Austria

Students at all Viennese colleges and universities carried out a strike on March 6. The Austrian students demonstrated against the Communist 7th World Youth and Students Festival planned for Vienna in the summer of 1959. As the colleges in Graz and Innsbruck had semester vacation at this time, students in these colleges participated only symbolically in the strike. Many students also took part in a march of silence through the streets of the Austrian capital protesting against the great communist meeting. (Special Report).

Eleven Austrian youth and student organisations are protesting against the holding of the 7th Communist World Youth Festival in Vienna from July 26 to August 4. The organisations, which have joined in an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Junges Leben" (Youth Working Group), announced in a memorandum that they would try to stop the festival "with every means at their disposal and every legal possibility."

"In case the organisers are not induced to transfer their festival behind the Iron Curtain, the Working Group has decided to 'inform participants of the real goals of the festival and at the same time to make them acquainted with the work of Austrian Youth'."

The Central Committee of the National Union of Austrian Students, which also belongs to the Working Group, has sent a telegrame to the Afro-Asian Youth Conference in Cairo stating that "with the exception of Communist students, no other Austrian student organisation will take part in the festival." (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Junges Leben/Wiener Zeitung, Vienna).