiation,” Picardo said. “But if he (Rajoy) prefers to talk about those things and not talk about cooperation and friendship, each one answers to his own electorate,” the Gibraltar first minister said. “Since Francoism,” according to Picardo, a 39-year-old lawyer whose grandfather was on the Republican side in Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war, Spanish politicians have tried to destroy the “great friendship” that unites the peoples of Gibraltar and Spain. Gibraltar is a territory of 5.5 square kilometers (2.1 square miles) on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. It has been held by Britain since 1704 and became a British Crown Colony in 1713. The Rock currently has some 30,000 residents, who overwhelmingly rejected a 2002 proposal for Britain to share sovereignty over the territory with Spain. Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but Madrid continues to press its claim to sovereignty over the Rock, Europe’s last colony.
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