THE CORFU CHANNEL CASE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31083, 11 June 1966, Page 4

THE CORFU CHANNEL CASE

The Eagle Spreads His Claws. By Leslie Gardiner. Blackwood. 277 pp. Index.

On May 15, 1946, the British cruisers Orion and Superb entered the Corfu Channel, between the Greek island of Corfu and the mainland of Albania. These were the first warships to pass the narrow channel after the end of the Second World War. Without warning Albanian shore batteries opened fire on the British ships. This was the real beginning of the Corfu incident and, in itself, it caused relatively little excitement in the rest of the world since no real damage was done. Reaction ranged from shocked amusement at so little a country trying to get tough with so powerful a nation to . cartooning along the lines of an opera-buffe republic going in for a definite line in Ruritanian politics. Albania’s declaration of the Corfu Channel as territorial waters caused somewhat greater concern. But the “incident” only became really

serious on October 22 of the same year when four British warships, the Mauritius, the Leander, the Saumarez and the Volage put out from Corfu harbour into the channel. Within an hour of leaving Corfu the Saumarez was mined and shortly afterwards the Volage suffered a similar fate, resulting in the heaviest naval casualty list since the war.

Leslie Gardiner, himself an ex-Royal Navy man, has, in this book recorded the history of the Corfu Channel case, the subsequent wrangling in the United Nations (the first veto invoked in the United Nations was over this affair) and the final protracted trial in the International Court at The Hague. In the account the author includes hitherto undisclosed information from behind the scenes on both sides and as well illustrates very clearly the grave deficiencies of international justice.

The Eagle of the title is the emblem of Albania and, perhaps of wider importance than the Corfu incident, the book tells us a great deal of the recent history of Albania and in particular its relations with the West since 1945. The smallest and least known of the Balkan states, Albania was for centuries a captive Eagle but since 1945 and her adoption of communism she has proved a most unpredictable Eagle both to the Communist as well as to the nonCommunist worlds. Her relations with Tito’s Jugoslavia and. incidentally, the latter’s involvement in the Corfu incident, described at length by the author throw some light on Albania’s steadfast refusal to follow the Moscow line. Few readers will probably realise just how disproportionate is Albania’s vociferous championship of Peking in relation to her size. This is a book well worth reading.