Another Crisis Heard From

Stripped of their Habsburg empire after World War I, neutralized by the belated World War II peace treaty of 1955, the Austrians have become a country without a cause. They cannot align their armies with East or West, are forbidden to reunite with Germany. But they cannot be stopped from having patriotic ambitions.

Last week Austrian newspapers were filled with black crisis headlines--but not the crisis most of Europe was worrying about. The headlines said: BRENNER PASS

CLOSED, AUSTRIAN AMBASSADOR INSULTED, DEMONSTRATIONS IN INNSBRUCK.

The cause that meant so much to the Austrians last week was that of the "oppressed" majority in the South Tyrol. Forty years ago, in disregard of Woodrow Wilson's principle of ethnic frontiers, but honoring the secret 1915 promise that drew Italy into the war on the side of the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia), the victorious Allies awarded Italy the strategic Brenner Pass and a slice of Austrian Alpine territory the size of Connecticut leading up to it. The Italians changed the name of the region to Alto Adige, Italianized town and street names. Benito Mussolini's eager henchmen even substituted "Giovanni" for "Johannes" on tombstones.

Flood from the South. South Tyrol's 200,000 German-speaking people, subjects of the House of Habsburg for 555 years, never cottoned to the idea that they were Italian. At the end of World War II, the late Italian Premier Alcide de Gasperi* agreed with Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Gruber to give the region autonomy within the Italian Republic, to allow German in the schools and in government offices, if the Austrians would consider the issue closed.

But German-speaking South Tyroleans. who once had a10-to-1 majority in the area, accuse the Italians of flooding the region with Sicilian and Neapolitan "immigrants" in an attempt to create an Italian majority.

Last week, when Italy refused to allow two Austrian nationalists to enter the disputed region to help the German-speaking population celebrate the150th anniversary of a Tyrolean uprising against Napoleon, Austria called home its ambassador to Rome. Viennese newspapers said he had been "insulted" by being forced to cool his heels in an anteroom of the Italian Foreign Office. White-stockinged Tyroleans from the Austrian side, who look so gay in the travel posters, staged a grim memorial service outside Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral.

On the Spit. In Rome teen-age students --most of them neo-Fascists--marched on the Austrian embassy and hurled stones at the riot police, who doused them with fire hoses and chased them down in red Jeeps. Going before the Chamber of Deputies to win a necessary vote of confidence for his new government, Italian Premier Antonio Segni attacked those who were making "political capital" of the South Tyrol issue, insisted that it is a "matter that concerns Italy alone." He was promptly voted into office by 333-248, the biggest majority that any Italian Premier, even De Gasperi, has had since the war. Austrians were talking of carrying the matter to the United Nations, and were especially incensed at placards carried by Roman marchers showing Austria's famed gold-crowned black eagle as a chicken roasting on a spit. As a small sign of its displeasure, Austria halted all shoe imports from Italy.

*Himself born in the area, near Trento. He grew up an Austrian citizen, served seven years in the Austrian Parliament before entering Italian politics. To his death in 1954 he spoke Italian with a trace of an Austrian accent.

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