REPARATION OBLIGATIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18722, 30 May 1924, Page 7

REPARATION OBLIGATIONS.

FIRMNESS OF ALLIES. / WARNING > FOR GERMANY, I SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT.

MACDONALD TO • POINCARE. JOINT ACTION IF NEEDED. / By . Telegraph Association— (Received 9.55 p.m.) • A. and N.Z. LONDON,, May 29. . Recent correspondence between M. Poincare, retiring Premier of France, and Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald, Prime Minister of Britain, was written in a strain quite novel in diplomacy. Mr. MacDonald, in referring to his invitation to M. . Poincare to visit him at Chequers, said: I greatly desire the pleasure of meeting .you' personally at my own fireside. v, ( ,To this ,M. Poincare . replied I . was looking forward with great pleasure to passing an evening at your fireside, and having a heart to heart talk. , One of the most important passages in the correspondence , was the following, contained in M. Poincare's letter: ; You were good enough to tell the Prime Minister of Belgium, M. Georges Theunis, and his Minister for Foreign Affairs, M. Paul Hymans, tnat, in the event of a German breach of her undertakings under the reparation experts' reports Germany would find herself confronted' by Britain, Belgium, and France, as inflexibly united as they were iir the war.

The newspapers point out that this goes much further than any of Mr. MacDonald's previous declarations.

A message from Paris states that an Allied Note has been handed to the German Ambassador reaffirming the Allies' standpoint regarding military control of the Ruhr. ~

The Ambassadors' Conference, maintaining that the Allies had the right to : exercise military control in Germany, rejected Germany's request that the control should be handed over to the League of Nations.

The reply of the German Government to' the Note of the Conference of Ambassadors of March 5, which itself was a reply to the German Note of January 9 on the resumption of inter-Allied military control in Germany, was handed to the Quai d'Orsay on April 2 by the German Ambassador in Paris. The Note of the Conference of Ambassadors insisted on the five following points—(l) The police forces to be put on such a footing that they cannot be used for military . purposes ; (2) munitions ' factories to be transformed and rendered incapable of producing war material; (3) excess war material to be surrendered • (4) documents' showing the war material existing at the time of the Armistice and indicating the production during the war to be furnished; (5) all necessary laws to be promulgated to prevent the import and export of war material and to prohibit the recruiting and organisation of the army .in any sense contrary to the Versailles Treaty. Mobilisation plans to be discarded . an* superfluous officers to be removed;« the Allied Commission to be given proper facilities for investigation. , The German Note in reply was an endeavour to render impossible military control of any kind.