Poland began a reign of terror in Eastern Galicia, suspending the Diet and Provincial Executive on January 30, closing Ukrainian schools, suppressing Ukrainian newspapers, and conscripting Ukrainians by force into the Polish army. When the time came for elections to the Polish Diet, the army was used at the polls to prevent the people from returning Ukrainian deputies. The brutality of the Polish army and the methods of the Polish Government in Eastern Galicia are as bad as anything the Germans and Russians have ever done. This is a strong statement, but it is based upon unimpeachable testimony. I have only recently heard accounts of punitive expeditions to the villages in the Przemysl district that might have been written about Europeans in central Africa. At Przemysl the Ukrainian recruits marched handcuffed through the streets singing patriotic songs. This is how Poland is raising her armies!
Notwithstanding the determination of the Eastern Galicians to have nothing to do with their age-old enemies, on March 16, 1923, the Council of Ambassadors at Paris allotted full sovereignty over Eastern Galicia to Poland. Former Secretary Colby was in Paris, retained by the Ukrainians to plead their cause. But he was refused a hearing. The Ukrainians were ignored. The decision was made solely at the suggestion of France, who had received from Poland control of 50 per cent of the oil-wells and 75 per cent of the refining factories in Eastern Galicia as security for a loan of 400,000,000 francs for military purposes. As a last resort, the Ukrainians requested that the status of their country be referred to the League of Nations or the Hague tribunal. As they did not have the backing of a great power, as the Poles had, the request was ignored. This settlement of the Eastern Galician question creates a large and dangerous Alsace-Lorraine in eastern Europe. None who knows local conditions doubts that Ukrainia will eventually intervene on behalf of her “oppressed brethren,” with the backing of Russia.[11]
Poland had allowed her insatiable territorial greed to create for her another danger on the East as great as that of Eastern Galicia. We have read in another chapter how General Zeligowski violated the armistice agreement arranged between Poland and Lithuania by the intermediary of the League of Nations. Zeligowski, following the successful example of d’Annunzio, seized Vilna, capital of Lithuania. When the Lithuanian Government protested to the League of Nations, the Polish Government answered that Zeligowski had acted on his own initiative, and that Poland was not responsible for him. But Warsaw took full advantage of the breach of faith, and, again with French backing, manœuvered diplomatically so as to secure a decision of the Conference of Ambassadors, on March 15, 1923, arbitrarily dividing Lithuania in two. The Vilna district contains a mixed population, with White Russians predominating. But there are more Lithuanians than Poles, and Vilna is the historic capital of Lithuania. The decision of the ambassadors, after the League of Nations had failed to settle the question, consecrates Zeligowski’s _coup de force_. The Lithuanians have officially declared that they will not acquiesce in the settlement, and they warn the Entente Powers that “such a wrong done to the most powerful instincts of racial self-preservation may precipitate untoward events.” The reply of the Entente Powers was to give the Lithuanians authority to inflict a wrong upon the Germans at Memel such as the Poles inflicted upon them at Vilna! The Moscow Soviet, speaking for once in the name of all Russia irrespective of party, immediately warned London and Paris that the Occidental powers “are responsible for prejudice to Russian interests through decisions adopted by them without the participation of Russia and her Allies.”
