The Whiskey War
In the north of the remote region of the Atlantic Ocean at the edge of the frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean, there is a small patch of land called the "hans island" that was named after the traveler from the Arctic in the nineteenth century, and it is a small island with a radius of a square mile. An inhabited mass looks like an exposed rocky and not covered with vegetation, and there are no apparent natural resources, however, this piece of rock was in the emergence of a territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark that spanned for nearly half a century.
The island of Hans
is located in the middle of the Nares Strait, a 22-mile canal that separates Canada from Greenland, an autonomous region in Denmark. International law imposes on all countries the right to claim lands located 12 miles from its shore, and this applies. On Hans Island, miles from Danish and Canadian waters.
The regional conflict began to appear between the two countries in 1973, when each of them drew its maritime borders and at that time it was not possible to reach an agreement between the two governments, and thus the issue was postponed for a later time, and the conflict began in earnest in 1984 AD when the Danish Minister Greenland during his visit to the island planted The national flag and leaving a message saying “Welcome to the Danish Island” with a bottle of brandy. When Canada learned of this, they sent troops to the island to exchange the Danish flag for a Canadian flag and a bottle of Danish brandy for Canadian whiskey.
And the
"whiskey war"
has raged for decades. Both Canadian and Danish forces visit the island in turns to change flags and leave a bottle of liquor. In 2005, Canadians installed a metal plate on the island.
The Danes did not reciprocate, but their foreign minister stated that “Going to the beach and tearing up the (Canadian) flag and replacing it with a new one… would be kind of childish behavior between two NATO allies.
The fate of the rocky island remains unknown.
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