Oskar
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« on: February 03, 2012, 08:52:47 AM » |
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The Ethiopian people, to whom all assistance was refused, are climbing alone their path to calvary. No humiliation has been spared to the victim of aggression. All the resources of procedure have been tried with a view to excluding Ethiopia from the League of Nations, as the aggressor demands. Thus, for three years there has been before the world and before the League the problem of international order: Will law win the game as against force, or force as against law?
Ethiopia, the victim of an inexcusable aggression, has placed her confidence in the signature of the State Members of the League, although the support that was due to her was given only in a very incomplete measure. Since 1935 Ethiopia has with pain noted successive abandonments of signatures that had been appended to the Covenant.
Many powers threatened with aggression and feeling their weakness have abandoned Ethiopia. They have uttered the cry of panic and rout. Everyone for himself! In the vain hope of currying favour with the aggressor, they have regarded themselves as freed from the undertakings they had assumed for general security. Thus they have themselves overthrown all principles on which their very existence rests. They have torn up the treaties which ensured their own independence -- the treaties of non-aggression, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Pact of Paris. By what right will they themselves be able to invoke these undertakings if they regard as scraps of paper treaties they have signed?
Aggression have taken place in increasing number. The contagion has been propagated. Certain States are now engaged in full struggle, others are threatened. Fear reigns over the world. The present or forthcoming victims tremble for the future, and think they may improve their situation by flattering those whose aggression they dread. International morality has disappeared. The excuse of these weak people is their very weakness, the certainty that they would be abandoned as Ethiopia has been, and between two evils they have chosen the one which the fear of the aggressor leads them to consider the lesser. May God forgive them!
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It is disappointing to the Ethiopian people to observe the attitude of most powerful States in the world -- States that have always proclaimed their devotion to the Covenant, asserting their respect for the undertakings embodied in international treaties, and recalling the sanctity of international contracts as the basis of international morality.
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Did not the world hail as one of the most important marks of progress in international law, and as the most effective contribution the re-organization of peace between nations, the principle proclaimed a few years ago by the United States of America, namely the refusal to grant juridical recognition to the results of aggression?
As sovereign of the Ethiopian people, I invoke this principle, for it is My duty to defend the political independence of the Ethiopian people, the territorial integrity of Ethiopia and at the same time the life, the property and liberty of each of those individuals and each of those religious or civic institutions which make up the Ethiopian people.
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In order to break down the resistance of My people and its refusal to abandon that independence which it has enjoyed for more than thirty centuries, the Italian authorities are counting upon propaganda with the object of demoralizing the people, and in this they make great play with the abandonment of Ethiopia by the League of Nations.
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Ethiopia protests against all subtleties of procedure, the object of which would be to evade the rules of competence which are clearly written in the Covenant. As the delegate of Portugal said, nothing can be more repugnant and more hypocritical than the strangling of a nation by procedure. Will the League of Nations agree to any such things? This Covenant does not allow it.
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