lavs, at enormous sacrifices, to sign the
Treaty of Rapallo; they are, therefore, morally obliged to see that it
is executed. For too many months the Italians were saying that they
would carry out their part of it and leave the third zone in Dalmatia if
the Yugoslavs would agree to a few more concessions, commercial and
territorial, that were not in the Treaty. During the Genoa Conference in
the spring of 1922 the Italian authorities confessed to the Yugoslav
delegates that their hands were bound by the fascisti. These elements
would certainly object to the execution of that part of the Treaty of
Rapallo which refers to the port of Baro[vs]. Accurately speaking, the
arrangements with regard to Baro[vs] are embodied in a letter from Count
Sforza, the then Foreign Secretary, and are added to the Treaty as an
appendix. Both were signed on the same day, and apparently this plan of
an appendix was adopted on account of the fascisti. Yet if Count Sforza
had not signed that letter it is safe to say that the Yugoslavs would
not have signed the main body of a Treaty which to them was the reverse
of favourable. And at Genoa the Italians started haggling about a strip
of land near Baro[vs], in the hope that some success would stay the zeal
of the fascisti. Furthermore they pleaded that Zadar could not live if
Yugoslavia did not, in addition to supplying it with water, give it
railway communication with the interior. The Yugoslavs were thus invited
to construct at great expense a railway to a foreign town which their
own [vS]ibenik and other Adriatic towns did not possess. This,
naturally, they refused to undertake, as also to agree to the Italian
suggestion that a free zone of some twenty kilometres should be
instituted at the back of Zadar. One might safely say that the Italian
agents in this region would not have confined themselves to salutary
measures for the welfare of the town. It is stated in the Treaty of
Rapallo that in case of disagreement either party could invoke an
arbitrator, and the Yugoslavs, who happen now to be the weaker party,
have been contemplating application to the League of Nations. Well, in
Genoa it was proposed by Italy that Yugoslavia should renounce the
clause which deals with an eventual arbitration. If you make a large
number of demands--never mind that they should be in opposition to a
Treaty you have signed--then you may gain a few of them--and Italy was
hoping that the Free State would repay the cos