Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has struck a historic deal with Denmark, settling a dispute stretching back five decades over a 1.3-square-kilometre island in the Arctic.
Joly and the Danish foreign affairs minister Jeppe Kofod signed an agreement Tuesday to divide Hans Island, an uninhabited rock situated between Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, and Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.
The island has been the subject of fifty years of diplomatic disputes between the two nations, as it sits in the territorial waters of both.
Joly hailed the signing as a “historic day,” adding that it ended the “friendliest of all wars” which involved both nations leaving bottles of spirits on the island with little notes for one another while removing each other’s flags….