Trieste

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24913, 28 June 1946, Page 6

Trieste

The Paris deadlock on Trieste is still unbroken. Though hopes had been raised by the Foreign Ministers’ decision to meet on Wednesday evening, when Mr Molotov advanced a new proposal, the Ministers are said to remain as far from a solution as ever. There may, of course, still be time for them to

redeem their failure. An early estimate of the probable duration of the conference gave the period as a fortnight or three weeks; and even if the precise, and les§ generous, estimate offered this week should piove more accurate, the Ministers will still have two or three days more. But certainly, whether the conference ends this week or next, the prospect sketched by “ The Times ” correspondent in his account' of Tuesday’s talks has lost none of its gloom—the prospect that the Ministers may have to postpone the question for a year or more, as they are said to have postponed the question of Italy’s colonies. It is an anxious one, if for no other reason than that suggested by another correspondent of “ The Times ”, in Trieste. Three months ago, he wrote: Trieste is paying a heavy price for being a bone of contention. So long as its future remains undecided, shipping goes elsewhere- the big commercial houses do no business, and the shipyards receive no orders. If it were not for the UNRRA cargoes for Jugoslavia being unloaded here the port would be completely idle. This 1 stagnation expresses itself in a crushing load of unemployment. In spite of. the well-meant efforts of the Allied Military Government in promoting public works, nearly half the -wageearners. including some 5000 blackccat workers, are jobless.

In this stagnation there is, ob- k viously, great dangei, even though there are many fewer Slovenes than Italians in Trieste to be harmed by unemployment and poverty. And even if Trieste were an enclave wholly populated by Italians, the danger would remain at its gravest. For the effects of this economic stagnation would be, and are, felt widely beyond Trieste, in the hinterland. The rural population there is deprived of the market for its produce and of the services which Trieste normally offers; and that population is, of course, predominantly Jugoslav. Racial and ideological issues, clearly, have made Trieste a potential storm-centre. But their pressure has been intense ever since the war ended in Italy, and is more or less constant. The economic issues are no less powerfully impelling. Their force, however, is not constant, but rising; and it will continue to rise so long as the future of Trieste is uncertain and its return to prosperity distant. It is this factor, probably more than any other, that could bring tension to cracking point