Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [73]
The Belgians were less easily ignored. On May 2, they complained to the Council of Four that they were being left out and put in a demand for part of German East Africa. “A most impudent claim,” said Lloyd George. “At a time when the British Empire had millions of soldiers fighting for Belgium, a few black troops had been sent into German East Africa.” Lloyd George was being unfair. Congolese troops under Belgian command had played an important part in pushing the Germans back in East Africa. At the end of the war, Belgian forces occupied about a third of the country. The Belgian government had no interest in keeping this; it intended to use East Africa to bargain for Portuguese territory along the Atlantic. The British, who were unable to persuade the Portuguese to play along, found themselves in an awkward position. Belgium would not give up its gains without something in return. Unfortunately, that occupied territory included what looked like the best possible route for the north–south railway linking the Cape to Cairo that British imperialists had so long dreamed of building. 22
On May 7, just after the Germans had received their terms, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and Orlando met in a room at Versailles and agreed on the final distribution of mandates over the former German colonies. (They still were haggling over the wreckage of the Ottoman empire in the Middle East.) When word leaked out into the press that Belgium was to get nothing, the Belgians, who were already feeling shortchanged, were enraged.23 In the end, Britain decided it could spare a bit of territory (and that there were other routes for the railway) and so two provinces next to the Congo’s borders were detached from East Africa. Belgium took the mandates for Rwanda and Burundi.
When the League finally came into existence in 1920, it confirmed what had long since been decided. In the interwar years, the mandates in Africa and the Pacific did look, as Hughes had predicted, very much like direct annexation. The mandatory powers sent in annual reports to the League but otherwise went their own way. At the end of the Second World War, the United Nations took over the mandates and, as the great colonial empires melted away, gave independence to the territories it had inherited— with one exception. South Africa refused to give up Southwest Africa. Only in 1990 did it welcome its new neighbor, the independent state of Namibia. In 1994, the last mandate ended when Palau, which had been placed under Japan in 1919 and then under the United States after 1945, became independent. The 999-year leases had run out ahead of their time.
PART THREE
THE BALKANS AGAIN
9
Yugoslavia
WHILE THE GREAT POWERS had been preoccupied with the League, the smaller powers had been busy polishing up their demands. On the evening of February 17, 1919, a telephone call came to the Hôtel de Beau-Site, near the Etoile. Would the delegation of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes please be ready to attend the Supreme Council the following afternoon? This sudden and typically capricious attention from the powers came as something of a relief. The delegation had been in Paris since the beginning of January, but its leaders had only appeared once before the council, on January 31, to counter Rumanian claims to the whole of the rich Banat, which lay between their two countries.
The H