THE LEAGUE: Assassination Preferred

By demand of Ethiopia, the League Council last week called Italy to the mat. Ethiopia was represented by Professor Gaston Jeze of the Paris Sorbonne. To smash him Dictator Benito Mussolini sent to Geneva the hard-bitten Italian naval officer who, during the War, smashed Imperial Austria’s network of spies after they had succeeded in blowing up two Italian battleships.

In those pre-Fascist days keen, hard little King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy had picked hawk-eyed,, hollow-cheeked Baron Pompeo Aloisi as his naval aide-de-camp. Austria’s spy net was known to have its spider on Swiss soil at Zurich in the person of a certain Captain Mayer. On the night of Feb. 24, 1917 Spy Master Mayer’s safe was rifled by expert Italian cracksmen. For the next three days the Italian frontier was closed to keep Austrian spies from escaping from Italy. They were caught and shot in batches on the evidence provided by the spy data stolen in Zurich. Since Italians have always given credit to Baron Aloisi for this exploit, they relied on him in Geneva last week with serene confidence.

Benito Mussolini, after he became Premier, used Aloisi to set up one Zogu as Zog I, King of Italian-protected Albania (TIME, Sept. 10, 1928). Later the Baron was sent to Turkey, negotiated the famed Pact of Amity between Dictator Kemal and Dictator Mussolini. For Baron Aloisi last week Professor Jeze was a pushover. The Italian pointed out to French Premier Pierre Laval that Sorbonne professors are employes of the French State and that therefore Professor Jeze had no business representing Ethiopia while he was also working for France. After that, the professor was not invited to the scene of last week’s actual negotiation which was not the League Council chamber but the villa of the League of Nations’ rich French Secretary General, M. Joseph Avenol.

There the Big Three of last week, grim Aloisi, affable Laval and Britain’s young Captain Anthony Eden, who vividly remembers the talking-to he recently received in Rome from Il Duce, sat around devising what the League calls a “formula.” Every few hours Baron Aloisi would read the latest text by long distance telephone to Premier Mussolini and the Dictator would snort, ”Unacceptable!”

This continued until Britain and France had backed down on every point except that when the League meets in regular session Sept. 4 it will simply have to discuss Italy and Ethiopia. Even such discussion the Dictator at first called “Unacceptable!” Then he grudgingly yielded. Around midnight the Big Three took time off to telephone Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, telling him as President of the Council to convene it next day. Somebody also telephoned Professor Jeze about 2 a. m. to come around and get the League formula. It provides that the totally deadlocked Italo-Ethiopian conciliation commission shall again discuss whether Italians or Ethiopians fired the first shots of the Ualual Incident (TIME, Dec. 24), but shall not discuss the real issue of whether Ualual is in Italian Somaliland, as Italians claim, or in Ethiopia, as Ethiopians maintain. While this is going on Italy, France and Britain will negotiate about Ethiopia among themselves and totally outside the League of Nations on the basis of their Treaty of 1906, unrecognized by Ethiopia and said to provide for the division of Ethiopia into “zones of influence” among Britain, France and Italy.

When the League Council finally met to rubber stamp this formula, Ethiopia’s Professor Jeze made his only score for the week. He glared at President Litvinoff and hissed: “You offer us the choice between suicide and assassination. Well, we prefer assassination!”