Europe

ON THE WORLD TO DAY

THE political pot in Holland has begun to boil because of one hot issue raised before the UNO meeting in London. The cause is the dispute unleashed by the Indonesian rebellion. Dutch imperial policy and the whole political setup of the Netherlands may undergo drastic liberalization as a result, to provide better opportunity for the public will to express itself in the affairs of government.

Since liberation, according to a writer in the Knickerbocker Weekly, the pre-war Assembly has been functioning in a parliamentary role, dominated by ultraconservative elements. Commanding a majority in the Assembly, these exponents of ruthless colonial exploitation are fighting to preserve unchanged the pre-war imperial policies. Their attitude is a basic factor in the dissensions between The Hague and its colonial experts in the East Indies. The object of the ultra-conservatives is to nullify the spirit and letter of Queen Wilhelmina’s proposed colonial “new deal,” by eliminating all reasonable time limits within which its pledges might begin to operate fully.

The Dutch Cabinet includes able spokesmen for a progressive policy. Yet it finds itself dangerously crippled by the conservative majority in the Assembly. Though British pressure is producing some concessions from this political bloc (because of aroused public opinion in England which views Britain’s role in Java with distaste), the issue is by no means settled. All decisions made by Dutch officials in Indonesia, in seeking a compromise settlement there, must still run the gantlet of the obstructionist clique at The Hague, who include sturdy champions of the oil, rubber, and tin cartels.

Denunciation of Holland’s reactionary colonial policy by the Dutch clergy adds powerful support to the clamor for reform. The government’s adherence to a cumbersome system of proportional representation, the delays in compiling voting registers, the postponement of elections resulting from this maneuver, irk champions of a new social and political policy. The Calvinist and Liberal Parties, which comprise the hard core of reaction, face a brusque challenge not only from the political groups inheriting the program of the Resistance, but from important minority elements within their own ranks.

How fast the Dutch rebuild

One reason for the delay of the political thaw in Holland is the intense preoccupation of the Dutch people with rebuilding their ruined country. A program calling for construction of 60,000 new homes has been drawn up. Work on the first 10,000 of these — scheduled for completion this year — is under way. About 400 million dollars has been made available by the government for repair of another 300,000 damaged dwellings. Master plans for the renovation of the great center of Rotterdam are complete, and work is beginning there also. This undertaking will cost between 570 million and 760 million dollars.

The trackage of the entire Dutch railway system has been restored, and more than 80 per cent is fit for passenger traffic. Temporary structures now replace the important railway bridges destroyed by the war. Tremendous effort is being made to reconstitute the Dutch dairy industries and agriculture. Some 15,000 cattle have been imported to replenish depleted herds. Of the thousands of acres of rich agricultural land flooded by the Nazis, only two sizable plots remained under water by January 1. The others have been drained and are being treated intensively for soil restoration.

Credits negotiated in Canada are being supplemented by negotiations for a fifty-million-dollar credit in Switzerland. The Dutch hope to export their surplus bulbs, vegetables, seed, and chemical products in payment for quantities of machinery, electrical equipment, locomotives, and other badly needed capital and goods. Meantime, with British support, the Netherlands government is scouring Europe and the Americas to bring back refugee diamond workers and restore Holland as the world’s diamond market.

Tension in Greece

Greece stumbles through the persisting fury of factional war toward an election meager of promise. Undoubtedly the presence of hundreds of British, American, and French “observers throughout the country will help to hold violence to a minimum on election day, March 31. That they can ensure a fair and free election is exceedingly doubtful.

The difficulties they face are endemic to Greek politics. They are made worse by the almost unbelievable bitterness which divides the people, sets neighbor against neighbor, and even divides families into feuding partisans. More than 600 Greek Republicans have been slain by Royalist supporters of King George II since the signing of the Varkiza agreement less than a year ago. Approximately 17,000 supporters of a republic were being held in jail by the government as the New Year began. Some 150,000 others are in hiding in the mountains for fear of their lives, or have gone underground in the cities and larger towns. How many Royalists have been killed in the past year is a moot question. There is no doubt that the number is very large.

This is scarcely an auspicious setting for the first general election Greece has had in ten years. The election lists have been challenged by all the parties of the moderate center and left. Despite the fact that more than a million Greeks have died from war, famine, or disease since the onset of the war, and though scores of thousands are in prison or fugitives in their own country today, the registers show a heavy increase in enrollment above all previous figures.

The padded voting lists are even more amazing in view of the complaint by the Minister of the Interior concerning the public boycott on registration. He declared that nearly 60 per cent of Greek voters were refusing to register. Most of this abstention is the result of political terrorism.

As the sparring match between Great Britain and Russia discloses, one of the chief reasons for the calamitous condition of Greece is her unfortunate geographical position. The hard facts of position transform her into a Balkan bridgehead for Great Britain and an outpost protecting the British Empire’s Mediterranean communications. The Slav states along her northern borders — Yugoslavia and Bulgaria — dramatize the Russian sphere of influence there. No liberated nation in Europe deserves better of her allies. None has proved more demonstrably her right to set her own house in order her own way. None is more completely victimized by the circumstances of power politics.

British interest in Greece

British interest in Greece is illustrated by the presence there of a British army, largely composed of Indian Sikhs, under General Scobie. The Greek partisan forces, which had cleared the country of Germans three days before the British landed, welcomed them with songs, the populace strewed their path with flowers. Now they are denounced by all parties.

The Churchill policy was based on determination to restore an unwanted king and to make Greece completely manageable from London and Cairo. The rise of the Royalists to power and influence was accompanied by the crushing of the EAM, which formed the Greek army of liberation. This action stoked the fires of hat red and elicited reprisals. Greek Communists, who made up about a fifth ot the EAM, and Greek moderates, Republicans, Democrats, and Liberals, who comprised most of the remainder, went to war against, the monarchists, the Greek fascists, and the professional militarists who supported them.

The forces of the Right, who enjoy the support of British arms, believe with profound conviction that they are battling to save Greece from Communism. Their opponents, whether Communists, Liberals, or other supporters of Republican aspirations, believe just as deeply that they are fighting to save Greece from dictatorship by a rightist reaction.

The new British loan to Greece gives promise of putting an end to the worst inflation experienced by any country on the European continent. Cancellation of the Greek debt to Britain for war aid lifts another backbreaking burden. Finally, Britain’s bold postponement until 1948 of the plebiscite on the form of the government puts off the decision on the monarchy.

Two thirds of all the labor in the country is unemployed. The industrial index stands at 20. Under the necessity of paying close to 30 per cent of its entire annual income to British investors, with 75 per cent of its building craftsmen idle and 90,000 homes in ruins, denuded of raw materials and deprived of essential economic imports, strangled in billows of worthless drachmas, shaken by internecine political feuds and the supervening contest of the Great Powers, Greece surveys a hollow victory.

The head of the Palestine Arabs

One of the most interested absentees from the first meeting of the United Nations occupies a closely guarded chateau on the outskirts of Paris. Repeatedly at London, spokesmen for the seven Arab states in the Middle East have shown their solidarity, vis-avis Britain, France, Russia, the United States, and other important powers. Their accomplishments foreshadow new challenges. The Arab prisoner guarded by the French expects, eventually, to embody one of these challenges in his own person. He is Haj Amin el Husseini, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, self-styled descendant of the Prophet, and would-be spiritual leader of the Moslem Arab world.

Tall, slim, red-bearded, and blue-eyed, this darkskinned man in his early fifties has been probably the most dangerous opponent of the authority of France and Britain in the Middle East during the past quarter of a century — ever since he got himself named spiritual head of the Palestinian Arabs back in 1921.

Exiled by the British in 1937 after he had engineered the bloody riots of that year in Palestine, he fled successively from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq. There, in 1941, he became one of the movers of the revolt which came perilously close to opening a highway for Hitler into India. With a price on his head, Amin el Husseini next escaped to Rome and then to Berlin. From these cities, throughout the struggle with the Axis he preached a holy war to the Arab world.

Husseini’s importance is indicated not alone by the elaborate silence of British and French diplomacy. It is emphasized by reports that the Arab League is now beginning to move for his exoneration and release from custody. If the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is liberated, there is trouble ahead for all colonial powers in Africa and the Middle East. If he is not, the refusal may further sharpen Arab nationalism.

Foster child of British policy

The Arab League was originally a foster child of British policy, which still seeks to employ it for imperial purposes. The aim was to set up a bloc of Arab states in the Middle East as a safeguard against Russian pressure from the north. Moreover the British, and since the war the Americans, have recognized the importance of holding the support of the Arab rulers, for economic reasons, in the oil-rich Middle East.

Ibn Saud, one of the Arab League’s key directors, has been a recipient of British subsidies for many years. He thrived on them during the war, when they helped to keep Iraquian rebels and the rest of the Arabs divided. With the royalties he receives from exploitation of oil fields in his kingdom, and with his other royal revenues, these subsidies make Ibn Saud one of the richest kings in the world.

According to an official report issued at London, he was paid in the form of “assistance to Saudi Arabia” (meaning himself) 596,582 pounds sterling in 1940, 1,311,375 pounds sterling in 1941, 3,381,188 pounds sterling in 1942, when Arab flirtations with the Nazis were causing endless trouble in Iraq, and 3,367,189 pounds sterling in 1943, when Syrian and Iraquian dissent was finally smothered. To this handsome “assistance” in hard cash, which adds up to about 35 million dollars, should be added 2 million dollars in supplies and 1.5 million dollars in Lend-Lease, between 1943 and 1945.

Ibn Saud’s business acumen is disclosed by the apportionment of the costs for the League’s activities. Egypt pays 42 per cent, Iraq pays 21 per cent, Syria 16, and tiny Lebanon 6. But the multimillionaire King of Arabia, the King of Trans-Jordan, and the Imam of Yemen pay, all together, only 14 per cent.

A league of rulers

The League is one of rulers rather than of peoples, for the Arab masses have little to say about their government in most Arab states. Though presiding over the hopes of countries harboring fifty million Arabs and aspiring to extend its sway to encompass all Arab North Africa and re-establish the empire of the Middle Ages, the League is a compact and closely held organization. It is tied tightly to the interests of the great Arabian landowners. Accordingly its directors are opposed to any fundamental reforms, social or economic.

This fact plays an important part in British policy in the Middle East and explains the firmly held view of the Colonial Office that industrialization and economic development in the region on any scale promising to raise living standards for the masses would be ruinous to imperial interest. Only in Egypt, where the League recently convened, are there signs of ferment at the bottom of society, demonstrations for social reform, demands for a living wage. Throughout most of the lands associated by their rulers under the League’s banners, the poverty and misery of the people are almost incredible.

Rulers reluctant to yield to progress often find it convenient to focus attention on a substitute for reform. Nationalism is made to order for this purpose. It is not. strange, accordingly, to find the League pressing its claims on all fronts. The more London and Cairo yield to the League, the stronger becomes its appetite. Trusteeship for the League over Italian colonies in Africa is one objective sought. Pressures growing on French Africa suggest others. A customs union, designed to knit the seven member states more closely together in the economic field, and an ambitious program for cementing cultural ties promise to strengthen the organization further.

Its chief weaknesses are two: the tendency toward feud among Arab rulers is an old one and difficult to eradicate; the revolutionary awakening which is stirring Asia to social and economic reform is moving out of China across India into the Middle East.