BALKAN STORM=CENTRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 July 1939, Page 3

BALKAN STORM=CENTRE

ANNEXATION OF BOHEMIA ' AND MORAVIA. .

Before the German annexation of , Bohemia and Moravia shook Europe to its foundations, the world had come to look on the once turbulent Balkans as a prodigal son who had seen the errors of the past and had determined never to be led astray by anything or anybody again, writes Mr Godfrey Leas in the “Christian Science Monitor." But today, seemingly, we are back again at the bad old pre-war period when trouble in the Balkans" was a permanent cloud on the international hori-I zon. No longer arc the annexation of Bosnia by Austria-Hungary in 1908, the two Balkan Wars in 1912-13, the permutations which put forward first one and then another candidate for the throne of Albania, and finally the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo which set the world • ablaze in 1914. merely items of past history. Out of these very spectres of the past which it was hoped had been I laid for ever, new problems are arising just as capable of setting the world on I fire as their forebears, unless they are 1 more skilfully handled.