Chinese animals fly to Kabul bound for shabby zoo
Date: 04-Oct-02
Country: AFGHANISTAN
A Turkmen cargo plane chartered by China flew from Beijing carrying two lions, two bears, two pigs, two deer and a wolf.
"With these animals, we are conveying our best wishes for everlasting peace, prosperity and wellbeing to Afghanistan," Sun Yuxi, China's ambassador to Kabul, told reporters as the animals arrived at the city's airport.
He said Chinese veterinary experts would make trips to Kabul to help local zoo officials raise the animals that will live in the zoo's dilapidated cages.
It was the first time in nearly a decade that a foreign country had donated animals to the zoo, which like much of Afghanistan suffered material damage and heavy loss of life during 23 years of civil war and occupation.
The zoo's veteran inmates witnessed bitter clashes during the civil conflict of the early 1990s when the zoo often found itself in the frontline of fighting between rival factions.
Zoo officials said the two lions would be kept in the cage which once housed Marjan, a lonely lame and half-blind male lion who died on a cold winter night earlier this year in a blaze of international publicity.
Marjan, after surviving years of war, was badly hurt in 1995 when a fighter threw a hand grenade into his cage in revenge for the death of a cousin who had climbed into the cage to show his bravery only to be killed by Marjan and his partner.
Marjan's partner died of disease several years later.
The zoo, with no running water or electricity, is in a sorry state, with just a few birds, several monkeys, a fox and a wolf.
