Belgrade.

October 30th, 1925.

Dear Lampson,

I cannot help thinking that the opportunity afforded by the meeting in Paris should not be lost to make some attempt to tackle the Macedonian question. I fully realise that anyone with long Balkan experience and knowledge of this apparently insoluble conundrum will smile at my temerity in making such a suggestion; but, as you well know, Macedonia is always at the bottom of all the trouble in this part of the world, when it is not Albania and we shall always have one incident after another any of which may bring any of these countries to the brink of war, until the Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation has been genuinely suppressed and the Bulgarian Government have been made to realise that they cannot resuscitate it under any other guise.

The Yugoslav Authorities are, I think, genuinely at their wits’ end as to how to cope with Comitadji activities and no doubt the only effective way to do so would be to deal with Kustendil, Jumaa and other Comitadji strongholds as the Greeks have with Petric.

One may say that Serbia should never have been given Macedonia and administers it badly, but she has been given it and we have got to make the best of it; but as long as the Macedonian Committee are free to carry on their intrigues and campaign of outrage and assassination with the connivance of Sofia we shall never have any genuine peace down here and it is useless to talk of a Locarno for the Balkans.

I would therefore urge, though I dare not put forward such a suggestion officially, that the Council should seriously consider the advisability of possibly sending a commission to Macedonia and Bulgaria with a view to determining what steps can and should be taken to suppress Comitadji activities and to prevent (in the event of the suppression of the Macedonian Committee being found possible) its secret resuscitation in any form by the Bulgarian Government who would no doubt, if forced to suppress the present organisation, absorb it or be absorbed by it.