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Posted
on 07-Sep-01 08:58 AM
Friday, 7 September, 2001, 10:37 GMT 11:37 UK
Palace accused over Nepal insurgency
The rebels have frequently targeted Nepal's army
Nepal's former prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, has accused the royal palace and neighbouring India of supporting a long-running Maoist insurgency.
Mr Koirala stepped down as prime minister two months ago, following differences with King Gyanendra over mobilising the army to quell the Maoist rebellion.
Mr Koirala - still president of the ruling Nepali Congress Party - suggested that the army - which is under the command of King Gyanendra - had been suspiciously withdrawn from the fight against rebels in western Nepal.
"This is very surprising. It makes me confused as to whether the palace is not supporting the Maoists," said Mr Koirala, quoted by his personal secretary Birendra Dahal.
Mr Koirala alleged that India has been giving shelter to the rebels while the palace has been nurturing them.
No reason was given as to why the monarchy should abet a rebel movement which has publicly vowed to replace it with a communist republic.
The Maoists have also threatened to abrogate a 50-year-old peace and friendship treaty with India if they seize power.
There has been no immediate response from India or the palace.
Peace talks
In Kathmandu, a crucial meeting of all major political parties gets under way on Friday to review ongoing peace talks aimed at resolving the insurgency.
The government has called the meeting amidst confusion surrounding the second round of peace talks with the rebels, which is due in less than a week.
Mr Koirala stepped down in July
The political parties are expected to suggest ways of dealing with the rebel negotiators in the next round, the date and venue of which have not yet been announced.
The first round of talks, which was held last week, has been described as positive and cordial but doubts persist about substantive progress in the future.
The government has accused the rebels of violating an earlier commitment to end the violence.
The authorities said violence, extortion, coercion and vandalism have continued despite rebel assurances made during the discussions.
Such rebel activities, the government said, could disrupt peace talks.
The government is also concerned about a Maoist rally due to be held in the capital, Kathmandu, later this month.
It has urged the rebels to cancel the rally which, it fears, could turn violent.
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Posted
on 07-Sep-01 12:35 PM
JAKARTA Only a present day William Shakespeare could imagine the real life tragedy in Nepal when the Crown Prince eliminated an entire line of a royal dynasty that had ruled that land for more than 200 years.
In killing his father, the King, his mother, the Queen, his brother and sisters, an uncle - and then himself - the Crown Prince did more than recreate the most dramatic themes of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. He also plunged Nepal into its most serious crisis ever - one that can affect the rest of this volatile region.
Before last month, Nepal was known in the West primarily for its small size and remoteness. But in geostrategic terms it is neither small nor remote. The Himalayan kingdom is sandwiched between the world's two most populous countries - China and India. Nepal's 25 million people are divided among more than a dozen ethnic groups that speak 48 languages and dialects. And although the King relinquished most of his powers in 1990 in favor of becoming a constitutional monarch with a parliamentary democracy, the monarchy has been the glue that held the country together. Indeed, in the 11 years of constant political party infighting, there have been eleven governments and six prime ministers.
All of this turmoil has been an open invitation for China - and its surrogate, Pakistan, to try and extend their influence both in Nepal and into India's turbulent northeastern states.
The hijacking of an Indian passenger plane taking off from Katmandu by Islamabad-backed Kashmiri rebels two years ago, the arrest of a Pakistan diplomat allegedly planning to sell explosives to Nepalese insurgents, and the emergence of Nepal as the passage to India for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence furnishes more than enough of a security reason for New Delhi not to take its ties with the kingdom for granted.
India is by far Nepal's most important economic, military and political ally. But Delhi expects complete loyalty in this unequal partnership, especially vis-à-vis China. When Nepal talked of procuring Chinese anti-aircraft guns in 1988, for instance, India responded by closing its markets to Nepal, increasing the landlocked kingdom's economic isolation.
Compounding its recent problems, and virtually unnoticed by the outside world, Nepal has been subjected for the past five years to a Maoist guerrilla insurgency spreading to most rural districts. The insurgency's intellectual godfather boasts that like Mao Zedong's guerrillas, once they control the countryside, the capital, Katmandu, will fall and, "We will hoist the hammer-and-sickle red flag atop Mount Everest." Sadly, with the death of most of the royal family, and the accession of a new king who may use the army to restore law and order, the nation may find itself in a full-scale civil war.
The oxygen feeding Nepal's instability is its abject poverty. Fully half of the population is unemployed and living below the poverty line. That is Nepal's real tragedy. The country could be rich. It has a crucial natural resource, water. Hundreds of rivers gushing south between the Himalayas have massive hydroelectricity potential to serve all of its domestic needs and the growing demand from India and Bangladesh.
So why hasn't Nepal exploited this limitless, renewable source of energy? A fear of increasing dependence on India, its principal consumer, has been the prime concern.
But with Nepal and nearby Bhutan endowed with enormous water resources, India with its coal and Bangladesh with its natural gas, these four neighboring countries could develop a mixed energy system for all to benefit. And massive investment capital from the West, the World Bank and the IMF to build the dams and the hydroelectric plants would surely be forthcoming.
Whether concerned about economics or security, there is too much at stake not to bring peace and prosperity to the kingdom and transform a Shakespearean tragedy into a happy ending.
Stanley A. Weiss is chairman of Business Executives for National Security, an organization of U.S. business leaders. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune
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Posted
on 07-Sep-01 12:38 PM
By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune
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POKHARA, Nepal - Vishnu, the mountain guide, asked if I could carry a black plastic bag filled with something he had just bought from a woman in a stone hut. Some trekkers come to Nepal and hire a porter, I thought. Others become one. The idea immediately appealed to me.
It was the first day of a short hike in the Himalayas with my brother, Christian. The morning
clouds were dissipating and the stunning peaks of the Annapurna range becoming apparent.
Like thousands of other trekkers who come to the Himalayan kingdom, we had hired a guide to help us navigate the mountain trails. Vishnu was a middle-aged father of three who knew the area well. He had embarked on our two-day hike with an umbrella in one hand and a transistor radio in the other. No extra clothes, no backpack, no map. He tuned his radio to Nepali pop songs and a comedy show that elicited the occasional outburst of laughter.
I agreed to carry Vishnu's black plastic bag, but I must be honest: This was a less than heroic gesture. The bag was small and featherweight.
''What's inside?'' I asked.
Vishnu, who had already unzipped my backpack, ignored me.
My thoughts drifted back several years to a conversation in southern India that, according to the synapses firing in my brain, was somehow connected to our hike and the black plastic bag.
One night in Madras I had hired a bicycle rickshaw, those modified three-wheelers pedaled by men too skinny to be called fit. At the end of my ride I asked the rickshaw driver if I could pedal him around for a while: He would sit in the back of the three-wheeler, where the customer usually sits, and I would do all the work. After 20-odd years pedaling people around, I told him, he would finally see what it was like to be driven. The rickshaw driver was horrified. His refusal came with an expression that said: You are a foreigner who just doesn't understand his place.
Vishnu had finished stuffing the black plastic bag into my pack.
But before we could continue our trek, the woman in the stone hut called out. ''You like mariana?'' she asked.
Mariana?
We had been through Naudanda and Pothana, but I had no recollection of Mariana. Perhaps it was the small village up ahead.
''Yes,'' my brother said. ''It's a very nice place.''
By the time the woman in the stone hut had asked the question a second time, it became clear that Mariana was not a small, pretty village perched atop a Himalayan valley. I turned to our guide.
''Vishnu?'' I inquired. ''Did you put marijuana in my pack?''
Vishnu was sheepish. He answered without words, just guilty eyes. The marijuana was for his father, he said. ''He works in the fields, and at night he sometimes needs to relax.''
The notion of a Nepalese grandfather smoking through such a formidable stash was too much for my brother and me. It was our turn to laugh.
Good one, Vishnu.
My brother joked that Vishnu's purchase had come just one hour after we had passed through Pothana, which thereafter we pronounced ''POT-hana.'' A few minutes later, adding symbolism to our cannabis adventure, a caravan of mules passed by.
Marijuana is banned in Nepal, although you wouldn't know it from the number of shady men offering it on the streets of Kathmandu. My guidebook instructs potential smokers to ''keep the less than five star condition of Nepali jails firmly in mind.''
We never asked Vishnu what he really intended to do with the black plastic bag of pot - or the other bag of marijuana he picked up on the second day. Our guide had a tendency of going silent when asked pertinent questions. He had reluctantly agreed to take the marijuana out of my pack, but had trouble finding a spot to carry it.
He settled on folding it into his umbrella. We resumed our hike, Vishnu plodding along, transistor radio in one hand, bulging umbrella in the other: Two trekkers accompanied by a perverse, Himalayan Mary Poppins.
In this remote place not far from the top of the world, that magical nanny's parasol carried a mundane cargo found all over.
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Posted
on 07-Sep-01 04:45 PM
Mainstream parties made the call after an all-party meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba amid allegations that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was continuing extortion, intimidation and the public display of weapons to scare people.
Officials say that the rebels are trying to derail the peace process that began last month. The two sides are due to hold a fresh round of peace talks next week.
''The meeting strongly urges that all acts of force and pressure that could break the peace process must be stopped and talks should continue in a cordial atmosphere,'' Deuba's office said in a statement after the meeting.
It gave no details of the meeting which was expected to work out a common position ahead of the second round of talks with the rebels.
Last month, rebels demanded an interim government, a new constitution and a Communist republic during peace talks with the government to end the five-year-old Maoist insurgency that has taken more than 1,800 lives in the kingdom.
The government has not spelt out its position on the rebels' demands -- who model themselves on the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru -- but it has said the constitutional monarchy is beyond compromise.
Both sides have announced a truce and exchanged some prisoners. The government says the rebels must stop extortion and the public display of weapons to make the talks successful.
Deuba has urged the rebels to cancel plans for a public meeting in Kathmandu on September 21, fearing violence.
Former Prime Minister and chief of the ruling Nepali Congress party, Girija Prasad Koirala, said on Thursday the Maoist rebels were getting ''shelter'' in neighbouring India which shares a 1,580 km (987 miles) open border with Nepal.
Koirala, who resigned in July over Maoist crisis, also blamed new King Gyanendra for the failure of a military mission against the rebels.
Gyanendra came to the throne after Crown Prince Dipendra killed his parents and seven other members of the royal family on June 1.
Army personnel failed to rescue 70 policemen captured by the rebels in Rolpa in west Nepal amid allegations they had refused to take orders from the prime minister.
The military in Nepal is generally perceived to be more loyal to the king, who is the supreme commander of the army, than to the elected government.
The Nepali Defence Ministry urged the rebels in a statement on Friday to halt pressure on army personnel to quit their jobs and join the Maoists.
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
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