PACT REPUDIATED BY ITALY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22594, 27 December 1938, Page 3

PACT REPUDIATED BY ITALY

DECISION CONVEYED TO BRITAIN AND GERMANY

FRENCH ATTITUDE TO AFRICAN SETTLEMENT

(Received December 26, 8.10 p.m.)

ROME, December 24,

It is officially announced that Italy’s repudiation of the FrenchItalian agreement of 1935, which determined the frontier of Eritrea and Libya and the status of Italian nationals in Tunis, has been communicated to Britain and Germany. A message from London says that the Paris correspondent of “The Times” stat >s that official circles justify France’s attitude towards Italy’s denunciation of the agreement, by Signor Mussolini’s own words w 7 hen the documents were drawn up in December, 1936. Signor Mussolini then said: “All African accounts are now settled to the last farthing.” Though there has been no ratification and Italy has not received strips of territory in ifibya, Eritrea, or the island of Dumeira, it is stated in Paris that those concessions represented the limit beyond which imperially-minded France to-day was not prepared to go, especially as Djibuti was the only French port on the route to Indo-China and Madagascar. PARIS, December 23.

French newspapers affirm that the Laval-Mussolini Pact is still valid, as, although it was not ratified, Italy received 2500 shares in the DjibutiAddis Ababa railway which should be returned on the event of the pact becoming invalid. The French Chamber of Deputies has voted £400,000 for improving the port of Djibuti and the DjibutiAddis Ababa railway. Signor Virgilio Gayda, in “La Voce d’ltalia,” declared that the plans of the French Prime Minister (M. Daladier) to visit Corsica and Tunisia were “provocation” to Italy. He added- that France’s attitude towards Italy’s renunciation of the 1935 agreement tended to “aggravate her threatening and combative intransigeance towards Italy.”