Greenland negotiator was ready to walk away from US talks

Greenland’s chief negotiator says his team was prepared to leave talks with the United States if the country’s red lines were not respected. Mininnguaq Kleist described the negotiations in an interview with DR.

Kleist, permanent secretary of Greenland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, led the Greenlandic team in a series of meetings in Washington, where Greenland, Denmark and the United States discussed the island’s future. The talks resulted in an agreement signed by all three parties, with Greenland as a co-signatory on equal footing with the United States and Denmark.

Kleist travelled to Washington in January with then-Greenlandic Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Motzfeldt and Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He said the team did not know how the meeting would end, but understood that the outcome could be serious.

“The worst case is basically that we lose our country, our democracy, our people as we know them today,” Kleist said.

The negotiations were held in the same room at the State Department in Washington. The parties called their focus “solutions”, Kleist said, and he sensed that all three genuinely wanted to reach an agreement. But disagreements sometimes led to raised voices.

Kleist said he did not back down from Greenland’s red lines. The final agreement states that the parties recognise the economic, social and cultural rights of the Greenlandic people, including rights relating to their land and way of life, hunting, fishing and other traditional, cultural and historical activities and future development.

“We have a responsibility to our people. We have laws and a way of life that must be respected,” he said. “There are things we stand for, and they must not be crossed, because then we lose more than just the text. We lose ourselves.”

At times, Kleist said, he had to put his feelings aside and treat the negotiations as a task that required decisions and words on paper. He also recalled receiving a photograph of the agreement, bearing three signatures in black marker, from a room in the United Nations building in New York.