28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002 Issue No.575 |
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While Achham burned
Despite a three-month-old state of emergency, Nepal's security forces have been caught off guard as the country's Maoist rebellion steps up its guerrilla war. Al-Ahram Weekly finds terror in Shangri-LaWhen Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba finally offered his sombre address to the regular session of the House of Representatives on Monday, 18 February, his words could have been lifted from the notebooks of US President George W Bush's speech-writers. "The fight against terrorism could be long and complex, and sometimes we may suffer losses in this fight," Deuba told a packed house of irate politicians. Later, inaugurating the two-day conference of the Nepal Trade Union Congress in Katmandu on Saturday, he pleaded for political unity in the fight against terrorism: "An alliance against terrorism is being built up among the Nepalese people and political parties who adhere to the present constitution, and through support from the international community."
But Deuba, who last week was forced to personally detail the losses from three brutal coordinated attacks on police checkpoints when opposition lawmakers rowdily heckled Home Minister Khum Bahadur Khadka off the podium and into an adjournment of proceedings, was not talking about the global threat of Saudi-born dissident Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'eda terrorist network. The fierce attacks, which took place in the early hours of 17 February and led to the deaths of 154 people, were perpetrated by the country's increasingly bold Maoist insurgency.
A grim reminder that the rhetoric of Islamic extremism is not the only motivation of militant groups agitating against a government seen as apathetic and in the service of a powerful monarchy, Maoist rebels have been fighting a guerrilla war in the country's far-flung provinces since 1996. Led by the elusive Comrade Prachanda, rebel leaders take their inspiration from Chinese revolutionary and communist leader Mao Tse-tung and state as their main aim the overthrow of the country's constitutional monarchy and the establishment of a communist republic. Their self-styled "people's war" is modelled after Peru's notorious Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which waged a pernicious insurrection that peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s before being largely stamped out by the heavy-handed counter-terrorism efforts of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.
Nepal is still reeling from the political uncertainty that rocked the Himalayan kingdom after the killing in June last year of former King Birenda and eight other members of the royal family, including the queen, by Crown Prince Dipendra, who then shot himself. But the country was plunged deeper into instability last November when peace talks between the Maoist rebels and the government broke down and the fighters renewed their attacks against government installations. Deuba, who engineered his rise to power largely through his promise to get a grip on the insurgency through unprecedented negotiation, declared that he had been betrayed by the rebels and set in motion a declaration of a state of emergency, which King Gyanendra issued on 26 November.
The emergency powers allowed the king to deploy the Royal Nepal Army, which is directly under his command. It was a risky move, deemed essential to protecting the safety of poorly outfitted remote police posts that are easy prey to rebels armed with looted military stores and who benefit from the element of surprise. But the price of this decision has been the stepping up of the Maoist rebellion, which has perpetrated its worst attacks since the state of emergency was declared.
Deuba felt the heat of this deterioration of security when he stood before the House last Monday -- all the more so because he was set to table a motion to extend the three-month state of emergency by another three months. Analysts seem confident that the attacks were timed to send a message ahead of the debate about the extension. They also coincided with the insurgency's six-year anniversary and National Democracy Day on 19 February, which celebrates the ruling Nepali Congress Party's ouster of the century-old Rana monarchy in 1951 that paved the way to a limited constitutional monarchy.
The late King Birenda was a popular leader as well as a reformist, but the country has suffered transient and corrupt leaderships who have failed to extend the country's formidable tourism income and international aid to remote provinces, where in many cases the standard of living has remained unchanged since the days when Nepal was an isolated and unknown absolute monarchy.
Numerous civilians in small towns in the country's far-western provinces have felt the brunt of the government's new hard-line stance on the Maoists, who Gyanendra dismissed as terrorists when government talks ended and the state of emergency was declared in November. A recent feature in the weekly The Nepali Times looked at the civilian injured left out of government fatality numbers and crowding poorly equipped medical facilities. In the article, Mahendra Kumar Nepal, the director of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Katmandu, indicated that injuries he was seeing since November have grown more brutal and more pronounced. The patients at the hospital, all villagers from towns in the grip of the insurgency, are teachers and social workers, most of whom describe being dragged from their homes and brutally beaten in wide-scale intimidation campaigns by the rebels. Close to 3,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the six-year insurgency.
Politicians, notably among the major opposition party, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), or CPN-UML, are enraged by the government's inability to guard against a major attack and argue that three months of emergency law have yielded nothing but the worst attacks so far. An open call last week by the daily Kathmandu Post entitled "Do something" admonished the government for failing to use its extraordinary powers under the emergency law: "Such an emergency always signifies abnormal times, yet for ministers, bureaucrats and many others, it is business as usual; there is no sense of [the] urgency that emergency signifies." The editorial advises "It is in the interest of both the status quo-ists and the Maoists to start talking again."
CPN-UML leader Pradip Nepal was less subtle. During the raucous House meeting last week, he blamed Deuba for an unacceptable slowness in the government's reaction to the attacks on 17 February. Shouting down Home Minister Khadka, he likened the prime minister to Roman emperor Nero, who is said to have delighted in playing the fiddle while Rome burned.
On Thursday, 21 February, legislators voted overwhelmingly to extend the state of emergency. The vote came a day before a two-day nationwide strike called by the Maoists to celebrate the insurgency's six-year anniversary and protest the emergency law's extension. The strike virtually shut down major centres, with schools, factories and businesses closed and the streets largely deserted as uncertainty and nervousness swept through the public. Violence continued with rebel strikes on a police checkpoint in the town on Sitalpati, some 260 kilometres west of Katmandu, and clashes between government forces and rebels took lives on both sides of the conflict.
Already suffering from a global downturn in tourism -- one of the country's main income generators -- the recent escalation in violence will certainly deal a hard blow to the tourism industry. Still to be addressed is perhaps the most pressing issue at hand: the desperate poverty and lack of services in remote regions that have made it possible for the Maoists to thrive. In some areas, the Maoists have marginalised inefficient local governments by setting up swift "people's courts" and have organised "people's banks" and collective farms. In areas like Achham, 600 kilometres north-west of Katmandu, where two deadly attacks took place last week, the quaint image of Shangri-La that drew legions of Westerners following the hippie trail in the late 1960s and early 1970s is belied by aching poverty.
While Nepal has recently been built up as an adventure travel destination centred mainly on its famous mountain heights, most people in the country are living in another age. Television did not come to the country until 1986 and of the nation's 24 million people, only 14 per cent have electricity. Only a third of the Nepalese people are literate and the average annual income is $220.
Saved from political elimination by the unified vote to extend the state of emergency on Thursday, 21 February, Deuba pledged that the government's anti-terrorism campaign would go hand in hand with "sweeping reforms in the social and economic areas." Promising anti- corruption measures and the foundations of "good governance," Deuba was dressing a sore wound, but if the past is anything to go by, there is no cure to this plague in sight.
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