BACK TO GERMANY?

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 134, 8 June 1936, Page 10

BACK TO GERMANY?

FUTURE OF SAMOA

"EQUIVOCAL STATEMENT"

(By Telegraph—Press Association.)

AUCKLAND, This Day.

The opinion that New Zealand may some day be asked to hand back Samoa to Germany was expressed by Major C. V. Joske, a Suva business man; who is a through passenger to Sydney by the Aorangi. In Fiji there was concern, he said, at the "somewhat equivocal statement of the British Prime Minister that the British Government could not at this stage commit itself upon the question of mandated territories to Germany and that action would be governed largely by protection of the natives involved." ! "We cannot help feeling," he added, "that the day is not far distant when New Zealand may be asked to .assist in furthering Imperial policy by handing back Samoa to Germany. In any case, the position in Samoa seems to have been an embarrassment rather than an advantage, and Fiji cannot help regarding somewhat ruefully the increasing imports of bananas from Samoa to New Zealand which threaten to cut in half the banana export to the Dominion from Fiji."