99.2% Solid

All through the night the red beacon on top of the great rock flashes out its insistent and seemingly perpetual message: dash dash dot, dash dot dot dot. In the nearby Spanish villages of La Linea and San Roque and across the Campo plains to the mountains beyond, the people know that the Morse code signal stands for the letters G and B: Great Britain. The light is a constant reminder to the Spaniards that Gibraltar is British, as it has been ever since Britain seized it from Spain 263 years ago.

Last week Gibraltar proved that it is even more British than anyone had imagined. As the voters went to the polls for a special referendum to decide whether Gibraltar should remain with Britain or be turned back to Spain, the 2 1/4-sq-mi. crown colony was decked out in Union Jacks from its deepwater harbor to its 1,396-ft. summit. Stickers everywhere proclaimed such slogans as I'M O.K. WITH THE U.K. When the count was made, only 44 of the 12,237 voters opted for reunion with Spain. The rest--an astonishing 99.2%--preferred to retain their unique status as British subjects in the last colony on European soil.

Wrong Residents. Gibraltarians feel that life under British rule is far freer and more prosperous than life in Franco's Spain, have developed a British sense of fair play and justice and an almost embarrassing devotion to the royal family. By ancestry most of them are neither British nor Spanish. Some are Sephardic Jews originally expelled from Spain during the Inquisition; others fled Genoa in the 1790s to escape the havoc of the Napoleonic Wars; many came from Malta to seek work in the British dockyards. Over the years, they have developed into a surprisingly homogeneous population of 25,000 people who are tidy, industrious and bilingual (English and Spanish).

Spain rejected their vote for Britain on the grounds that the legitimate Gibraltarians are not the present ones but the villagers in La Linea and San Roque and across the bay in Algeciras, whose ancestors fled the invading British in 1704. (The United Nations, which supports this view, also refused to accept the referendum.) To show its displeasure at Britain's insistence on keeping the rock, Spain has imposed on Gibraltar a series of annoyances, ranging from a slash in the number of Spanish men workers (from 14,500 to 6,000) who cross daily into the colony to a ban on border crossings by all vehicles. The Spanish government seems to be laying the groundwork for an eventual sealing of the border entirely: it is planning to industrialize the area around La Linea and San Roque, building enough plants to provide jobs for the workers who still draw their paychecks from Gibraltar.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.