Office of the Historian

C.P.(Gen)Doc.1.E.2.

Articles 3 and 4

undated

Substitute for these two Articles the following:

“The frontier between Italy and Yugoslavia shall be determined jointly by the Governments of the United States of America, France, the United Kingdom and the U.S.S.R., within a period of one year from the coming into force of the Treaty.

For this purpose, the Council of Foreign Ministers shall appoint a fresh Committee of Experts for the study of the question. This Committee should take into consideration not only ethnic, geographical and economic factors, but also the possibility of creating a free territory, capable of independent existence, between Italy and Yugoslavia.

Until the Four Powers have taken a final decision, the existing military occupation shall be maintained up to the so-called “Morgan line”.

Justification

When the Council of Foreign Ministers decided in London, on 19th September 1945, to set up a Committee of Experts to report on a frontier line which should, generally speaking, follow the line of ethnic separation, the question of setting up a Free Territory of Trieste had not yet been mooted. It was only much later, after the Committee of Experts had presented its report, that the Four Ministers, by a decision taken on 3rd July last, agreed that the Free Territory of Trieste should be constituted. The whole aspect of the problem therefore changed enormously and the original plan should have been revised, all the more so as the creation of this Free Territory was almost exclusively at the expense of the territory attributed to Italy by the so-called “French line”, adopted as the line of demarcation between Italy and Yugoslavia.

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It should be noted that the French line itself was much less favourable to Italy than the lines proposed by Great Britain and the United States of America, and left a considerable portion of Western Istria on the Yugoslav side, including a number of towns and villages, where, as recognised by the Committee of Experts itself, the Italians represented “the majority, and in certain cases, almost the entire population”.