| Bond-007 |
Posted
on 27-May-03 03:09 PM
Headline: Year of living dangerously for Nepal's reporters
Byline: Scott Baldauf Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 05/27/2003
(KATHMANDU, NEPAL)To his wife and colleagues, Krishna Sen was a kind husband and a
journalist who wrote passionately about the troubles of the Nepali
peasants.
To the government of Nepal, he was a Maoist revolutionary, a supporter
of a terrorist organization that had launched a seven-year-long
insurgency that killed 8,000 people and brought this small Himalayan
kingdom to the edge of anarchy.
Finding out who is right is difficult. Mr. Sen, the editor in chief of
the popular Janadesh daily newspaper, disappeared May 20, 2002.
Newspapers reported that he was killed by Nepal's police force while in
custody. His body has never been found.
Flipping through an album on the floor of her apartment, Sen's widow,
Takma K.C., stops at a picture of Sen surrounded by armed men, who were
his prison guards during a previous arrest in 1999. "Except for these
photos, I don't have anything of my husband," she says, her eyes
filling with tears.
The deaths of a few local journalists in a distant Himalayan kingdom
may not get as much attention as those of foreign journalists in Iraq
or Afghanistan. But if the past year is a gauge, then the long civil
war in Nepal places it among the most dangerous places in the world for
journalists. I1n all, eight reporters were killed last year; 176 were
arrested, kidnapped, or detained; and dozens more were tortured by both
the Maoist rebels and by the Nepalese government, according to the
Federation of Nepalese Journalists. No legal inquiry has investigated
these killings, and despite steady pressure from Nepali and
international human rights organizations, none is expected any day soon.
The official reason is that such investigations would stir up bad
feeling at a delicate time when the Maoists and the government are
engaged in peace talks.
"Inquiries will be made, the truth will get out, but at the present
time it is not appropriate for me to talk about such issues," says
Rameshnath Pandey, minister of information and communication. But Mr.
Pandey, a former journalist and a close friend of Sen, adds that it's
inappropriate to even ask the present government about events that took
place during the state of emergency which lasted from November 2001 to
August 2002 and was declared by the previous government of Sher Bahadur
Deuba.
Local journalists say that all efforts to investigate the deaths of Sen
and others have been met with denials and coverup. "Since the peace
talks began, all cases are closed, because asking questions now
endangers the peace process," says Tara Nath Dahal, chairman of the
Federation of Nepalese Journalists. "We are not afraid, because during
the state of emergency last year we were marching in the streets. But
we are worried that the same thing (the killing of journalists) could
happen in the future."
A government panel composed of three ministers concluded last summer
that neither the police nor the Royal Nepal Army had arrested Sen. But
the report mentioned that an unclaimed body resembling Sen's was found
around the time of his disappearance.
A police doctor, Harihar Wasti, said he conducted an autopsy of a man
who resembled Sen about a month after Sen's disappearance. The body had
two bullet wounds in the abdomen.
In a report prepared by the federation and cited by the Committee to
Protect Journalists, Mr. Dahal documented the execution of the eight
Nepalese journalists, and the detention and torture of countless
others. While six of the scribes were reportedly killed by either
police or the Royal Nepal Army, two were killed by Maoists, apparently
on charges of spying.
Complicating investigations is the tendency of journalists here to take
sides and blur the line between neutral observer and active political
participant.
Om Sharma is a prime example. As chief reporter of the Janadesh - the
same pro-Maoist newspaper that Krishna Sen edited - Mr. Sharma
considers himself a supporter of the Maoists although not a member of
the party.
"We believe in Maoism, it is the ideal for us, but we are not Maoists,"
says Sharma. "It is the same for journalists who take B.P. Koirala (a
Nepali centrist politician) as their ideal. We believe we can bring our
political mission and our journalistic mission together.
"We are fully aware that if the current cease-fire collapses, we could
be arrested," adds Sharma, who was detained for 118 days during the
state of emergency. "If we go alone to the village to report, we can be
arrested by the Army and killed silently and thrown away in the brush.
But we can't run away from danger."
While the government denies arresting or killing Sen, Takma says that
her husband's last living hours were in police custody. She knows this,
she says, because Army interrogators who detained her for nearly 20
days after Sen disappeared told her.
On the final day of detention, she says a senior officer came into her
room and told her she would be released. "I asked the officer, 'Please
tell me about my husband,' " she recalls. "The officer told me, 'He is
in police custody, and in my opinion, I think he is safe.' I was
comforted by this, so I just asked about his condition. I wonder now
why I didn't ask to see him."
A few weeks later, newspapers reported that Sen had been killed. Takma
went back to the Army officer who assured her of Sen's safety, and he
denied ever telling her that Sen was in police custody. A few days
after that, Takma received a second shock. The Maoist Party announced
in a local newspaper that Krishna Sen was a senior Maoist leader and a
martyr.
Even today, Takma finds herself questioning her husband's identity. "I
don't know, I don't know," she says.
"He was concerned with poor people, with rural life. He was sympathetic
to the Maoists, because they were helping the poor people. But he was
not involved in actions of the People's Army, (the Maoists military
wing)."
(c) Copyright 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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