MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
HE professional historian is trained to be suspicious of history's coincidences and repetitions. He knows all too well that the act that events appear from time to time to form the same sort of pattern does not imply an identity of motives, purposes and powers behind those events. He is cautious to reject all assumptions that situations which are in appearance identical must proceed from similar causes and produce similar results. And thus when he chances upon a coincidence or a repetition he averts his gaze, being rightly determined not to be influenced by so fortuitous an occurrence. On the other hand, those of us who approach history from the literary rather than the scientific angle are delighted when history seems to repeat herself. We persuade ourselves that the coincidences of history are in some manner strange and true and that they possess meanings or lessons which they may not possess at all. It thus appears curious and significant to me that both the League of Nations and U.N.O. should have been landed with a Corfu incident at the very outset of their career. The Corfu incident of August 31, 1923, faced the young League of Nations with a dramatic and highly inconvenient test case. Would the principles of the Covenant be applied in a dispute between a Great Power and a Small Power? The fact that the League on this occasion failed to establish its claim to full jurisdiction in a dispute with which the Ambassadors' Conference was already dealing did much to shake public confidence in the Covenant as a charter of international right and wrong. The Corfu incident of October 22, 1946, which is now before U.N.O., raises a similar issue. Will the provisions of the Charter be objectively applied, or will political considerations inter- vene to blur the decisions? In other words, will the Charter be interpreted judicially or only diplomatically?
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It is sad that this enchanted island of Corfu, destined by nature to slumber eternally among her cypresses and olives, her myrtle and arbutus, should throughout the ages have been forced into the centre of strategic strife. It was a dispute about Corfu which helped to bring about the Peloponnesian war ; it was Corfu that became the bone of contention between the Genoese and the Venetians, and later between France, Russia and ourselves. And even today she retains her unwanted strategic prominence and remains the key to the Adriatic, a chink in the iron curtain. She would have pre- ferred a gentler destiny. She would have preferred that idyllic age when Alcinous ruled mildly over his Phaeacians, cultivating his orchards and gardens upon the hillside, and enjoying the society of his entrancing daughter. Happy was Corfu during the fifty years of British occupation, when Sir Thomas Maitland ruled the seven islands with fierce benevolence, while Edward Lear painted her olive groves with such meticulous precision. Happy was Corfu during that short honeymoon when Mr. Gladstone acted as High Com- missioner and when it was believed that this ardent young Liberal of fifty years of age would be proclaimed King of the Ionian Islands. Happy was Corfu even in that later period when Arnold Boecklin made his sketches for the Toteninsel, and William II conducted somewhat spurious excavations from his marble hermitage at the Achilleion. But history in her irreparable course has always come to snatch Corfu back into the centre of strategic rivalries. Her slumbers are broken by the crash of explosions, and the sleepy little town which clusters around Maitland's palace wakes suddenly again to the shock of fear. Once again Corfu has become the focus, not of power politics only, but of the system of international law which is to be recreated after a second world war.
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How many people, I wonder, remember the Corfu incident of 1923, that tragic and unjust transaction which first brought the Covenant of the League of Nations into disrepute? It is salutary at this moment to recall this distressing episode. When the Peace Conference dissolved in 192o the task of supervising the execution of the treaties and of polishing off the loose-ends that remained was entrusted to a permanent Conference, composed of the Ambassadors of the Five Powers in Paris. Among these loose ends was the de- limitation of the frontier between Greece and Albania. An inter-' national commission, under the chairmanship of the Italian General Tellini, was sent to the spot in the summer of 1923. On August 27th General Tellini was ambushed and murdered in the vicinity of Janina in Greek territory. Mussolini, who had only recently estab- lished his rule, reacted violently to this event. He presented an ultimatum to the Greek Government demanding apologies and com- pensation. The Greek Government, while accepting four out of the seven Italian demands, appealed to the League of Nations under Articles 12 and 15 of the Covenant. On August 31st an Italian squadron appeared t ff Corfu, bombarded the citadel, killing fifteen Armenian refugees who were housed in the building, and occupied the island by force. Meanwhile the Conference of Ambassadors had also protested at Athens against the murder of an official acting under their mandate. Mussolini at the same time allowed it to be known that, although he would evacuate Corfu eventually if the dispute were settled by the Ambassadors' Conference, he would remain there indefinitely if the League of Nations interfered. Here was a direct challenge to the authority of the Covenant. And what rendered the crisis even more acute and overt was that the Assembly and Council of the League happened both to be in session at Geneva.
On September 5th the Italian representative on the Council of the League of Nations registered the " irrevocable opinion " of his Government that no action should be taken by the Council on Greece's appeal. Lord Cecil, the British representative, countered in a dramatic manner. He called upon the secretary to read aloud in French and English Articles ro, 12 and 15 of " The Treaty of Versailles." It will be remembered that, on the insistence of Presi- dent Wilson, the articles of the Covenant had been incorporated as the opening articles of all the main treaties of peace. Lord Cecil, by quoting the major treaty, wished to remind his colleagues, and especially his French colleague, that the contention of the Italian Government affected the very foundation of the European system as it had emerged from the recent war. On the next day the Council, impressed by Lord Cecil's intervention, drew up a plan of settle- ment which was accepted by the Ambassadors' Conference on Sep- tember 7th and by the Greek Government on September loth. It seemed at that stage that the rights and interests of the Ambassadors' Conference and the League Council had been reconciled and that the authority of the Covenant had been maintained. One of Musso- lini's original demands had been that the Greek Government should pay the Italian Government as compensation a sum of so million lire. The Council had decided that this sum should not be paid until the responsibility of the Greek Government had been estab- lished and an international commission was sent to Janina to investi- gate the facts. This commission was instructed to report within five days. On September 22nd they telegraphed to the Ambassadors' Conference saying that they were unable to judge "whether the Greek Government ought to be held responsible for the cases of negligence revealed." On September 26th the Ambassadors decided that the case against Greece had been proved and ordered the pay- ment of the fifty million lire to Italy. Corfu was eventually evacu- ated. But it was generally known that the case against Greece had not been proved, that the League had, in fact, been ignored, and that the provisions of the Covenant had been evaded for diplomatic reasons: Confidence was shaken.
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It will be interesting to observe whether this second Corfu incident of October 22nd, 1946, will be more objectively treated by U.N.O. The Albanians contend that they never laid the mines which damaged the destroyers Saumarez ' and ` Volage ' with the loss of 44 lives. They also contend that the passage of these vessels through the Corfu channel on October 22nd was not " innocent " but provocative and offensive. It would not be proper to comment upon an issue which is still under discussion. All we can hope is that the decisions come to will not inflict upon the Charter the same damage as was done to the Covenant by the unhappy transactions of 1923.
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