NEGLECTED DUTY OF ENEMY

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 47, 19 November 1941, Page 8

NEGLECTED DUTY OF ENEMY

Food And Clothes For Starving Peoples POLICY OF BRITAIN (British Official Wireless.) (Received November 18, 7 p.m.) RUGBY, November 17. The expected return to Instanbul today of the Turkish ship Kurtulush from her second voyage to Athens with food and clothes provided by Turkey, America aud Britain for starving Greeks and British prisoners of war is a sample, says "The Times,” of the British Government’s "earnest desire to allow properly controlled distribution of food to the hungry wherever it can be made without affording an advantage to the enemy.” Another example is the passage through the blockade of American medicants and milk to children in unoccupied Prance. Within the "blockade area,” "The Times” recalls, food in smaller quantities has similarly passed from Sweden to Norway, Portugal to Belgium and from Switzerland to several occupied countries. "The British Government cannot but welcome these transactions on the understanding that they do not entitle the country making the gift to demand passage through the blockade ring of additional food for itself,” the paper adds. It deeply regrets that "other countries suffering just as severely as Greece can have no hope of any largescale relief us long as they remain in the grasp of the cruel, rapacious and wholly untrustworthy conqueror. Conqueror’s Duty.

“It is a rule of war recognized by all civilized countries that the conqueror makes himself responsible for feeding the inhabitants in territories he has occupied. That obligation was restated by the American Secretary of State, Mr. Hull, recently when he said the United States Government was deeply sympathetic with the needs of many parts of the world but it was the manifest duty of occupying authorities to supply relief. It is notorious that the Germans have removed large quantities of food from every country they have entered and diverted food inside those countries from women aud children to factory hands- who are forced into the production of armaments.

"German spokesmen, moreover, have repeatedly declared that the British blockade is ineffective and the "Neus Tagblatt’ was arguing not Jong ago that the Nazi system of self-sufficiency had made the whole of Europe •invulnerable to blockade.’ Out of their own mouths it is proclaimed that organized robbery and pillage are the cause of the'present terrible destitution in occupid countries. There was no starvation in any one of them before the German armies reached it.”