East Needs Western Aid, Austrian Leader Says

Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said Monday that the “wait and see” posture some Western governments are taking toward economic assistance for Eastern Europe is “a wrong attitude.”

“If we in the West just wait and see,” the former Communist nations in the East “will not succeed in building solid economic foundations for their ambitious political goals” for democracy, Vranitzky said in an interview during a four-day visit to Los Angeles.

“I do not advocate massive loans,” he said as he enunciated the themes he sounded in a round of public and private visits with scholars, business people and civic leaders.

Rather, he said, assistance should take three forms: humanitarian aid, such as money for rehabilitating hospitals and creating adequate medical care; aid to help the distribution of food and goods, such as assistance to rebuild railroads, and direct economic investment, such as joint ventures in which Western firms assume a majority interest to ensure strict management control.

Waiting for Eastern nations to build modern market economies will not work, he said, because their economies are not strong enough. He said he believed, though, that with assistance, the Eastern economies can be good places for Western business to invest.

To this end, he offered Austria as an excellent base for Western business expansion to the East. He pointed to the historical ties between his nation of 7.5 million and the East, adding, not incidentally, that Austrian communications are excellent, as the East’s are not.

The 54-year-old chancellor, who spent his career in banking and government finance before taking his current post as leader of the Social Democrats in 1986 and head of his nation, was cautious but gloomy about stopping the fighting in Yugoslavia.

“We must not stop our common efforts on an international level” to bring a cease-fire, he said. He suggested that the U.N. Security Council again might take up the matter, and he added that a world-wide economic boycott might help. Asked if he thought the fighting might be ended soon, he said: “This is not the time to make predictions.”

Among Vranitzky’s meetings Monday was one with Jewish leaders. Last summer, he told his Parliament that his government acknowledged--as had not been done before--Austria’s sometimes enthusiastic complicity in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Vranitzky also met with executives, editors and reporters of The Times; the Council on Foreign Relations; staff members at UCLA and the RAND Corp., and Hollywood figures, among them Austrian-born director Billy Wilder. Vranitzky also visited some public and private art collections.

A tall, vigorous man, he was a basketball player on the Austrian national team in his youth. So today, before flying on to Houston, then to Washington and a meeting with President Bush, he scheduled a stop at Loyola Marymount to watch the Lakers work out.