LIKE A MIRACLE

Taranaki Daily News, 20 April 1935, Page 9 (Supplement)

LIKE A MIRACLE

BUT IT HAS BEEN DONE. ONE MORE WONDER OF LEAGUE. The League of Nations has just finished a wonderful and almost impossible task in the Near East. In exchanging great portions of the population of Turkey and Greece the League has achieved something that will be of incalculable benefit to us and our children and grandchildren. History, in the course of years, mixed up Christians and Mohammedans hopelessly throughout Asia Minor, and set them at each other’s throats so that neither side could leave the other long in peace. Outrages against the Christians in Turkey were as frequent in the news of the past generation as new air records are in ours. The Near East was a recognised danger zone, and, short of a wholesale massacre of one side or the other, there seemed no way to cure it. Then the League of Nations was founded—a body able to see that international agreements were carried out fairly, a body able to intervene for the good of humanity if the machinery broke down. In 1923, at Lausanne, Greece and Turkey agreed to sort out their populations. The Christian Greeks, established in Turkey for centuries, were to be sent home; the Moslems in Greece were to go back to Turkey. THE MIXED COMMISSION. A Mixed Commission of 11 men was > set up to see that this was done. This Commission, after 11 years work, some of it heartbreaking in the extreme, has accomplished an extremely painful and difficult operation wisely and well. In all 1,825,000 people have been uprooted from their homes, set down on new soil, and fitted into their new life as workers and citizens. A million and a half of these people went to Greece, and for a time Greece was at her wit’s end to find room for them. But new towns were built, new industries started, and the farmers went on the land. Ruthless and bitter though the story is, it has a happy ending. Turkey now has a much more united population, and is free to develop in her own way without constant friction from people of another faith whose line of progress lies in other paths. A NEW LAND. And while we give honour to the League' Commission which' has worked this change, and to the Greek and" Turkish statesmen who made it possible, we keep the biggest place for the hundreds of thousands of simple folk living in those sunny lands who were told one day that they had to pack up and be ready to go. Go where? What had they done? , Then into goods trains they were packed, travelling slowly, slowly, under the hot sun, sometimes side-tracked for hours or days, with the provision of water and food all very hit-and-miss, and children falling ill every day. Then they were crowded on to boats, and finally came to a new land: barracks, tents—their sick children wrested from them and put behind barbed-wire enclosures. There were whispers of epidemics. Waiting, waiting, waiting, day after day, week after week, wondering what would become of them all when this official madness passed off; but settling down, settling in, even in the barracks and tents, making the best of things—managing somehow to wash their clothes, hanging up a gay counterpane for a partition, making the palliasse bed up neatly and then folding it back to use it as a seat in the day, putting a jampot of field-flowers on an improvised shelf, making even this “home.” They were brave..- and courageous beyond belief, with ‘ the future so uncertain before them; and when they were finally moved into neat villages of new bungalows, with workshops where they could go back to their trades they felt that it had not been in vain. In all the turmoil, the ' sickness, and ' hunger and thirst they had, never quite lost their faith that life was good, and now, behold, they had proof! This is one of the biggest pieces of work the League has accomplished, but it has done it so quietly that the newspapers give it seven lines! It is the way of the Fleet Street world we live in.