Nepal crown prince defends father in Vienna
By Sudeshna Sarkar, Kathmandu: A rhino park is not the usual place to make political speeches but Nepal's Crown Prince Paras did just that.
The controversial crown prince turned the inauguration of a rhino park at Vienna's Zoo Schonbrunn on Wednesday into a platform for an impassioned defence of the coup engineered by his father King Gyanendra last year and the acts of the regime.
Blaming the Maoist insurgency for poverty and lack of development, the heir to Nepal's throne said, "Efforts towards finding a peaceful solution through dialogue are afoot."
However in Kathmandu at around the time, armed policemen raided the residence of opposition leader Madhav Kumar Nepal, kept under house arrest since January, and took away communication equipment, including computers, telephones and faxes.
"I can understand the government disconnecting my phone lines," a stunned Nepal said. "But how can they take away even the phone sets?"
The prince also told the gathering that Nepal was rich in water resources. But the government has imposed a five-hour daily power cut to meet escalating power deficit, a pointer to Gyanendra's failure to improve the power sector even after a year of absolute rule.
Paras also said Nepal was committed to conservation of rare species at a time people in Nepal have been protesting against the gifting of a pair of one-horned rhinos, an endangered species, to the Vienna zoo to wrangle an invitation for the royals to the inauguration.
Protests have also been mounting against King Gyanendra's ordinance this month paving the way for privatisation of national wildlife parks.
The government's rhino diplomacy failed with the Austrian government giving a wide berth to the royal entourage after a dire warning by the opposition and protests from Nepalis living in Austria.
Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, who was scheduled to attend the inauguration of the rhino park, stayed away and his deputy vice-chancellor Hubert Gorbach attended instead. The only other official present at the controversial handover was Minister of Economics and Labour Martin Bartenstein.
On Wednesday, unknown people threw three bombs at the office of the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation in Kathmandu, a nature trust chaired by the crown prince that organised the handing over of the rhinos
