Nepal Nearing Collapse As Maoists Winning Civil War

by Mike McPhate

(PNS) -- While world attention is preoccupied with the Middle East, Nepal is falling apart.

In recent weeks Maoist rebels, who control most of the countryside, have made bold moves in the capital Kathmandu. They clamped a weeklong blockade on the city, forced the closure of 35 major businesses, and were blamed for a bomb attack on the American information center. The U.S. Ambassador responded by ending Peace Corps activities in the country and seeking consent from Washington for the families of embassy personnel to evacuate.

Maoist leader Rajman Pakhrin recently told the Nepali Times that the Maoists hoped to provoke the people of the capital to launch an urban uprising.

In this tiny, rugged corner of the globe, the birthplace of Buddha and home of the world's highest mountains, communist rebels are displaying a new height of confidence.

The bloodshed is approaching a frenzied pitch. Most of the eight-year conflict's 10,000 deaths have come in the last three years.

In an indication of how serious the threat has become, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba arrived in the Indian capital, New Delhi, last week to plead for military and economic assistance. This week the US pledged an additional $1 million to the war effort.

Nepal's democracy was born in 1990 when its King was pressured to allow a multiparty democracy. The unity that followed among the country's myriad ethnic groups though soon unraveled as the Brahmin aristocracy, hailing from the Kathmandu valley and east Nepal, took power and woefully mishandled the country's development, particularly in the western region.

After 14 years Nepal (pop: 27 million) remains among the world's poorest nations. Fewer than half of its population are literate.

The Maoist revolt began in 1996 with the aim of building a classless society. Debt-bound tribes in the jungles of the west were the swiftest recruits to the cause with its objectives of abolishing feudalism as well as the institution that they view as the epitome of caste privilege: the monarchy.

The rebellion maintained only a mild intensity until the royal massacre of June 2001, when King Birendra and his wife along with their two children were slaughtered by their eldest son, crown prince Dipendra following a dinner-table dispute. The prince committed suicide afterward.

The Maoists took advantage of the political chaos that ensued.

During an eight-month ceasefire in 2003 they built an arms pipeline with communist allies in India and Chinese gangs to the north, which, according to Army General Rajendra Thapa, increased their strength "by leaps and bounds."

With three centers of power -- the Maoists, the King, and the political parties -- now locked in a struggle for supremacy, it's unclear where the country is headed. Peace talks have failed twice and little trust remains among the three.

Indeed, many Nepalese have given up hope on a resolution.

"People are saying maybe the previous regime was better," says Ananda Shrestha, Director of the Nepal Foundation for Advanced Studies, referring to the country's old monarchy. "Democracy has got a bad name."

In the most telling sign of strife, the country has witnessed an incredible exodus. Over two million villagers have fled in the last two years. They are mostly young, farming men who have streamed out of the hills into the Indian plains to the south. The migration continues at about 75,000 per month, observers say.

"The only people staying are those who can't afford to leave," says Subodh Pyakurel, Director of the Informal Sector Service Center (INSEC), a leading human rights group. While the Maoists give their institutions welcoming names -- the People's Court, the People's Army, the People's Education System -- their methods appear to depend on terror more than persuasion.

The rebels stone, amputate, decapitate or break the legs of suspected informants, say human rights observers. They killed more farmers than they did the King's soldiers in 2003, according to INSEC.

Mass abductions and indoctrination seminars have become common. Schoolteachers in rebel-held areas are required to wear Maoist garb and use a curriculum that favors the contributions of communist heroes Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong.

"You can't even think of free speech," the National Human Rights Commission's Sushil Pyakurel says of the current mood. The rebels coercive methods, he added, make it "hard to see them as a political group. They behave more like a criminal gang."

Activists criticize the army too. Amnesty International reported that in 2002 Nepal recorded the world's most disappearances in army custody, calling it a "widespread and long-standing pattern."

In the country's poorest region, the far west, the toll of the conflict is reflected at a local orphanage set up for war victims in the army-secured town of Dhangadi.

Several grubby children describe the killing of their parents by rebels or soldiers. A scrawny five-year-old, Yaka Soud, says he has neither any memory of his father, who was killed by Maoists, nor of his mother who left him at the orphanage two years ago. The director says he assumes by now that she has also been killed.

"Each month the number [of orphans] increases," director Min Kunwar says. Currently there are 91 orphans at the home. "We don't have enough room for them."

Narayan Dutta Mishra, Chairman of Kailali District Development Committee (DDC), says he feels the Maoists are winning the war. "Day-by-day it is getting worse," he says. "They are saying the country is in their grip."