HAGUE LETTER:The Netherlands' very popular Prince Friso (43) may never emerge from the coma caused by a skiing accident in Austria last month, writes PETER CLUSKEY
OVER A fortnight on from the skiing accident that left 43-year-old Prince Friso, the most popular of the three Dutch princes, in a coma from which he may never regain consciousness, his family is struggling with the terrible question of whether he can remain on life support indefinitely.
Last week Princess Mabel; his 74-year-old mother, Queen Beatrix; his elder brother, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and the youngest of the three brothers, Prince Constantijn, agreed that Friso should be brought from Austria to the exclusive Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood in London for specialist medical treatment and possible rehabilitation.
It was a medical decision, a family decision, one that, prior to his controversial marriage in Delft in 2004, would in all likelihood have been dictated without compromise by the public demands of the prince’s position as second in line to the Dutch crown.
But all that changed when Friso relinquished his claim to the throne to marry human rights activist Mabel Wisse Smit – after the prime minister at the time, Jan Peter Balkenende, shocked the country by saying he was not willing to seek the permission of parliament for the marriage, as required by centuries of tradition and precedent.
What emerged was an extraordinary story. In a letter to MPs, Mr Balkenende revealed that Ms Smit had given “incomplete and incorrect” information about the duration and extent of her relationship with Klaas Bruinsma, an infamous drugs baron shot dead in a gangland killing outside the Amsterdam Hilton in 1991.
It also emerged that Ms Smit, an economics and political science graduate of the University of Amsterdam, an expert on the Balkans, and co-founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations, had had a liaison a few years later with high-profile Bosnian-American lawyer, Muhamed Sacirbey, then Bosnian ambassador to the UN – though this was a mere aside to the Bruinsma row.
The revelations rocked the royal family, coming just two years after the government decided not to allow former Argentinian government minister Jorge Horacio Zorreguieta to attend the wedding of his daughter, Maxima, to the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, because of his links to the junta which ruled the country in the 1970s and presided over tens of thousands of “disappearances”.
Despite the Bruinsma and Sacirbey revelations, Friso and Mabel’s decision to marry regardless of the disapproval was a hugely popular one with the Dutch public, caught up in the romance of the occasion – which is why the recent photographs of a clearly distraught Princess Mabel accompanying a drawn Queen Beatrix to her husband’s bedside just eight years later, set off an enormous wave of sympathy here.
Ary van der Waay, a well-known supporter of the Dutch royal family, observed: “If the prince dies – and we hope he will survive and recover – you can expect emotional scenes in the Netherlands of the kind that followed the death of Princess Diana in the UK in 1997.”
Since their marriage, Friso and Mabel – who now have two daughters, Luana (6) and Zaria (5) – have lived away from the public eye in the leafy London suburb of Kew.
Friso worked first for management consultants McKinsey, then for Goldman Sachs, and most recently as chief financial officer of the uranium enrichment company UNerco.
Princess Mabel is chief executive of The Elders, the independent group of global leaders – including former Irish president Mary Robinson – convened in 2007 by Nelson Mandela to work for peace and human rights.
The comparative anonymity of London clearly suits them, which was almost certainly why, along with medical considerations, they decided to move Prince Friso from Innsbruck to a rehabilitation clinic in England, where decisions about his long-term care – and perhaps, ultimately, about whether it should be continued – can be taken in peace, away from the glare of the Dutch media.
The option of the Netherlands wasn’t really open to them as the best centre there, the Leijpark Centre in Tilburg, which specialises in stimulating coma patients, does not accept patients over 25 – the age at which brain cells stop developing.
Another possibility was Liège university hospital in Belgium, whose coma unit, led by neurologist Prof Steven Laureys, has an international reputation.
In reality though, Friso’s family were left with little hope last week when trauma specialist Dr Wolfgang Koller delivered this pessimistic assessment: “At the moment it cannot be predicted if he will ever regain consciousness.”
A statement from the royals a few days later said: “The members of His Royal Highness, Prince Friso’s family need to come to terms with the prince’s situation – and to reorganise their lives accordingly.”
In that, they are just like any other family and will do so now from their home in Britain.