Rearmament Conference

Adept at speaking French, behaving with French politeness and outdoing even French diplomacy when it comes to haggling around a green table are the statesmen of Turkey, first of countries downed in the War to arise under a Dictator. Last week with exquisite politeness Dictator President El Ghazi ("The Victorious One") Kamal Atatuerk ("Father of the Turks'') called at Montreux, Switzerland a conference at which the Great Powers could agree to his tearing up the Treaty of Lausanne, under which Turkey is forbidden to fortify the Dardanelles. This the Great Powers were delighted to do last week. They were most grateful that Dictator Kamal Atatuerk had not smacked them in the face by announcing that he had fortified the Dardanelles whether they liked it or not, as Adolf Hitler brashly militarized the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. What made Kamal Atatuerk's action the pink of Turkish politeness was that Turkey's Dictator is suspected of having almost completed secret fortification of the Dardanelles, might easily have been crude about it.

At Montreux, only a few miles up the Lake of Geneva from the sparkling new League of Nations buildings, the Conference opened last week with extreme Swiss police precautions against assassination of Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, onetime traveling salesman, and Turkish Foreign Minister Dr. Tewfik Rushtu Aras. onetime male midwife. From London came the 7th Earl Stanhope, product of Eton, Oxford and the Grenadier Guards. He was sent to capitulate to Turkey at Montreux because British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, has the job of capitulating to Italy down the lake in Geneva this week (see p. 18). At the opening session in Montreux, high praise for Turkey's considerate action in calling the Conference at all was voiced by Britain, France. Russia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Greece and Bulgaria. The only delegate who did not chime in eulogy was Japan's hard-boiled Naotake Sato.

Everyone, including Mr. Sato, agreed that of course the Lausanne Treaty is to be torn up. Elected chairman of the Conference was Stanley Melbourne Bruce, one of the gallant Australians whom the Turks trounced at Gallipoli. Handsome Mr. Bruce, now High Commissioner of Australia in London, was gravely wounded during the slaughter of his countrymen by the Turks. Last week he asked Dr. Aras to please be considerate about the graves of Australian War dead in excavating for Dardanelles fortifications. This the swarthy, squint-eyed little Turk politely promised, patting the stalwart, pink-cheeked Australian reassuringly on the back.

Ironically at this rearmament Conference, the delegates elected as their secretary obliging A. M. Agnidis of Greece, chief of the League of Nations Disarmament Section. "His leaving Disarmament for Rearmament is just one of those little contradictions which lend charm to life.'' drawled lanky, Mongol-featured Rumanian Foreign Minister Nicholas Titulescu, provoking the Conference's first laugh. Everyone else was willing to have Conference sessions open to the public, but the 7th Earl Stanhope successfully demanded that they should be secret.

Leaks began at once. Turkey asked the right not only to fortify the Dardanelles but virtually to control passage of the straits, whether by sea or air. Russia, having France on her side, hammered demands that Black Sea countries (like Russia) should have unrestricted entrance and egress, while nonBlack Sea countries should have their war boats virtually excluded. A dextrous word wangler, Comrade Litvinoff favored the Conference with his explanation of why the Red Navy, although "wholly not aggressive," must be able to rush out of its Black Sea at any moment. The reason is, according to the Soviet Foreign Minister, that units of the Bolshevik fleet have to make "courtesy visits" constantly to other Russian ports. Comrade Litvinoff did not think foreign warships could make courtesy visits to Black Sea ports without incurring suspicion that their purpose was "aggressive." To Turkish proposals that the straits be closed to all submarines, Orator Litvinoff replied that Soviet submarines must have the right to pass, others might perhaps be excluded, and that aircraft carriers of the nonBlack Sea powers should certainly be barred.

To this Britain & Japan opposed shoulder-to-shoulder demands that "equal rights of passage in either direction should exist for all nations." Stanhope and Litvinoff were soon quarreling and Japan's dry Mr. Sato said: "Even if the British recede from the Anglo-Japanese position, Japan will not recede."

At this someone had the happy thought of inducing the Montreux Conference to adjourn until next month, after the League meetings, and the 7th Earl Stanhope sped from Montreux to Geneva to tell "Tony" Eden how things stood. Dictator Benito Mussolini long since refused to send an Italian delegate to Montreux "until after sanctions are lifted." Last week the Italian Press, pointing out that Italian commercial tonnage is the heaviest through the straits, declared that obviously no solution at Montreux not approved by Italy could stand. At this the Turkish Press of Dictator Kamal Atatuerk exclaimed what a good thing it had been last week to adjourn the Montreux Conference. Correspondents predicted that on meeting again it will probably end, after a free-for-all, in a stalemate, with Dictator Kamal Atatuerk in any case maintaining Turkey's iron grip on the straits, getting credit for having been most polite.

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