RUMANIA’S FATE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25503, 5 April 1944, Page 4

RUMANIA’S FATE

It will be a poor consolation to the mass of the Rumanian people, to say nothing of the leaders who brought them into alliance with the Nazis in this war, to be told by Mr Molotov that the. Soviet Government has no territorial designs against their country beyond the restoration of the frontier with Russia established by the treaty of 1940. It was obviously no part of the Rumanian Government’s intention that the cession of the provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina should be permanent. It was in June, 1940, that the Soviet ultimatum demanding the cession was presented to the Government in Bucharest. Six months before, when King Carol was paying his first official visit to the Bessarabian capital, he emphasised his country’s determination to defend thjjt province and all the Rumanian frontiers against aggression. “ This is, and eternally will be, Rumanian soil,’’ he declared. The Moscow demands were made when Russia and Germany were still in treaty association, and in acceding to them Carol’s Government took what was deemed the expedient course—though not, as has since been revealed, without prior consultation with Berlin. It is on record that the German radio announced on June 27, the day after the Russian ultimatum was received in Bucharest, that the Reich was not concerned over, the Russo-Rumanian dispute, Germany’s interest in the Balkans being “purely economic.” It was reported, nevertheless, only a few days later, that King Carol had appealed to Hitler for advice, and had been told to “accept anything for the time being.” The effect of that advice was evident on July 1, when the then Rumanian,Premier, M. Tatarescu, formally announcing the renunciation of the AngloFrench guarantee to Rumania, added that in future his country’s foreign policy would be aligned with “ the new orientation in Europe.” The devious nature of the political game played between Moscow and Berlin in that fateful period has been commented on by Dr V. V. Tilea, a former Rumanian Minister to London:

The pattern of the moves which forced Rumania to surrender to Nazi Germany was, with slight differences in details, similar to that applied earlier to Czechoslovakia. First, amputation the German-Russian treaty of August, 1939, secretly awarded Bessarabia to Russia, and in the summer of 1940 pressure was used on Rumania that she should give up that province as well as Northern Bukovina to Russia and half of Transylvania to Hungary; then, deposition of the head of the State, to be followed by military occupation. All these moves, as well as the fostering of a moral and material decomposition and chaos, were facilitated and hastened by the “fifth column.” All this was made possible through the feebleness or the consDiracv of a few ruling men and against the will and the sound political instinct of the masses.

The Rumanians, with their Pruth frontier invaded and Bukovina as well as Bessarabia in the process of being retaken by the Russians, can now see clearly the morass of defeat into which the ambitions of political intriguers have led them.

PACTS AND THE PACIFIC The contribution of Dr Evatt, the Australian Minister of External Affairs, to the controversy concerning the Canberra Pact is not such as to win new friends abroad for this instrument. His statement that a regional understanding on the lines of that envisaged in the pact would have prevented the catastrophies of Japanese aggression and kept the enemy north of the equator is, to say the least, native to the realm of hypothesis. It was only by the employment of armed strength that in the unenlightened era of 1942 the Japanese could have been halted in their depredations short of the Netherlands Indies, New Guinea and Micronesia, and it is difficult to determine how clauses 35 and 36 of the padt, which provide for Australian-New Zealand defence collaboration, with an invitation to other Pacific countries to join in consultation, would have turned the tide of aggression. As the United States had to demonstrate, with a great expenditure of sea-power, airpower, and man-power, it was not possible that what might be called' Canute clauses could have stopped the fanatically-inspired and bril-liantly-planned Japanese interpretation of “ blitzkrieg.” In the House of Representatives in the Dominion a week ago Mr Fraser, in a modest statement, denied any suggestion that the Canberra Pact was written in vainglory. It was possible for the Opposition, with that reassurance fresh in mind, to welcome it as an expression of agreement on matters of common interest by the two southern dominions. But the document is scarcely related to its proper place among the muniments of Empire—and thus relegated only by unspoken repudiation by Mr Fraser of- some of its more vague and grandiose designs—when the New Zealand High Commissioner in the Commonwealth, Mr Berendsen, is telling the journalists of New South Wales that it will, in effect, shape the destiny of the universe.

Australia and New Zealand would speak with one voice and would count four times as much as either would count individually. They would influence events in this part of the world and in all the world. That was the primary object of the agreement.

Little less, it must be remarked, is implied in the actual claim of the dominions for representation “ at the highest level” in all armistice preparations and peace planning. The report of the New York Times that Australia and New Zealand asked for, and on the objection of the United States were refused, participation in the preliminary talks of the Allied Powers on post-war civil aviation confirms the ambitions with which its Labourite sponsors have invested the Canberra Pact. America’s blunt refusal to recognise these technologically backward and geographically outermost Empire nations as first parties in the planning of post-war aviation requires no comment. The fact is that between the pretensions of the pact and Mr Fraser’s mild professions of its purpose there is a dangerous disparity. New Zealand and Australia must naturally claim their proper share in. Allied councils, and particularly in reshaping the world of the Pacific, but they have received due warning that they are not to be the tail that wags the United Nations dog. '