UNSOLVED PROBLEM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 January 1944, Page 3

UNSOLVED PROBLEM

OF THE POLISH FRONTIER ACCENTUATED BY RUSSIAN ADVANCE. REPORTED VIEW OF BRITISH GOVERNMENT. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, January 5. Diplomatic relations between the Soviet and Poland have been broken off for nearly a year. British efforts to heal the breach have met with no success. The Poles claim that all the territory west of the frontier fixed in 1920 cannot be changed without Polish consent, and that Poland will not consent. The Russians maintain that the line drawn by the 1920 treaty was unjust and was imposed by force on a defeated republic. The “Daily Herald” states that the British Government’s view is that the Russo-Polish border should be settled after the war by friendly negotiation, if necessary with the help of the Allies. ,

The Poles’ attitude can be gauged from the comment of a Polish daily, the official Government paper, when the Russians were 10 miles from the line. “A space of 10 miles lies between the United Nations’ camp and the most serious political and moral crisis of the whole war,” it said. Prominent Poles in London state that Russia's entry into Poland and the powerful Polish underground movements could best be harmonised if official diplomatic relations between Poland and Russia were restored. The Polish Cabinet held a threehour meeting yesterday without reaching agreement on the form of the statement. Britain and the United States are believed to have urgently counselled the Poles to issue emphatic instructions to the Polish underground movement to aid the Red Army.

“The prospect that an increasing area of Poland may in the near future pass into the occupation of the Red Army has directed fresh attention to the unsettled issues between the two Governments,” comments “The Times” in a leading article. “Their dispute constitutes the one conspicuous gap in the continuous United Nations’ political front, and as long as it is not resolved it offers to the enemy one of the few consolations in his present bleak prospect. “The omission of all references to the frontier question as such in the Polish declaration is conspicuous, but by no means' discouraging. It may ease the way for negotiation toward that settlement which alone can repair a serious weakness in the Allied front and at the same time establish a bastion of the permanent peace system to which the United Nations arc pledged.”

SOVIET CLAIM

DECLARATION IN WASHINGTON. LONDON, January 5, The Russian Embassy in Washington. according to the British United Press, has issued a bulletin stating: “The Red Army liberated the workers of western Byelorussia and the western Ukraine from the yoke of the Polish usurpers. The people of Byelorussia themselves decided on the form of their State, The Supreme Soviet acceded to their request and accepted them into the U.S.S.R. “The Red Army is now again liberating Byelorussia. The time is near when free Soviet Byelorussia will again shine as a jewel in the brilliant cluster of republics of the U.S.S.R.

CATEGORICAL DENIAL OF REPORTED STATEMENT BY DR. BENES. REGARDING COMMON FRONTIER ' WITH RUSSIA. LONDON, January 5. The Czechoslovak Press Bureau in London. says that the Cairo report which was cabled by a British United Press correspondent imputes to Dr. Benes statements which he ‘could not have made at a gathering of the Czech colony in Cairo.’’ The bureau categorically denies that Dr. Benes made a statement to the effect that Czechoslovakia and Russia would have common frontiers or that he said that Marshal Stalin had agreed that all the Germans should be expelled from the Sudetenland. The bureau also categorically denies the inference that Russia intends to regain and keep Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The British United Press, referring to the bureau’s denials of Dr. Benes’s statement, says: “The Czech spokesman in London admitted that he had not seen a copy of Dr. Benes’s statement, and the denial is based ‘on the fact that this is not the sort of thing that Dr. Benes would say.’ ”

As defined in pre-war Europe, the province of Bukovina, in noithem Rumania, began a few miles east of the Carpatho-Ukraine, the narrow tip of Czechoslovakia. This would be a common frontier in the general sense of the word. A common border existed only in 1940-41, when German and Russian armies faced each other across the line between Czechoslovakia and Galicia (southern Poland).

JN LONDON AGAIN

CZECH PRESIDENT RETURNS FROM TOUR. LONDON, January 6. Dr. Benes is back in London today after his trip to Iran and Moscow, where he signed the Czecho-Soviet treaty. With him arrived the new Soviet Ambassador to his Government.