EU Sanctions on Austria Should End, Panel Says

Austria is pressing for a quick end to its diplomatic isolation after a European Union investigation concluded Friday that sanctions have done more harm than good in the months since the far-right Freedom Party won a share of power.

A three-member fact-finding mission, headed by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, concluded that the EU’s freeze on bilateral contacts with Austria and other sanctions should be ended. Austria is an EU member.

“If the measures adopted by the [other] 14 member-states are maintained, the effect will be counterproductive,” says the report, which was submitted to French President Jacques Chirac, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency.

“The measures have already generated nationalist sentiments in Austria,” it adds, “above all because they have sometimes been wrongly interpreted as sanctions against the Austrian people.”

Austrian Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, a leading member of the Freedom Party, called for an immediate end to the sanctions.

“They were able to agree [to] sanctions on Austria in one day,” Grasser told reporters while attending a meeting in Versailles, France. “Now we are asking the 14 to lift the sanctions immediately. That means in the best case also in one day.”

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel’s government has threatened to hold a national referendum on the sanctions, which could provoke further discord in the European Union if the sanctions aren’t lifted by mid-October.

Ahtisaari, former Foreign Minister Marcelino Oreja of Spain and German lawyer Jochen Frowein--known mockingly here as “the three wise men”--delivered their report to Chirac on Friday evening.

But copies had already leaked to Spain’s El Pais newspaper and Austria’s state-run ORF television, which posted the 45-page report on its Web site hours before Chirac received his official copy.

The union’s member governments are to discuss the report and decide whether to act on its recommendations, perhaps at an EU summit next month. Chirac is a leading proponent of the sanctions.

The United States joined the European Union in imposing diplomatic sanctions against Austria in February after right-wing politician Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party joined the conservative People’s Party in a coalition government.

But cracks quickly appeared as the list of European governments opposed to sanctions grew, Austria’s government held firm and the EU searched for a way out of the first such confrontation with one of its member states.

The European Union came up with the fact-finding mission in July to check whether Austria’s human rights record under the new government met the union’s standards. The team visited Austria but refused to meet with Haider.

Haider, who is notorious more for what he says than does, has been widely condemned for praising Austria’s Nazi past and has campaigned against immigrants. European leaders fear that populist copycats might rise to power in their countries.

The EU report supports what most Austrians had been saying all along: Racial minorities and human rights are better protected in this country, whose economy depends heavily on foreign tourists, than in some other member countries.

Austria reportedly has seen an almost 50% rise in racist incidents this year compared with 1999. But while some visible minorities have suffered attacks here, authorities say the statistic reflects an increase of racist or anti-Semitic statements and verbal abuse rather than greater violence.

Last month, Austria’s Interior Ministry reported that restrictions on right-wing activities, such as a ban on displaying Nazi symbols, was forcing extremists from about 30 Austrian groups to form links with better-organized neo-Nazis in Germany.

Haider’s Freedom Party is criticized in the EU report, but rather gently, as a “populist rightist party with certain radical elements in it.”

“The habitual comments from the Freedom Party,” it adds, sometimes contain “sentiment close to the typical statements of national socialism or declarations that seek to trivialize the history of that [Nazi] period.”

Haider has outraged many by praising Nazi labor practices during World War II and insisting that immigration should be curbed sharply by bringing in temporary “guest workers.” He also is strongly opposed to European Union expansion to include former Soviet bloc countries.

But he hasn’t advocated violence. Instead, he has dwelt on sure crowd pleasers, such as demands for lower gas prices and for government financial incentives to encourage Austrians to have more babies.

He helped take some of the heat off Schuessel’s center-right coalition with the Freedom Party in late February by resigning as party chief. But Haider is still the driving force behind the party, and he openly boasts about his power.

Just as Austrian leaders were trying to persuade Ahtisaari’s visiting team last month that Haider was nothing to be worried about, he stirred the pot again from Carinthia province, where he is governor.

“No moves will be made in [EU] expansion that I do not approve,” Haider boasted to reporters. Romano Prodi, head of the union’s executive commission, dismissed the remark as another Haider “opinion.”