10/08/2013 00:00
TW
0

Palma.—Today, Gibraltar is going to be top of the agenda when King Juan Carlos holds his annual Summer meeting with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy at Marivent Palace.

On Wednesday, David Cameron warned his Spanish counterpart that the escalating tit-for-tat over border tensions in Gibraltar risked damaging relations between their countries.

But yesterday, Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, who Britain holds responsible for sparking this latest crisis by remarks made in an interview last Sunday, said that it is up to Great Britain to ease tensions over The Rock.

Garcia-Margallo, who is on holiday in Majorca but closely monitoring developments told Ultima Hora yesterday that the latest crisis is “a judicial conflict, not political” but admitted he has no idea how long this dispute could drag on for.

Although, in the meantime he made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, he “is going to strongly defend the best interests of the Spanish, I personally believe in common sense and now, it's time to talk. “We want to resolve this latest dispute via dialogue, but not under the same three party conditions (Great Britain, Spain and Gibraltar all working on an equal footing) which was drawn up by the Zapatero government. “We will only allow Gibraltar to join the negotiating table to discuss the fishing conflict if Andalusia is allowed to participate in the talks because the issue also affects them,” Garcia-Margallo said.

Gibraltar has accused Spain of deliberately creating border hold-ups in retaliation for the tiny British overseas territory dumping concrete blocks in the sea to create an artificial reef.

Gibraltar says it wants to create an ecological reef, but Madrid claims it is a deliberate bid to impede Spanish fishing vessels in the dispute over territorial waters.

Madrid says the artificial reef will destroy the fishing grounds and has provoked great concern in Spain about the damage to the environment and the fishing industry. Garcia-Margallo has suggested Madrid could impose a 50-euro charge to cross the 1.2-kilometre frontier in either direction, which would affect the thousands of people who make the trip every day.