POLAND AND LITHUANIA

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 17 March 1928, Page 11

POLAND AND LITH UANIA

r PHE dispute between Poland and A Lithuania has figured somewhat prominently in the cable news during the past few weeks, and it. is acknowledged that the position is such as to cause some misgivings in diplomatic circles in Europe. The following article by the Kovno correspondent of “The London Times” will bo of interest: —

A dispute which loses /.nothing in acrimony by being conducted at long range has recently caused a revival of anxiety concerning that least manageable and most remote of danger-zones, the “closed” frontier between Poland and Lithuania. It is being fought over the rights of Polish-speaking citizens of Lithuania and Lithuanianspeaking citizens of Poland to establish minority schools ’and the duties the respective Government towards them.

Questions of citizenship or the observance of mutual obligations do not arise, because the two countries, on account of the Vilna quarrel, have never been able to make peace although their hostilities ceased in November, 1920. Poland ’is bound to protect the right of minorities by a convention with the Allied Powers which was signed by her as a pendant to the Peace Treaty, and Lithuania promised equitable treatment to her citizens of alien raee at the time when she was to bo recognised de jure. THE RIVAL COMPLAINTS. Briefly, the Lithuanian complaint is that the arrests and deportations of Lithuanians and the closure, of +8 Lithuanian schools and a training college in the Polish districts of Vilna and Grodno, which were carried out.in the first week of October ,in the guise of reprisals for vVhnt was then alleged to be the complete suppression of .Polish private education in Lithuania, cannot. be supported by such pleas. The appeal from 2S Polish teachers, said to be interned at Varnial, in Lithuania, which looked as if it were the pretext for the acts complained of, is condemned as a forgery, and the private schools of the Polish minority are stated to have received the same fair | treatment as any others. It is argued further that the real purpose of the Polish persecutions is to stamp out the Lithuanian national movement and prepare the way for the absorption of Lithuania. . •On the Polish side it is claimed that apart from the Varnial appeal, there were sufficient grounds to justify strong measures; that the publication of the appeal in Vilna newspapers and its ready acceptance by the rest of j Poland bore witness of what the Poles have learnt, bv experience to expect from the Role-baiting administrators ot Lithuania; that the Lithuanian Government, so far from exercising tolerance, does everything in its power U> annihilate the relies of Polish culture; that the so-called “reprisals” might have been executed much earlier under another title, because the persons and institutions selected for punishment had long been guilty of criminal disloyalty; and that further patience, in view ‘of the growing menace to the Polish .minority and the noisy persist-

A BITTER DISPUTE

THE QUESTIONS AT ISSUE

once of the Lithuanian Government in a claim'to’Polish territory, would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness by the subversive elements which reap their livelihood among th 0 minority peoples of I-oland. The actual grievances of the Polish minority have lain in the refusal to qualify their teachers, .(is they consider unfairly, and in the rigid enforcement of' an administrative order which prohibits minority schools from giving instruction to any pupil who has not produced a certificate from the local authority stating that the nationality of the parents, as given in their passports, is the nationality of the school.

The Poles declare that during the German occupation they were permitted to open 30 private schools, but between 1919 and 1926, under various Lithuanian Governments, the number of them was cut down to five. On the advent to power of the Slezevieius Government, a Liberal and Socialist /Coalition, which occurred in the summer of 1926, and the consequent removal of martial law for the first time m the history of the Republic, they were permitted to open 74 schools. They possessed no training and lacked qualified teachers, 'but 85 were granted a temporary license to teach for one year, and registered attendances in the following January, the busiest school month, exceeded ‘4OOO. In December there occurred the military _ revolt which brought the present Nationalist Government into power. Before the end of the school year, in early summer, the number of teachers was reduced by 13, of whom seven were deported from the districts in which they resided and taught to other districts by order of the military—the whole country, and not merely the chief towns and main railway lines, as was the case the year before, having been placed under martial law —and six were disqualified by the Ministry. The corresponding number of schools closed. Thirty-two Polish teachers have beer, given a further temporary licence since the school-year began, but few of the schools can be re-opened owing to the methods of obstruction locally employed. < ‘ pair,SPORT NATIONALS ’ ’

The descriptions of the parents nationality were taken over from identity cards which tlu* Germans issued during the occupation, and the Germans, while eager enough to claim Germans and bound to recognise Jews for what they were, made a practice of entering Poles as Lithuanians. Since the war the state of Lithuanian national feeling and the fears of boycott or persecution it aroused have prevented people who feel themselves to !><• Roles thorn altering these passport- descriptions. Now, when the private, though not the 'State, minority schools arc (strictly confined to their “passport nationals,” ft great many parents have found that they are not able to do so. The Lithuanians explain thnr I .ring the last school year Polish canvassing parties toured the countryside in moto" •ars offering free schoolbooks un i even free luncheons to children who would attend Polish schools, and one of the

queer results of this somewhat dubious practice was that Orthodox peasants who had spoken a dialect, of Russian all their lives suddenly decided to be •Poles. The Poles pour ridieult \ni sueh stories, declaring that it was tho Lithuanians who offered free glasses of tea and are trying‘to saddle the I'olish minority with their own methods. . Besides the private schools, there are 33 maintained by the /State, both prim, ary and secondary, in which Polish is wholly or partly the language of instruction. It is represented that in all but a few of these schools, where the teachers are independent, political ideas are so effectively instilled that quite young children come home after :i few terms and shock their Polish par. cuts by chanting hymns of hate against Poland.

. The Yilna reprisals .have been condemned bv many Poles as undignified and untimely; nevertheless, over the ■period of years, Poland has not the worse 1 record. Lithuania admits to (v 5,000 Polish citizens, Poland to 57,000 Lithuanians. On the basis of their Parliamentary vote the Poles of Lithuania would number 200,000 and the Lithuanians of Poland are probably about 100,000. ■ The Polish minority has never been given more —and that only for one school-year —than 33 State schools and 74 private schools. The Lithuanian minority, the less numerous of the two, was granted in the same school year 44 State schools, of which half were Lithuanian purely and half bilingual, and 70 private schools. As long ago as 1923 there were 92 elementary schools and one secondary school in which tic only language of Instruction was Litaunniau. The •Curatorium at Yilna had tgreed to license 93 private schools for the schoolyear beginning this autumn, when the reprisals were carried out and 48 of the private schools were closed. PILvSUDSKI YIiSTT TO YILNA Marshal Pilsudski went to Vilna on October 8, accompanied by 'Ministers, staff officers, and officials. On October 9 the anniversary of the seizure of Yilna, kept as a day of •mourning in Lithuania, was solemnly commemorated, although the Marshal himself took no part, in the military and ecclesiastical ceremonies. It is certain his presence in the city and his meetings with local Polos ha i the .oothing influence which was greatly needed. Speculation had begun as to whether his visit portended some new coup do force, the granting of autonomy to the Yilna region, or a dramatic proclamation that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was revived. We at hod been whispered at Yilna was oeiug si. out id from the housetops in Kovnj. wiiiclt ti month later had not yet steadied its nerves. Nothing so fantastic was ever intended, but even the urns'; or lent, of believers in the wisdom of tlr; great could bo pardoned for wondering-what the trumpeting was about. The Marshal’s games of cat and mouse have often stood him in good steal, notably in hia- dealing with the Polish Parliament; if it was intended to try tneir efrect on little Lithuania, they only made the existing tension worse.