FINNS’ BITTER HARVEST.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 94, 19 March 1940, Page 6

FINNS’ BITTER HARVEST.

For Finland the harvest of war is bitter in the extreme. Not only has Russia shorn the country of valuable lands and industrial areas, but the Soviet also is determined to reduce it to a state amounting almost to vassalage. To-day a great migration is proceeding of the Finns who must leave their farms, homes, or towns for another part of their homeland rather than come under the rule of Moscow. The leading port of Yiborg has fallen to Russia and a little to the west of it will run the new frontier; at the other end of the Mannerheim Line the Finns must travel more than sixty miles before they are under their own flag. But their new homes may still be far distant. Russia has deliberately stolen from these people J 9,000 square miles of territory which, prior t,o the war, had a population of half a million people, of whom four-fifths were evacuated, leaving 100,000 to make the migration to safer habitations. ’There they must find new occupations for the area lost comprises national resources in timber, sawmills, pulp factories, iron works, sulphide and sulphate plants, flourmills and fishing grounds. The cost to Finland of Russia’s outrage is appalling. It is placed at <£118,000,000,_ of which half was caused by air raid damage, and one-quarter represents the loss of resources in the ceded quarter. The Finns, with their sturdy self-reliance, independent spirit, and hardiness of character may be relied upon to build afresh the nation so painfully dismembered, but it is a sign of world sympathy for them that Brazil has promptly offered an asylum for 100,000, with a of free land and financial help. The process of rebuilding will be arduous and anxious for the Government and people/ and it would occasion no surprise were Stalin to adopt Hitler’s procedure in Czechoslovakia.