Greece refuses consent to the occupation of Corfu

The British chronology of the war records under 13 January 1916 that the Greek government refused its consent to the occupation of Corfu. On that day, 31 December 1915 by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Stefanos Skouloudis, sent a note to the ministers of the Entente powers in Athens. Three days earlier they had informed him that the remnants of the Serbian army would be transported to the island, and on 11 January the French had landed there. The Athens newspapers had already been writing that the cabinet was preparing a protest sharper than all the previous ones.

The arguments of Athens

According to reports from Athens relayed by the Paris press, the Greek government reproached the Allies above all for landing soldiers on the island before its reply to the notification had arrived. The Allies answered that they had not expected a reply to the notification, all the more so as they had given assurances in it that they had no intention of infringing Greek sovereignty over the island. Athens, however, held a weightier legal argument. In the Treaty of London of 29 March 1864, under which Greece received the Ionian Islands from Britain, Britain, France and Russia, with the consent of Austria and Prussia, declared that Corfu and Paxos would enjoy “perpetual neutrality”, and the King of Greece undertook to uphold it. The island had thus been occupied by one of the very powers that guaranteed that neutrality.

The British publicist George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to King Constantine, wrote after the war that the occupation of Corfu was a flagrant violation of treaties, and that the island’s neutrality had been guaranteed as firmly as that of Belgium. This gave the Central Powers an opportunity to accuse Britain and France of contempt for treaties whose sanctity they themselves had been proclaiming since 1914. Austria-Hungary did indeed protest on 17 January through the United States ambassador in Vienna, calling the occupation of the island a “flagrant violation” of the London treaties of 1863 and 1864.

The king speaks to the Americans

The Greek government, however, had nothing with which to back up its protest. The country depended on imports of food and coal, and the Entente had already shown once that it could turn off the tap. Five days after the note, on 18 January, King Constantine I summoned the correspondent of the American Associated Press agency in order to express, through the press of the United States, his indignation at the conduct of the Allies. He listed the Greek territories they had already occupied: Lemnos, Imbros, Mytilene, Kastellorizo, Corfu, and Salonika with Chalkidiki. “It is no use claiming that Greece’s neutrality was not guaranteed by the powers now violating it, as was the case with Belgium, for the neutrality of Corfu is guaranteed by Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia. And yet that has made no difference,” he said. He also asked why the Serbs had not been taken to Italy, likewise an ally of Serbia, and whether the Greeks had less reason to fear contagion than the Italians.

France replied semi-officially that it was the Germans who had first violated the island’s neutrality, because a network supplying their submarines operated off its shores, and that since Greece had not come to the aid of its ally despite the treaty, it should not refuse that ally shelter. The Entente took note of the Greek protest and did not change its plans. The first Serbs arrived on Corfu in mid-January, and as late as February Skouloudis was protesting in parliament against the occupation of the island. The inhabitants of Corfu, however, received the Serbs kindly, and a British correspondent wrote that almost all the islanders sympathised with the Entente.