PEACE NEGOTIATIONS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 99, 7 April 1936, Page 7

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS

League Should Be Called Without Delay

MR. EDEN’S STATEMENT

(British Official Wireless.) (Received 7, 12.30 p.m.) RUGBY, April 6.

Mr. Anthony Eden, in the course of his reply to questions in the House of Commons on the war in Abyssinia, said that recent events had made it clearly desirable that the League's Committee of Thirteen should be called together without delay. Replying to the suggestion that a commission should be appointed to recommend a settlement in the ItaloEthiopian dispute, Mr. Eden recalled that in September the League's Committee of Five made a careful and thorough investigation into the origin of and issues involved and worked out in great detail a plan for a just and equitable settlement. Mr. Eden said, as to the bombing of open towns, that in view of the importance of guarding against violation of the laws and customs of war relating to the protection of non-combat-ants the Government was making urgent representations that the complaints of the Ethiopian Government should receive immediate attention from the appropriate organ of the League- , He added, in answer to a further question, that the Government desired by every practical means to avert the menace of attack from the air. In the existing circumstances it considered that this would best be met by the conclusion of an air pact and by the limitation of air armaments. Mr. Eden repeated that in conjunction with

an air pact or other means the Government would continue to work for limitation of national air forces. Mr Eden said that the important lessons to be learned from the Italo-Abys-sinian dispute wpre that the League was limited in membership and was inevitably limited in effectiveness (says a supplementary Frees Association cable). Financial and economic sanctions could not be immediately effective if the membership of the League was incomplete. It might he said, viewing all that had happened that we should not have attempted to stop the war. He did not agree. Turning to recent events, he recalled that Britain supported the oil embargo, but France insisted on another effort at conciliation before the embargo. Italy, since the acceptance of conciliation, had intensified her aggression. It was the view of the British Government that there must ether be real conciliation, resulting is a cessation of hostilities in a given period, or the Committee of Eighteen would have to face its task again. But whatevere the final verdict might be, the responsibility must be shared with the League. We would take our share —no more and no less.

As regards the German reply, Britain could not go to a meeting of Locarnoitea with the idea of conciliation dead. It was essential that the German proposals should be co-ordinated by the League,

Mr Eden added: “If we can see by the end of the summer all nations of Europe members of the League, a new structure of security in Western Europe replacing Locarno and the strengthening of security elsewhere by arrangements directly controlled and supervised by the League, we shall have gained so much more security for Europe that it will then be possible to enter upon larger schemes relating to armaments, economics and the strengthening of the security afforded by the Covenant itself.”