FIGHTING FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 April 1943, Page 4

FIGHTING FRANCE

DEMAND FOR RECOGNITION BY ALLIES

STATED BY DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT.

ALLEGATION OF INVIDIOUS TREATMENT.

Pcrtinax has reviewed the North African situation in a dispatch from New York to “La Marseillaise,” the French weekly published in London. The pseudonym of PertiYiax hides one of the best known and ablest diplomatic correspondents of France, a man who has not only followed every international conference and every important meeting of the League of Nations since the end of the last war, but whose opinion undoubtedly carried the greatest weight among French people, among foreign journalists working in France, and among the chancelleries of the foreign powers everywhere. Nothing that he wrote during the interwar period was ever lightly passed over. From his exile in New York he writes on the African situation:—

“Months arc passing, and the paradoxical state of affairs in North Africa persists. Vast French territories are now at war against the Axis, territories capable of producing an army of several hundreds of thousands of men. And yet, among the United Nations who signed the pact of alliance of January 1, 1942, there exists no direct representation of French national interests.

“Mr Roosevelt and Mr Churchill have promised that the integrity of our country shall be respected. In order that this undertaking shall have all its practical value, it will have to be accompanied by protection of what remains of the national patrimony, represented by the embroyon of a French government. However, up to the present, this indispensable protective function has been tolerated only in a fragmentary manner by the United States as that function is exercised by local authorities.

“It comes to this, that at Washington no one is received to speak in the name simply of France, and the constitution of a government of North Africa further accentuates the fact that such a gap or hiatus is an incongruity. “In the capital of the United States the particular needs of North Africa, West Africa, can be made known, as can those of Equatorial Africa, the Camerocns, Madagascar, Syria, New Caledonia, the islands of Pacific. But no one is considered to be in a position to define the general interest, the permanent interest of France in such or such a conjuncture, or in regard to such or such a problem, susceptible nevertheless of having vital repercussions on the future of our country. Yet the French army that is fighting in Tunisia and the greater French army which will soon be raised, from Algiers to Casablanca, cannot be ever properly called the army of French Africa. An army cannot be based on one part of a nation: it comes necessarily out of the nation as a whole. The army of the Republic is one and indivisible, as is the Republic itself. To pretend that one has the co-opera-tion of any real French army and declare in the same breath that the entity, France, is incapable of expressing itself devolves into a statement in contradictory terms.” Pertinax points out somewhat bitterly that Czechoslovakia, of whose territory not an inch has been freed, has a government here in London and diplomatic representation in Washington. The same applies to Holland, Polland, Luxenbourg, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia, Belgium. But France has no such representation. The argument that Fighting France cannot speak for the whole nation is no more valid, he points out, than would be the argument that the governments of the other overrun countries cannot speak for their lands. Pertinax reveals that when the brother of General Eisenhower returned to America he spoke of the impatience of the population. This population, says the well known French writer, is the proletariat, naturally opposed to the small but powerful minority of land owners who found in the Vichy regime advantages they had never thought before they would be able to enjoy.