Last Thursday, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Then I made the fatal error of switching on my phone. This is what I saw.
“President Trump Eyes a New Real Estate Purchase: Greenland.”
An article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had, for some time, and to varying degrees of seriousness, been toying with the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark.
When you live in Greenland, you don’t want to wake up to that, especially in the middle of the night. The article had been sent to me by one of my brothers. Then, online, my whole family abroad proceeded to make fun of me and how I might get involved in this hostile takeover, all still in the middle of the night.
As I read through the article, vaguely conscious, I noted that the local Nuuk real estate agent – Kenneth – who was quoted by the Wall Street journalist, was the same estate agent who sold us the house that we currently live in, where I was lying in bed. That was weird. To his credit, Kenneth pointed out that in Greenland all land is owned by the government. So you can’t really buy it, if you want to go the rules that is, which I presume Trump probably doesn’t. For example, we own the house we live in, but we rent – for a minimal fee – the land that our house is built on. It makes things quite simple, and fair. But that’s not likely to be interesting to a real estate mogul president who is keen on a bit of strategic land between North America and Russia. And who could blame him? I mean, if you look at a map of the world, Greenland is quite strategic. So why not?
Well, for one, there are some people who live here. Greenlanders. There aren’t that many of them, I grant you, but they have actually been here for a while. The best part of a thousand years, in fact.
And there’s another thing. Greenland is self-governing. That means it has a government. They govern Greenland’s affairs – by themselves. So…buying Greenland from Denmark? Even the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, who happened to be in Greenland this week, said “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland is Greenlandic.”
I’m not Greenlandic. I just live here. But I’m still not super keen on the idea. And I think I’m on the same page as everyone else here in agreeing with the sentiment of the Government of Greenland’s Foreign Ministry that “We’re open for business, not for sale.”
