Evening Post. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1934. A RELUCTANT DESPOT

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 89, 12 October 1934, Page 8

Evening Post. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1934. A RELUCTANT DESPOT

According to Miss M. E. Durham, Avho is an exceptionally welkinformed, though by no means unbiased, .authority on Balkan politics, the crime of June 28, 1914, has a much closer relation to the crime of October 9, 1935, than the general parallelism which has been in everybody's mind during the last two days. Speaking.at the Royal Institute of International Affairs on December 3, 1931, in the discussion of an address delivered by Professor R. W. SetonWatson on "The Yugoslav Dictatorship," she said:

Yugoslavia was founded on crime. The Sarajevo crime was formerly believed to be the work of a few students, but the published reminiscences of members of the "Black Hand" and otliors and the official report of the Salonika trial now proved that Belgrado had been behind it. Those who had lived up-country in the Balkans knew that Alexander Obrenovitch was, murdered with the object of creating Great Serbia, and one of the most important men concerned in that murder—General Zhivkoviteh, the man who opeiW the palnce gates —was now Prime Minister of Yugoslav)!!. Why had not Great Britain broken off relations with a land thus governed by a murderer?

The murder of Alexander, the King of-Serbia, took place on June 10, 1903, under peculiarly revolting circumstances, but the fact that General Zhivkovitch's name was not in the list of persons whose removal from office was demanded by the British Government as a condition of restoring diplomatic relations with Serbia supplied Professor Seton-Watson with a conclusive answer to the charge that Jugoslavia was "governed by a murderer." He also repudiated with emphasis Miss Durham's reference to the "vices" of the late King. .

The allegations against King Alexander ebuld not bo too strongly rebutted, lie said. The King was a man of the highest character and courage, unhappily committed to theories of government which conflicted with the trend of his age and the sentiments of his people.

One might even doubt whether Alexander had any theories of government at all. His extraordinarily active and busy life, crowded at first with the cares and perils of war and afterwards with the hardly less perilous responsibilities of Balkan politics, had certainly left him little time for study. But, whatever may have been the motives that made him a dictator, nobody suggests that ambition was one of them, that he had anything but the interests of his country in view when he became an autocrat, that he had since been tempted to abuse his power for personal ends, or that his attempts to get rid of it were not "bona fide." Yet, though it may therefore be said that Alexander was a dictator in spite of himself, a dictator he remained to the end, and as such he was in conflict, though perhaps not quite to the full 100 per cent, that Professor SetonWatson suggests, "with the trend of his age and the sentiments of his people."

, Writing, in the "Fortnightly Review," February, 1933, on "A Dictatorship near its Crisis," Mr. Wilfrid'Hindle gave a vivid sketch of Alexander's early years.

Few reigning monarchs, he said, can have;,had Alexander's experience of life, and nqne has been brought nearer to : the sufferings of his people. Born in exile, he lived abroad until' the assassination of Alexander Obrenovitch brought his father to the throne. Made a man before his time, his first duty to. his country was to fight in the war against Turkey, and thereafter in the series of wara in which Serbia was engaged until she was overrun by the Austrian army. Regent at twenty-six, he bore the brunt of government in the worst years of the War. With his army lie took part in the murderous Albanian Retreat, and with it he remained, except for brief visits to London and Paris, throughout the Macedonian, campaign. A king without his kingdom, lie was for a long time also a king in poverty. And when he finally returned to an enlarged estate, it was also to a capital and countryside despoiled.

Such experiences might well, as Mr. Hindle says, have turned any man to an easy life, but the effect upon Alexander was to reinforce "a natural bent towards modest living and hard work." For some years after his return to Yugoslavia he lived in "a house much Jess costly than that of his Parliament." Both then and since He worked twelve hours a day, "relaxing only in an occasional game of chess." In war he had endeared himself to the soldiers by his personal attention to their, needs. In peace his devotion to duty was recognised by Serbs and Croats alike. But the ferocity of their mutual feuds was beyond his power to control. In less than ten years Yugoslavia had had four Parliaments, 20 Cabinets, and 130 Ministers, when on June 20, 1928, the assassination of several Croat Deputies, including their leader, Stefan Raditch, in the Skuptschina, provided a terrible climax. Yet even then Alexander hesitated, and he was blamed for his reluctance to take decisive action. At last the resignation of his fourth Cabinet on December 27 brought matters to a head. On January 6, 1929, by Royal Decree, he dissolved the Skuptschina, suspended the Constitution, and declared that in future the laws would be repealed or altered by Royal Decree alone.

The hour has come, he «aid, when

there can be no intermediary between

people and King. . . . It is my sacred duty to uphold the unity of the nation and of the State by all means, and .1 am resolved to fulfil this duty to the end without wavering. . . .

Wo shall have to seek new methods and tread new paths.

In order to conciliate the French, upon whom his country was and still is financially dependent, Alexander explained in the "Matin" a few days later that the deadlock of Parliament by "party hatreds had left him no choice except "either to take on myself the whole responsibility, or publicly .to confess myself incapable of saving my State from an impossible situation- bordering on anarchy."

But alas for the vanity of human wishes and for the hay that circumstances are apt to make of good intentions! It is impossible for the most benevolent of despots to govern a population of 14,000,000 with "no intermediary between people and King," especially when millions of them are divided by the savage animosities to which we have referred. The new methods and the new paths of which Alexander spoke have presented a painful resemblance to the old methods and the old paths made perfectly familiar by the despots of all ages and countries. In their application to the Croats the methods of suppression appear to have inflamed their passions to a fiercer heat than ever. For that reason anything more inept than the remark attributed yesterday to Yugoslav circles at Geneva by the "Daily Mail's" Geneva correspondent could not well be imagined:

c Tho nationality of the murderer is unlikely to cause trouble, because he was a Croat, one of King Alexander's own subjects.

One of the millions of Alexander's subjects who hated him like poison, and will be glad to pass it on to little Peter II! The magnificent service which Alexander had rendered to his country and to Europe by his foreign policy had a serious set-off in "the impossible situation bordering on anarchy," which his domestic policy has failed to cure and may possibly have aggravated.