PROSPECTS FOR AUSTRIA

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25307, 6 October 1947, Page 7

PROSPECTS FOR AUSTRIA

TREATY COMMISSION DISAGREEMENT j

(Rec. 8 p.m.) VIENNA, October 3. Austria has the gloomy prospect <?t continued political and economic uncertainty. The Austrian Treaty Commission’s meeting yesterday was the last for discussion of the disputed clauses of the draft treaty. The next few days will be spent in writing a report to the Foreign Ministers of the Big Four, which will reveal the full extent of the disagreement. . The commission’s 79 sessions have failed to produce agreement on 19 clauses. The two most important are Article 35, dealing with the disposal of German assets, and Article 5, which in the British-American-French draft confirms the Austrian frontiers of 1938. while Russia still supports Jugoslavia’s territorial claims. To deliver Austria to the dictator- > ship of a minority would be one of the most certain causes of a new war, said the Austrian Foreign Minister (Dr. Gruber) writing in the People’s Party newspaper, “Tageszeitung.” Communist propaganda would not be so dangerous if Austria lay on the Bay of Biscay or the English Channel, but “her situation as a democratic State surrounded by States in which Communism rules or is on the way to power is far too delicate for us to be neglectful,”' he said. “It is not the Austrian Communist Party’s ’size which causes us uneasiness, but the shadow of a greater Power?] • The Communist newspaper, “Volkes Stimme,” commenting, said: “No peasant will get a single hobnail because Dr. Gruber has the courage to rage and rant against Russia and Communism.”