Fight for Greenland papers over a very murky past

To understand the geopolitical conundrum over Greenland you need a globe of planet Earth and a summary of the judgement of the Permanent Court of International Justice in Denmark v Norway in 1931 that explains Denmark’s sovereignty over the huge island in the Arctic that was described as green to hide the fact it was ice white.

Denmark claimed that Norway had unlawfully occupied certain territories in Eastern Greenland in breach of its sovereignty over the island that it argued was recognised worldwide. Norway had previously accepted Greenland as historically Danish in the treaty of Kiel of 1814 when Denmark and Norway split from the kingdom of Sweden.

Norway counter claimed that although Denmark had sovereignty over a few coastal colonies on the western part of Greenland, it did not have modern, as opposed to historical, sovereignty over the whole island let alone over uninhabited Eastern Greenland that Norway claimed was terra nullious or nobody’s land.

Modern sovereignty over territory turns on continuous, peaceful and actual exercise of state authority over territory. The court observed there had been no previous rival claim to sovereignty over Greenland by any power other than Denmark and that recognition of state sovereignty over uninhabited territories required good evidence of actual state authority.

In the end, the court found as a fact that Denmark had shown it had exercised actual state authority over the whole of Greenland because it had regulated navigation, shipping, fishing and hunting around Greenland and had divided the island into administrative provinces.

There was also evidence that Denmark had granted British and French nationals most-favoured treatment in Eastern Greenland in notes exchanged with the governments of Britain and France.

Finally, Denmark relied on the fact that when Denmark sold the Danish West Indies in 1916 to the US, the American Secretary of State made a declaration at the end of the treaty of purchase that the US would not object to the Danish government extending its political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland, which Denmark argued was recognition of its sovereignty.

The problem as it developed after 1931 has been geopolitical in the sense that Greenland’s size, mineral wealth and location within in the Arctic circle in the Western Hemisphere played a part in the decision of the US to occupy it in 1940 to prevent it from falling into the hands of Nazi Germany; and in the present demand of the current US administration to acquire it from Denmark.

After World War II, US President Truman offered to buy Greenland but this was refused by Denmark. But in the Greenland Defence Agreement in 1951 Denmark granted the US the right to keep and operate military bases for the defence of Greenland and the US confirmed that it recognised Danish sovereignty over it.

However, although Denmark has sovereignty over the whole of Greenland, it is not permanent sovereignty over national territory. It is impermanent colonial sovereignty over other people’s lands, which colonial powers are encouraged to relinquish by the 1945 UN Charter under the well-known principle of self-determination.

Denmark has been slow to grant the right of self-determination to Greenlanders, 88 per cent of whom are indigenous Inuit people who also inhabit the Arctic regions of Alaska, Canada and Russia.

The governments in Britain and Europe have put Denmark on a pedestal as a victim of US avarice owing to president Trump’s crass demands to acquire Greenland by hook or by crook, but that pales in comparison to what happened to the Inuit women of Greenland at the hands of the Danish state.

Not only did Denmark fail to decolonise Greenland, it sought to depopulate it of its Inuit population when thousands of Inuit women of childbearing age were sterilised without their consent, seemingly to avoid decolonisation.

Denmark’s policy of sterilisation engages the 1949 Genocide Convention that defines genocide as including measures intended to prevent birth of a people if done with intent to destroy them. 

The Danish government admits it was guilty of non-consensual sterilisation of Inuit women but denies it intended to destroy the Inuit as a people. This has been challenged by Mute Bourup Egede, Inuit prime minister between 2021-25 who insists it was genocide in plain sight.

The question is what reason other than to depopulate Greenland of its Inuit population could there have been for sterilising thousands of their women including teenage girls in a sparsely populated country of less than 50,000 during the height of decolonisation 1960-80.

No case has been brought against Denmark under the Genocide Convention, but it still has an obligation to punish those responsible for genocide if it took place.

The autonomous parliament of Greenland can hold a referendum in favour of independence if it feels strongly about the attempt to depopulate it of its Inuit population that looks as though it was done deliberately.

The exercise of the right of self-determination for Greenlanders in respect of their island, the size of Alaska and Texas combined, raises similar questions to those that arose in the case of the Chagos islands which Britain is going to hand over to Mauritius in an “act of great stupidity” according to President Trump, who originally agreed a leaseback arrangement.

In an advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opined that the Chagos islands and Mauritius were a single colonial territory for the purpose of the self-determination of its people even though they are more than 1,000 miles apart in the Indian Ocean.

According to the ICJ, Britain was wrong to exclude the island of Diego Garcia in the Chagos from the independence of Mauritius in 1968 – Britain had rented it to the US for use as a military base and failed to extend the right of self-determination to it.

The same applies to Greenland in that the sovereignty enjoyed by Denmark over the whole island of Greenland means that its self-determination would be in respect of the whole of its vast territory.

Alas its population is too small to exercise actual state authority over the whole of Greenland on their own, which is probably why they have not chosen independence hitherto. But now that the US has expressed an interest in Greenland, its people may change their mind and choose independence if US president Trump stops messing everyone around and offers them a better deal than the one they have with Denmark.

So the British were not so stupid to follow the judgment of the ICJ in the Chagos case after all, and although they are famously too polite and diplomatic to hit back if their government is insulted, Trump is best advised not to insult the valour of British servicemen and women in battle.