“FRONTIER DISEASE.”

Waikato Times, Volume 106, Issue 17805, 2 September 1929, Page 9

“FRONTIER DISEASE.”

STIRS UP BALKANS. HATREDS CAUSE SHOOTINGS. (From a Correspondent). VIENNA, July 18. Frontier incidents usually make poor copy. Like the poor in the Balkans, they always are with us. The outside world is barely apt to notice the weekly or half weekly shooting on some Ruritanian frontier. Yet the cataclysm of 1914 started by what in essence was a frontier incident when the student Princip crossed the Aus-tro-Serb frontier to assassinate the heir to the Austrian throne at Sarajevo. * . During the last four weeks sixteen persons of various nationalities were killed in Balkan frontier incidents. Memories of the suddenness with which a spark on the frontiers set the whole Balkans ablaze in wars of the past cause the governments suddenly to concentrate on dispatches of their Balkan diplomats and imitate such action as last week's AngloFrench demarches to Belgrade and Sofia. Inability to appreciate the existence of the disease which can be termed “frontier mentality” partly explains foreign indifference to Balkan conditions.

'ln pre-war days a British subaltern succeeded for months in exceeding the speed limit of England by bolding a driving license made out for “his Excellency -the Sanjak of Novibazar. ’ Naturally, no policeman who first stopped, then respectfully saluted the imaginary • potentate, had the faintest idea That the Sanjak of Novibazar was not a person but one of Austria s Balkan frontier possessions. Even to-day, scores of letters reach the Balkans ‘ weekly addressed to hybrid non-existent countries such as Yugosiovakia or Czechoslovia or tho long dead Austro-llungary. Except when a Balkan thunderbolt crashes from the apparently cloudless sky of European peace, the world regards the Balkans mainly as an ingredient for operettas and movie scenarios.

Diseases Is Hard To Understand

It is particularly difficult for the United Slates to understand the “frontier mentality” disease which year after year keeps rifles ready to tile hands of spy hunters, professional and amateur, along the ItaloYugoslaviau frontier. It is not always whole nations which the Balkan frontier dwellers hate. Their creed is. “The lowest tiling on earth is the man just across my frontier who either has land which should be mine or who desires land on which I am living.” . Along the largely imaginary Al-bano-Yugoslav frontier line, widening through the deep belt of blue mountains on either side of which live people of both the Albanian and Yugoslav race, gendarmes walk every 200 yards. None loses sight of his fellow and none ever employs the safety catch on his rifle. The gendarmes are outnumbered by tho little white crosses dotted about the fringe of forests. Each cross marks fille end of the chapter for some gendarme or komitadji leader who lost sight of his companion or incautiously applied the safety catch to his rifle. this is frontier mentality. Its existence even further . northward was revealed in the station of Hidasnemcti on the Hungaro-Czccho-slovak frontier where Hungarians seized a Czechoslovak railwayman as an alleged spy. Under the influence of deep suspicion bred by the frontier disease every little official iii the desolate loneliness of a border post is always alert to catcli or shoot a spy or to conduct stupid petty espionage for j the supposed benefit of his own ooun- j ! try. On .the Austro-Italian frontier) Italy’s had conscience .about the treatment of her ex-Austrian subjects in South Tyrol adds the possibility of arrest by carabiniers to the usual dangers of an Alpine tour. Towns Now Are Smugglers. In such an atmosphere smuggling, once a romantic profession for occasional ne’er-do-wells, degenerated into a lucrative trade for whole communities. There arc towns in Hungary whose main business is smuggling illegal immigrants without passports across frontiers. Amateur mapdrawers of 1918 and 1919, "who often sacrificed economics and commonsense to the satisfaction of national jealousies, made many present-day j frontiers open sores on the body of Europe. , Many miles of railway in the old Austrian monarchy to-day are disused on account of frontier hatreds. Ivomaron, where citizens are obliged to pass barbed wire entanglements on a bridge dividing Hungary and Czechoslovakia to reach the Komaron railway station, and Fiume-Susalc, where Italian and Yugoslavian soldiers glower at one another across twentyfive yards of stream, are typical of manv farcical frontiers. Flume is a ruined city to-day because Italy will not allow her to compete with great Italian ports. She insists on retaining the half empty harbour of Fiume to prevent it from serving as a natural hinterland in Yugoslavia. On the other side of the line running through the harbour is the overcrowded corner of what is called Susak, from where the captains of Yugoslav vessels gaze longingly through the wire netting at the grassgrown quay sides. A radical cure for the frontier mentality disease naturally will take pre- • cisclv as long to effect as it 'probably

will to realise M. Briand’s dream of a Pan-Europe union —at all events an economic union. „ In the meantime an effective al lcviation seems to be the same as th means of securing peace—an cteinai vMlance combined with efforts to increase the constricted range of vision of the sufferers from the disease.