Such Interesting People

Valona met Eton last week on the playing fields of Lake Success. The match was remarkable.

One protagonist was the Hon. Sir Alexander George Montagu Cadogan, K.C.B., younger son of the Fifth Earl Cadogan, educated at Eton and Oxford--a spare, spruce Foreign Office career man. The other was Hysni Kapo, one of Communism's new statesmen, a peasant's son from the tiny Albanian village of Terbac; he had gone through grammar school in Valona, worked as a male nurse in a hospital, risen to his present political eminence through his wartime exploits as guerrilla leader.

Cricket? Cadogan presented Britain's case against Albania with detailed dignity. On the early afternoon of Oct. 22, 1946, a British naval squadron "in normal passage formation" was steaming northward through the Corfu Straits. A west wind of 15 to 20 miles an hour was blowing. At 14:53, His Majesty's Destroyer Saumarez struck a mine and foundered. At 16:46, His Majesty's Destroyer Volage also struck a mine and lost her bow. Forty-two British sailors were killed, another 42 wounded. In the days of pomp, power and Palmerston, the Queen's Navy would have trained its adamantine guns on the Albanian coast while the Queen's Foreign Secretary sent a stiff note. But the present British Government merely protested patiently, asked the International Mine Clearance's Mediterranean Zone Board for permission to sweep the Straits, then took the whole business to U.N.

There had been 22 mines within 300 yards of the Albanian coast, reported Cadogan. All had been recently laid ("there was no rust or marine growth . . . the paint shone brightly in the sun"). The laying of the minefield, impossible without "knowledge or connivance" of Albanian authorities, was a "crime against humanity." Cadogan demanded that the Security Council establish Albania's guilt and instruct her to settle directly with Great Britain. Said Eton's ex-cricketer: "I trust the Council will not look at this case as an example of a large country trying to bully a small one."

Ghosts? Albania's Kapo rose, wearing a celluloid collar, his hair slicked down like a dancehall Romeo's. He had delayed the Council for two weeks by vanishing in Paris on his way from Albania, and blamed the delay on the "absence of normal means of transport." But U.N.'s best backstage theories (aside from some obvious, gayer hypotheses) claimed that he had his defense oration ghost-written in Paris. The speech did contain a kind of esoteric erudition rare in Valona: Kapo reeled off the names of 19th Century authorities on international law (who had once rendered opinions seemingly supporting Kapo's case), so that his argument ran something like this: I) Albania did not lay the mines; 2) cf. Hall, Hautefeuille, Klueber, Phillimore & Wheaton; 3) even if Albania had laid the mines, it would have been all right, because Britain was reactionary and had entered Albanian waters with hostile intentions; 4) cf. Bluntschli, Bonfils, Lawrence, Oppenheim, Pradier-Fodere, Rivier & Westlake.

Cadogan gleefully rose to the rebuttal. His own charges, he said, had contained one gap: the Albanian motive. "Now that gap has most conveniently been filled by the Albanian representative. . . . Albania objects to the passage of our ships. . . . But now look, mines conveniently and mysteriously appear ... to give effect to [Albania's] policy. . . ." The point was telling; Russia's Andrei Gromyko found it necessary to go to bat for Albania (a Soviet satellite's satellite). The exchange was typical of the state of U.N. in 1947:

Gromyko: It is not the first time that . . . Sir Alexander Cadogan has expressed dissatisfaction at something that does not please him. It seems to me, however, he has proved his own inconsistency.

Cadogan: The only contradiction, and one that often occurs, is between what I said and what the Soviet representative said I said.

Gromyko: I have no objection to hearing such rectification of my remarks as Gospodin Cadogan may wish to make.

Cadogan: I did not say I was not pleased with [Kapo's] speech.

Gromyko: I did not quote Gospodin Cadogan. I said it was obvious that he was not satisfied with the speech. . . .

Action was further delayed when the Councilmen refused to go to work in the snowstorm that hit New York last week (Kapo, repentant of his former unpunctuality, was the only participant in the case who appeared at Lake Success). At week's end they met again, argued for four hours, adjourned without decision.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.