Austria offers to compensate Nazi victims amid world ire

Austria offers to compensate Nazi victims amid world ire
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

FEBRUARY 9: Austria's new conservative Chancellor presented his programme to Parliament on Wednesday, amid continuing high security for fear of more protests against his power-sharing deal with the far-right. While he announced that Vienna will compensate Nazi slave labour victims, the Western world again made its displeasure known at the new government.

In a swipe at the new regime, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on Tuesday that free and fair elections, even in established democracies, do not validate intolerance. ``We all know that the politics of hate in Europe exacted an enormous price in the last century, altered the course of millions of lives and tragically ended many millions more,'' Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Britain's Prince Charles too cancelled an upcoming trip to Austria ``because of the current difficulties between Austria and its European partners'', the British Embassy in Vienna said on Tuesday in a letter addressed to Vienna's city authorities andmade public.

Most of Austria's European Union partners have already moved to cut bilateral relations with Vienna. Costa Rica joined them on Tuesday saying it was suspending ``political relations'' with Austria following the rise of the far-right and allegedly neo-Nazi Freedom Party of Joerg Haider in the Austrian government. Some 2,000 policemen were posted around Vienna's Parliament building on Wednesday, even more than on Tuesday, when Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel survived a no-confidence motion accusing him of isolating the country through his alliance with the Freedom Party.

Schuessel, flanked by his Cabinet, again reiterated his criticism of the international outcry on Wednesday. ``Much of what is reported about Austria is unjustified,'' he said, setting out the priorities of his new government, including a commitment to EU enlargement. But he said: ``I take it seriously. We must respond to prejudices with wide-ranging information.''President Thomas Klestil, who reluctantly swore in Schuessel'sgovernment last Friday after the collapse of efforts to renew the 13-year-old outgoing coalition, looked on stony-faced as the Chancellor spoke. In a special parliamentary session on Tuesday, the first since the new government was sworn in, a no-confidence motion presented by the Greens was defeated after Schuessel's People's Party and the Freedom Party opposed it. The two parties have a comfortable 104-seat majority in the 183-member parliament.