TURKEY AND GREECE.

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18166, 3 November 1930, Page 4

TURKEY AND GREECE.

A most significant gesture towards the realisation of world peace has passed almost unnoticed. Turkey 'and Greece, sworn enemies through the ages, have signed an agreement providing for naval parity. between the two 'countries, with a proviso that one party ' will notify the other six months prior to planning any new warship- True the navies of Turkey and Greece are very minor ones to the rest of the world, but they loom great in the affairs of the two countries concerned; to them the relative strengths of their fighting fleets mean .just as much as the ratio of British and United States men-o’-war means to those countries. In the days immediately after the war Turkey and Greece were nations of warlike intent; the former disgruntled at the loss of so much territory, the latter encouraged by a victory to which she contributed but little to seek an extension of her national boundaries. Two problems of grave importance confronted Turkey—the Iraqi at Mosul and the Greeks at Smyrna. Peaceful negotiations which followed a bellicose attitude gave the oilfields to Iraq, while the Ottomans released the pent-up wrath of many decades upon the Hellenes, expelling them from Turkey in Asia In' utter rout as the result of one of the epic campaigns of history. Reduced more nearly to their natural boundaries the two countries relinquished ambitions of conquest and settled down to reorganise their own internal affairs. Passing through many initial vicissitudes they have emerged, if not prosperous, at least contented. The signing of the naval parity -tee.aty is tantamount to a realisation that the era of antagonism and distrust has ended, and henceforth peace may reign where the shadow of war was ever present. ~