FRONTIER DISPUTE

Taranaki Daily News, 4 March 1935, Page 11

FRONTIER DISPUTE

ITALY AND ABYSSINIA. ROOTS OF RECENT STRIFE. The League Council can. hardly be looking forward to its January meeting, when it will not only have to face a recurrence of the storms it has just weathered but also a dispute between one of its permanent members and the kingdom of Ethiopia, says a writer ,in the Manchester Guardian. In which form the dispute will come before the Council or what procedure will be adopted is still uncertain, but it is high time that measures were taken ,to end a very dangerous and quite unnecessary situation.

The heavy fighting at Ual Ual and the admitted Italian reprisals on unprotected Abyssinian villages are not isolated incidents but come at the end of a long series of troubles of a much more serious nature than the “unofficial” raids of Abyssinian freebooters into Kenya. There is actually no continuous frontier" between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia. Delimited on the map by a reasonably straight line in the treaty of 1908, it has never been fully demarcated on the spot. The ground is half desert, half grazing country, and many of the tribes semi-nomadic in character. Grazing lands change and well rights change, and tribal boundaries with them. Since the war, with the consolidation of the Italian rule in their colony and the advent of capital and a few settlers, the Italian Colonial Service has taken matters pretty much into its own hands;

Using as a pretext , the impossibility of adhering to the treaty boundary, it has staked out? claims to . lands which are at least arguably on the Abyssinian side of it, and for some years local Abyssinian governors have reacted to the process with violence and the Central Government with protests.

It is perfectly true that the straightline boundary is absurd, but that fact alone makes it imperative that a proper demarcation should be made. The absurdity of a position in which a semifortified post, can be claimed by. one side as sixty miles within their territory and by the other as forty miles within theirs need not be laboured, and if the Italians will not proceed with the demarcation it is certainly time a League Commission did. A disputed frontier is bad enough; a non-existent frontier is quite impossible. The question of who started the fighting is hardly relevant until the' rights to the scene of the fighting have been established. This is the which the Abyssinians raise as a-suitable subject for arbitration under their Treaty of Conciliation and Arbitration with Italy of 1928. The Italians, despite the: fact that the frontier is not de-, marcated, persist in treating the incident as a case of warlike frontier violation which is not capable of arbitral treat-, ment. They refuse to admit that there is any lack of clarity about the frontier, although it is largely by their own inaction that it has not been made clear by demarcation. The deadlock is complete, because the two parties' to it interpret -the position differently. The Abyssinians want a disputed frontier settled; the Italians claim a frontier unilaterally and want vengeance from a violator who claims

not to be a violator. Whatever the truth of violation, the Italians have no ease for refusal of arbitration. The text of the treaty is plain:—

Both Governments undertake to submit to a procedure of conciliation and arbitration disputes which . may arise between them and which it may not have been possible to settle by ordinary diplomatic methods without having recourse to armed force. The. characteristic obscurities . of the text apart, the treaty , obligation is clear. There is no ground. at. all on . which Italy can refuse arbitration, but die has chosen to use the method of ultimatum. The choice is not dictated merely by a preference for forcible methods. It is part of a deliberate policy. In the past two years Ethiopia’s military preparations have caused a ' good deal of alarm in Italian colonial quarters, which know that neither Eritrea nor Somaliland is defensible and would welcome any excuse to increase the garrisons there stationed. . More, Italy’s copartners in’. the tripartite agreement •guaranteeing the integrity of Ethiopia have, Britain formally, France tacitly, recognised Italian priority of interest and conceded her superior economic interest.. in Ethiopia. That interest, she now recognises, is being threatened by the intensive'. effort of Japan to- secure Ethiopia'• as an overseas market, .an effort. not ■unwelcome to , the Ethiopian Government and one which has provoked .alarmist-articles in the Italian colonial Press and created the “scare” of a Japanese “base” on the Red Sea. At the moment, too, France seems ipphned to make overseas concessions in return for support in Europe, and Italians hope to secure part if not the whole of Jibuti. Abyssinia therefore

must, it is held in Rome, be reminded on all counts of Italy’s rights and, still more, of Italy’s strength. It is expected that the suggestion of the acquisition by Italy of her only outlet and the terminus of her only railway will rouse . a storm in Ethiopia, and in anticipation of trouble it is always good policy to create diverting trouble.