Austria's parliament ended decades of bitter debate on Wednesday by approving a law mandating bilingual road signs in dozens of communities with a significant Slovene majority, Reuters reported. The measure, long a tinder box for nationalist sentiment, calls for the names of 164 communities in the southern province of Carinthia to be signposted in both German and Slovenian. Chancellor Werner Faymann called it "an important day for Carinthia, an important day for Austria" and thanked the officials and representatives of ethnic groups who struck the compromise that ended years of bickering. "I am thankful as an Austrian chancellor who is proud that once again what unites us comes before what separates us," he said. Carinthia borders the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and a minority of around 20,000 people in the province still speak Slovenian. Slovene minority rights were established when Austria's allied occupation ended after World War Two, in which Slovene partisans fought Nazi troops from Germany and Austria. The Slovene minority have been a lightning rod for Austrian nationalists for decades. When the first dual-language signs were erected in 1972, nationalist groups staged riots and pulled them down. -- SPA
