A Voice For the Voiceless

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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Bulletin #29: Drama of a Despot and Accomplices

By Dr. Mathura P. Shrestha

Kepoo, April 4, 2005:The government has now released a sizeable number of political detainees while still continuing to detain a majority (composed of party workers, human right defenders and professionals) in order to appease national and international opposition to the king’s government of Nepal. The hidden motive is to mislead the delegates in UNHRC conference at Geneva that the political normalization is slowly returning in Nepal.

In other word a drama is staged to prevent the UN mandate on supervisory body to watch human rights in Nepal. The conscience of everybody needs to be refreshed that patched-up resolutions or arrangements will be too costly and even painful to the peoples in all countries of this interdependent world.

The people of Nepal are suffering as a result of series of political and social retrogression and the king’s coup d’état along with accompanied severe political oppressions, anti-people maneuvers stripping the civilians of all rights including human and civil rights. Supreme court declared that the fundamental rights are intact but nevertheless the military and other security personnel continue to engage in wildest possible manhunt (one may name that witch-hunt), unauthorized detentions, arrests without warrants, disappearances, undeclared murders of civilians even without recording, instigating armed gangs of right extremists to murder the captives and innocent villagers after most barbaric torture and mutilations of body parts while still living, under the supervision of army personnel, and forced disinformation along with intentional blocking of information and information channels.

(A few in the military write ‘editorials’, ‘news items’, and ‘skits’ and force media points, with threats by telephone, to publicize the dispatched items).

Secondly, the military personnel as well as the Maoist insurgents are intensifying their overt and covert operations at the expense of the freedom, rights and security of the people. If one peruse the available human rights reports more than 70 percent of dead, disappeared and wounded victims are innocent civilians, especially women, children and disabled, during those ‘operations’ or ‘actions’ or ambushes’, especially perpetuated by the government security personnel. The frequency and magnitude of atrocities have increased out of proportion since February 1 takeover by the king.

Thirdly, the government (hijacked by despots) has closed all doors to peace dialogue and wants to solve the conflict militarily in spite of several debacles that are covered up as most of these were targeted not against the Maoists but against other political party cadres and innocent civilians. These state sponsored operations have two main objectives:

1. To minimize, or even eliminate if possible, third political forces outside the royal palace (heavily hushed up by military) and the Maoists so that a greater leverage for the absolute monarchy would be possible in future negotiation with the Maoists. Maoists too committed grave mistake by refusing to talk with deposed Deuba government but with the king.

2. To continue or strengthen feudal exploitations and subjugations by restricting the political, economic, social and cultural spaces to the people. Their strategy is to force the people to complete subordination or fatalism with a little or no alternative. They stress on pseudo-nationalism by playing one neighboring country against other, fatalism and fundamentalism that make the feudalism as an essential instrument of coercion or ‘necessary evil’.

I hope that political parties in Nepal would commit to wage an effective and united political struggle for democracy, human rights and sociopolitical progression. They should positively forsake their love to so called ‘negotiated settlements’ at the expense of the people and their own political interests. They must be able to recognize their mistakes in previous negotiations which are related to conservation of feudal class, its structures and traits and patched up settlements that may provide a false sense of their victory.

They must remember that the victory of the people, and none other’s, would guarantee their Party’s victory. Politics lie in people’s domain. Therefore politics can not be a give and take bargain among the palace, parties and between parties. People are both life and blood of any one party. Existence of a party outside of people’s domain can not be imagined.

The most important political responsibility of all parties is to transform the present conflict to peace politically, and not militarily. Political dialogue between the future democratic government, an all-party government by consensus, and the CPN (Maoist) must be conducted as early as possible with all political honesty and commitment. Therefore the agenda of their political struggle should include:

1. Military and all security structures should be completely subordinated under the democratic government. Government controlled collective command system must be operational as in any other democratic country. Military personnel must remain subjective to overall security and interest of the country and people and not of any one person or superstructure.

They should remain disciplined with their own professional conscience, collectivism, and sensitivity to social justice and good of people including overall security (but not forced security without rights to descent). While in action you must be guided by your social responsibility, collective security concept, and an objective to bring peace to the people, not only to the system or employer. You have to develop professionally and socially. This is a true discipline. For that you may forget even your superior if they continue to behave despotic without humane norms.

2. A new constitution is to be developed with the conscious participation of all peoples in Nepal. Constitutional Assembly is the left out agenda of the history. The then king swallowed own proclaimed commitment and continued to remain swallowed. It had been pronounced political agendum of all political parties that struggled for democracy. All Parties should remain committed to their past manifesto. Constitutional Assembly is the most suitable structure to generate people oriented and people owned constitution. That is also an international norm.

3. Gains of 1990n people’s revolution must be safeguarded and further developed in the need based and people oriented principles.

4. People-first concept with political, economic, social and cultural pluralism must be adopted by all political parties. This will assure strength of multiparty democracy. Other paraphernalia are not important. Irrelevant deadwoods must be forsaken.

This will bring the Maoist or any other future insurgency to democratic mainstream. This will also ensure a culture of dynamic peace where people’s organized voices will remain stronger than guns and bullets and people’s real needs will override all superstructures.

Dr. Shrestha is a human rights activist and the ex-Minister of Health in Nepal.

INSN is the International Nepal Solidarity Network, which has activists in over a dozen countries around the world who are working to bring democracy to Nepal. Visit their website for regular updates related to the Nepal crisis.