AUSTRIA: On the Threshold

An early morning crowd of Viennese, gathered before the building where the flags of Austria's four occupiers have flown for ten years, looked upon a cheering sight. With the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Hammer and Sickle and the Tricolor floated Austria's red and white flag. Inside the building, the occupiers bent to their task: arranging for the red and white of Austria to fly sovereign and alone.

Representatives of the four powers had sat down for nearly 400 such discussions before. But this was different. Last week, the week in which two-thirds of Germany got its freedom, the four occupying powers in Austria agreed on terms that carried Nazi Germany's first victim to the threshold of the "liberation" promised to it by the wartime Allies twelve years before.

Articles 16 & 17. As it began, the Austrians, still numbly happy over the promises Chancellor Julius Raab brought back from Moscow (TIME, April 25), were uncontrollably hopeful; the representatives of the U.S.. Britain and France were visibly skeptical. Russia's Ambassador Ivan I. Ilyichev, enwrapped in a baggy brown suit, was briskly ready for business.

Onto the table went the 59-article Austrian treaty over which Russia and the West had bickered so persistently and so long. By day's end, Ilyichev had blandly, almost impatiently, acceded changes and omissions that Moscow had held out against for months, and the first 15 articles were disposed of. On the second day, surprise changed to disillusionment.

Russia still insisted on the treaty's Article 16, a crucial paragraph requiring Austria to "take all necessary measures to complete the voluntary repatriation" of 40,000 refugees from Communist countries. The clause, which would make it easier for the Communists to force them to return to their homelands, involved the basic principle that the U.S. fought successfully in the case of Korea's P.W.s.

Russia also insisted, despite Austria's objections, on Article 17, which would restrict neutralized Austria to an army of only 53,000 for defense.

The day's session ended in gloomy deadlock.

On the third day, Article 16 came up again, and Ilyichev, obviously redirected by signal from Moscow, remarked matter-of-factly: "If you don't agree to the wording of this article, I suggest we eliminate it altogether." The Western ambassadors asked for a second translation of Ilyichev's remarks. The translator had not erred.

The Technicalities. Through the third and fourth days. Ilyichev disbursed concessions like vodka toasts. By week's end, only a few technicalities stood between Austria's 7,000,000 and their freedom: when foreign troops should withdraw, what was to be the nature of the four-power Austrian neutrality guarantee demanded by Russia, and most embarrassing of all, what should be done about foreign oil rights in Austria. Socony-Vacuum, Royal Dutch Shell and a few other Western companies whose oil lands were confiscated by the Nazis, want them back.

The Austrians also want them.