GREECE AND ALBANIA

Evening Star, Issue 18509, 17 December 1923, Page 5

GREECE AND ALBANIA

STRAINED RELATIONS. Pres* Association —By Telegraph—Copyright. I LONDON, December 14. I Greece has sent Albania a forty-eight hour utimatum, Albania having refused to withdraw a communique accusing the Greeks of murdering members of the Italian mission.-—Sydney ‘ Sun ’ Cable. THE MISSION MURDERS. In the course of an interesting article in the New York ‘ Outlook,’ Mr Bruno Rossefli writes: I had barely left Albania when the five Italian members of the Albanian Bonn- ( dary Mission were slaughtered in Greece, bringing about the Greeo-ltalian crisis. I can near you ask: “Did Albanians or Greeks murder them ? ” It is not my wish to blow on a happily now extinguished fire. The Italians have evacuated Corfu as originally promised, and an international tribunal in Paris has found Greece guilty of wilful negligence in the search for the murderers, and fined her fifty million tire, the quarrel is settled Bat, since the assassins are still at large, 1 wish to record my impressions. The first one was of utter disbelief that, such a heinous butchery had taken place. Remember that the original Press telegram (originating in Athens) failed even to mention that the murder had taken place on Greek soil, and between the hypotheses of an Albanian political murder and of no murder at all I leaned toward the latter knowing how cordially the people felt toward the Italians. The word of that Albanian official corresponded to what I had heard all over his country. Then I wondered whether it could not have icon a case of robbery. Impossible. True, the Albanians arc primitive, and (politically corrupt, and boastful of a liberty and independence which they cannot properly maintain; they also .set small value upon human life; but their murders are all political, not mercenary. At any rate, the largo sums of money found on the five bodies excludes the robbery theory. So I returned to the theory of an Albanian political murder, but had to reject it on general and specific grounds. General, because it is universally conceded that the Italians are Albania’s best friends, “We have three neighbors,” many a Sqnipotar told me, “ and they are the Serbs, the Greeks, and the Italians; and only the Italians have lived up to the 1 spirit and the letter of the agreement ! when they promised to withdraw.” That : is absolutely correct. The Italo-Albanian ' agreemnt called for entire evacuation of | all the Albanian mainland; therefore Italy has withdrawn even from Capo Linguctta, whence the water used to be brought to the totally dry rock of Saseno, left to Italy by the said agreement. The few soldiers at Saseno now receive even their fresh water from Italy. And it was just because of this Italian proof of honesty that the International Albanian Boundary Commission had put General Tellini at the head of the mission sent to define uncertain zones and to place the boundary marks. And, rightly or wrongly, the general bad been accused of settling all dubious cases in favor of Albania. There were therefore specific reasons also why Albanians could not have been guilty of the crime! Whereas, ; aside from the fact that the murder took 1 placo on territory unquestionably Greek, the theory of Greek responsibility _ ap- ! pearod to mo more and more plausible. The fact is that, although I was not in Albania when the murder took place, I •was there while the general protested repeatedly to his international employers against the initial non-co-operation and final open opposition of the Greek menibers of the mission, who were stealthily displacing the boundary stones; and n partcnlar of Colonel Botzars, who on August 7 was officially warned by the International Boundary Commission to refrain from further interference. Twenty days later the entire Italian group was caught in an ambush and slaughtered, in that Greek land of Epirus, which bad al- j ways tried to annex Southern Albania be- I cause the religious faith of its inhabitants is Greek Orthodox—one of thoso State religions so often leading to dubious international claims.