The Corfu incident was an event that took place from August to September 1923. On August 27, an Italian general Enrico Tellini and his four staff members were assassinated at the Greek-Albanian frontier while attempting to delimit the frontier border. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent a harsh ultimatum to Greece that demanded the Greek government to pay reparation for the casualties and execute the assassins that were unknown and were unable to locate, but the Greek government failed to accomplish the two demands, especially the second one. Mussolini used Greek's failure to accomplish his demands as a pretext and sent Italian navies to invade and conquer Corfu, an island betw ...view middle of the document...
According to many sources, the reason Italy withdrew their forces from Corfu was because they were under great pressure from many powers including the League of Nations, but the pressure was applied to Italy after Greece apologized and paid their reparations to them, all the League did before was giving Italy pointless condemns. The situation described above requires comparison with the Bulgaria incident in 1925; a Greek captain and two Greek soldiers were murdered in Bulgaria, the Greek dictator Theodoros Pangalos used the incident as an excuse to invade the Bulgarian land, but they were forced to halt their action and pay reparation for the harms of the invasion by the League of Nations, the Bulgarians did the same act as the Greeks did two years ago when they appealed the League, and there was no bribing involved in this incident. The Bulgarian incident is an example of the League's method of dealing with a weak country or a country that is not really significant for them; the League did not use their power of condemnation on the Greeks when they were attacking Bulgaria- great pressure was applied to the Greeks directly without Bulgaria sacrificing in any form (Greece sacrificed pride and wealth when they appealed the League).The Corfu incident was the first incident that revealed the significant weakness of the League of Nations, it was the start of a series of invasion and conquering committed by the Fascist countries during 1920~1939.After the partially successful invasion in Corfu, Italy attempted to expand its land vigorously; they officially took control of a free port named Fiume by signing a legal treaty with Yugoslavia in 1924, they invaded and conquered an African country named Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) from 1935~1936, then they annexed Albania in 1939. During the expansion of Italian land, the League of Nation's primary, non-Fascist powers Britain and France did not perform any attempts to stop Mussolini, they even provided assistance to Italy during the invasion on Abyssinia by allowing Italy to pass through the Sues canal without any interference and secretly signing the Hoare-Laval pact with Italy which gave them the permission to keep 60% of Abyssinia's land.The reactions of the League of Nations towards Italy's aggressive actions greatly influenced the other powerful Fascist countries- Germany and Japan. The Manchuria incident best describes how Japan was influenced by Italy's situations; Japan claimed that the Chinese blew up their railway in south Manchuria and used the claim as an excuse to invade the innocent land on September 18, 1931(the railway was actually destroyed by the Japanese themselves with a well-planned scheme). After the complete conquer of Manchuria in February 1932, the League of Nations sent a group of experts to investigate the situation, the crew arrived Manchuria in September 1932 and suggested that it was Japan's foul; the League then condemned Japan to depart from Manchuria but ended up being igno...
