POSSESSION OF GREENLAND

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27072, 22 June 1953, Page 8

POSSESSION OF GREENLAND

ICELANDIC CLAIM HELD INVALID

DECISION BY SPECIAL COMMITTEE (From a Reuter Correspondent.). REYKJAVIK (Iceland). A three-hian committee of lawyers set up in 1948 to study Icelandic claims to sovereignty over Greenland has ruled that the claims are invalid. Their decision was announced in a report published here. The committee was set up as the result of a proposal put forward in the Althing (the Icelandic Parliament) by one of its membera, Mr Petur Ottesen, that the Icelandic Government should demand full sovereignty over Greenland. Mr Ottesen and those who support him base their claims on the fact that an Icelander, Eric the Red, settled in Greenland as early as the year 986. Shortly afterwards, there were large Icelandic settlements in Greenland. These were brought under the jurisdiction of the Norwegian King at the same time as Iceland, about the year 1260, and were, a few years later, incorporated into the Danish Union. Icelanders still lived in Greenland in the year 1400, but, either because they died of hunger or epidemics, or, because of attacks by Eskimos, they became extinct by 1450. The argument of those Icelanders who today consider that Greenland should belong to Iceland is as follows: “Iceland and Greenland entered the Danish Union as one State. When Iceland parted from Denmark in 1944, we should have been given, on leaving the Danish Union, all that we brought into it—namely, Greenland as well as Iceland.” But the three man committee decided otherwise, giving as its reasons that:— (1) The Icelandic settlers in Greenland most likely founded independent settlements in the same way as the Nordic Vikings who settled in the Shetlands, Orkneys, Faroes, and Iceland were independent of Norway: (2) Icelandic settlers in Greenland became extinct in the middle of the fifteenth century; Danish settlers went to Greenland in 1721, and since then the Danes have completely dominated Greenland; (3) The judgment given by The Hague International Court on the Danish-Norwegian-Greenland dispute in 1931 makes it clear that the Danes have complete and unchallengeable sovereignty over Greenland. The committee therefore unanimously recommended that no demand should be made for Icelandic sovereignty over Greenland.