ITALY’S INTEREST IN TUNISIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 3, 5 January 1939, Page 7

ITALY’S INTEREST IN TUNISIA

STORY BEHIND THE TENSION IT DATES BACK TO THE REIGNS OF CAESARS For 57 years Italy has nurtured a grievance over Tunisia, half-desert, half-garden, on the rim of the Noith African wilderness. And now, with France as she thinks, weakened by internal dissension, she judges the moment opportune to vent it once again. Rome’s interest in Tunisia goes back to the Caesars. A mile or two from modern Tunis, the seaport capital with the unforgetable smell, stood mighty Carthage, whose ships competed with Rome’s for the trade of the ancient world, and ravaged her shores when the winds were favourable, whose armies gave her legions the longest, toughest campaign they ever had to fight. Through an tac centuries when she lay rotting dter the final great collapse, Rome li earned of one day restoring her sway along the sun-baked shore across the sea. After Rome, the Turks. This race, the next masters of all that coast, hau forgotten what it was to be hungry. The driving force which sent them out of the bacK door of China centuries before, sweeping over a terrified Europe toppling empires as they came, had died out of them, and now too, were decaying, their own empire falling to pieces, ready for tne strong to take. Italy watched while England France and Holand divided up the East. She saw the world slipping bit by bit into the hands of Loncion and Paris. And Paris, it seemed, had reached her zenith, and was still reeling under the blow of 1870, shattered and disheartened, her golden age finished. England was at grips wita hall a dozen Imperial problems, and was in any much more interested in South and East Africa than in the North. The Golden Lire. The golden lire began to cross the Mediterranean. Roads were opened up in Tunisia, the British railway from ! i unis to Goletta was bought, new ■ tracks w ere laid, trading posts sprang 1 up at the crossing of the desert ways. Italy began to think again of a great' Italian empire from Egypt to the At-•. lantic. But there was no Axis then, revolving between her capital and Eoclin. And Italy reckoned without the man of blood and iron, Prince Bismarck, plotting in his gloomy palace away to the North. Tne French still smarted under the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of the thought of Prussian soldiers marching under their Arc de •friomphe. And the Iron Chancellor knew that a nation brooding is a nation dangerous. He looked around for some distraction whicn would keep the French busy, awaj from his preserves, and help them regain their lost self-respect without risk to the empire he himself was planning. He wnispered in the ear of France. England was growing great. The world was being parcelled out. Germany had no need of colonies, but France had. And she had better act while there was time. The Ottoman Empire was falling to pieces. Strike now! France struck. And one day in 1881 Italy awoke to find a different tricolour waving over Tunisia, French troops in occupation of the capital, all the Italians and near-Italians living there changed overnight into Frencn citizens. And Italy has not forgotten. Especially has she not forgotten that Tunisia is rich in the things she lacks —phosphates, zinc, lead, iron orc, lignites. Corsica and Italy. Corsica, too, has links with Itaij reaching back to the days of Imperial Rome. Charlemagne took it from the East Roman Empire, the Moors were its masters in the ninth century, it has seen Pisan and Genoese ana Spaniard. It has even been ruled by the board of directors of a bank, the Eanca di San Giorgio of Genoa, whicn drove out the Spaniards in 1447. France conquered this isle the ancient Greeks called Kaliste (most beautiful) in 1556, gave it back to Genoa, who for years round it hard to hold against the incessant raids of the pirates from the Barbary Coast, ana eventually saw it fall to France. For her size Corsica has made a considerable mark upon the pages of history. One of her sons went forth from his hillside home overlooking Ajaccio's sunlit harbour to write the name Napoleon in letters of blood from the Volga to the Nile. A second, born in Calvi s rock citadel, sailed off to find the New World —Christophei Columbus. A third, Pasquale Paoli, the Liberator, might have been greatest | of the three from the Corsicans' point ■of view had he not trusted too much iin his allies in Corsica’s last flare-up of independence, and found in the end that he had merely exchanged the bondage of France for that of England. To-day Corsica remains the most beautiful. But France is making it, too, a second Heligoland, an outpost fortress in the sea, a considerable base for flying-boats and seaplanes, keeping perpetual watch on the western coast of Italy and on near-by Sardinia. From the cliffs at Bonifacio you may look out into the heat haze and see the coastline of the Italian isle. Through the narrow channel pass the great liners outward bound from Marseilles and Liverpool and Hamburg, heading for Port Said and places east. But you cannot hire a boat in any Corsican or Sardinian fishing port that will take you across that few miles of forbidden water. Flying grounds are scarce in Corsica but there are fine harbours where warships lie and where great military seaplanes ride at anchor by the side of the passenger liners carrying tourists and business men between Marseilles and France’s Algerian and Moroccan possessions. The Corsican of to-day is content to be a Frenchman. He likes the food he imports from Marseilles, the tourist business that comes to him from Nice, the importance it gives him to send his own Deputies to the Chamber in Paris. And ha is getting reconciled at last to the one thing he does not quite understand about the Frenchman—his odd distaste for the vendetta, age-old Corsican manner of settling every dispute.—Graham Alleston, in the London Evening Standard.