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 Trekkers'
paradise
is Nepalis'
hell
By Julian Gearing
KATHMANDU -
There are a number of ways to break a person's legs.
Maoist guerrillas in Nepal often use rocks. They lay the
person down and smash the thighbones and shins. There is
no need to describe the pain felt by the victim. Or the
devastating effect crippling a person has in a
mountainous country where walking is often the only way
to get around. Breaking legs is a primitive but
effective way of sowing terror into the population.
How then do these Nepalese communists treat
well-off "decadent" Westerners trekking in Nepal's
mountain trails? In a strange irony, these insurgents
don't kidnap and torture such prime targets, or demand
ransom, as in the Philippines, nor do they break their
legs. Instead, they offer foreign visitors virtually VIP
treatment, though usually for a small mandatory fee.
Comrade Prachanda, the enigmatic Nepalese Maoist
leader, claims that he loves the Nepalese people. Yet
his "people's army" has a strange way of showing it.
It could only happen in the world's "greatest
trekking paradise", a country rich in idyllic mountains,
but dirt poor for the majority of the population. Since
49-year-old Comrade Prachanda, whose real name is Puspa
Kamal Dahal, began the communist insurgency aimed at
replacing the monarchy with "true people's democracy" in
1996, the conflict has claimed over 8,000 lives and
threatens to turn the poor Himalayan country into a
basket case. In Kathmandu, the capital, politicians
bicker and students agitate, while King Gyanendra
resolutely hangs on to power, having dissolved
parliament and assumed ruling powers on October 4, 2002.
It is often in the hills and mountains, the
tourists' trekking playground, where the crisis is most
acute. It is here that Prachanda's Maoists on the one
hand and the Nepalese army and police on the other excel
at torture and killing.
Yet, as one Kathmandu
restaurant owner put it, "Despite the troubles, the
tourists keep coming." While the number of arrivals has
dropped to about 270,000, down about 50 percent since
1996, and foreign embassies offer travel advisories
warning foreigners to be careful, tourists and climbers
still flock by the planeload to the land of Mount
Everest.
It is surreal. Privileged foreigners
visiting Nepal live in one world, the Nepalese people
live in another.
On the winding mountainous
trail from Tolka to Chomrong on the route up to the
Annapurna base camp, foreign trekkers occasionally run
into the foot soldiers of Prachanda's Maoist insurgency,
as well as in other trekking areas. Sheila, a trekker
from England, recalled the encounter she and her friends
had with two Maoists near Chomrong. "They were small
boys and looked worried and embarrassed when they asked
us for a trekking 'fee'," she said. "We guessed there
were men with guns in the surrounding forest, so we paid
the 200 rupee fee [about US$4.5]. And we got a receipt."
A few trekkers miss out and don't see sight or
sound of the Maoists. Others do worse than Sheila and
her friends. Rolph, a trekker from Holland, recalled his
party being stopped by a large group of armed Maoists
who asked them for 4,000 rupees each. The trekkers
bargained it down to 2,000 rupees. Climbers who were
about to climb Mount Makalu were forced to pay 10,000
rupees each in 2002. In the same year, eight trekkers in
the Everest region were evacuated by the authorities to
prevent their holiday from being ruined by gunfire.
Soldiers and Maoists were battling it out nearby. The
trekkers were airlifted by army helicopter from Lukla
airport's small landing strip in the high mountains to
Kathmandu, a thrill of a ride.
There have been a
few foulups. Some cases have been reported in which
trekkers were beaten because they refused to pay the men
and women with guns. Foreign embassy advisories suggest
not to resist the call for a "donation". And a British
army officer strolling in the hills recruiting Gurkha
soldiers for the British army was abducted in 2003, then
released, with profuse public apologies offered by
Maoist leader Prachanda. The British officer claimed he
was "well-treated" by his captors.
For foreign
tourists, a meeting with Maoists is usually a "big
adventure". This is something to tell the folks about
back home. Trekkers boast of being given a "People's
Liberation Army of Nepal" receipt - a note offering
thanks for the "donation to fight feudalism,
imperialism, expansionism and all types of
reactionaries". After all, the "encounters" are usually
polite and the "donation" is a small price to pay for
the pleasure of trekking in this mountain paradise.
Cruel justice
But for Kal Bahadur
Budha, Nepal was no paradise. Budha was born and raised
in Humla in the impoverished west of the country, the
Maoist heartland. In 2003, the 27-year-old farmer was
kidnapped by Maoists and taken to another villager after
he failed to persuade his brother to quit the police
force, following pressure from the insurgents. Villagers
were reportedly forced to watch as he dug a ditch.
According to press reports citing the captive audience,
when he refused to lie in the ditch, the Maoists chopped
off his legs and buried him alive. In another incident
reported by the press, 79-year-old Prabahang Kedem had
his head slowly cut off by rebels with a kukri knife in
front of his family, his last words a curse on his young
assailants. Eyewitnesses claim that after his head was
severed, his body was hacked into pieces. His crime?
Refusing to pay a donation to the Maoists.
Prachanda's war didn't start off this way. When
the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) rose out of the
splintering of the communist party movement in 1995
following the end of absolute monarchy and the beginning
of parliamentary democracy in 1990, the emphasis in the
countryside was on "winning hearts and minds". This was
not hard. Nepal lives under a pall of feudalism,
casteism, corruption and a chasm between the small
percentage of the rich and the masses, the poor. As one
foreign aid worker put it, life for the poor is "short,
brutish and ugly", especially in the hidden valleys
where people suffer "years of drudgery, backbreaking
labor, dirt, cold, disease and bites, and the rule of
the club or gun". As much as 75 percent of the
population live in the countryside, many close to or
below the poverty line, often at the beck and call of
landlords and the elite. Prachanda's Maoists have reason
to be angry with the landlords, the police and the
politicians.
The Maoists, under Prachanda and
the party's intellectual and ideology chief, Baburam
Bhattarai, were itching for more direct action following
the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist's
(CPN-UML) poor showing in elections in 1990. Building on
an already existing strata of support among the poor and
disenfranchised people in the country's most backward
region, the west, Prachanda and Bhattarai began their
"people's war" in 1996, a movement initially dismissed
in Kathmandu as "insignificant".
This was the
era of "father-like" Maoist village meetings where
political lectures on equality and the failings of
Nepal's feudal and corrupt elite were lapped up. Many
young people willingly flocked to the Maoist ranks. This
was the Maoism as seen in China in the 1930s under the
guidance of the communist guerrilla leader Mao Zedong, a
visionary helping and winning over the people.
But then more and more voices from the Nepalese
hills spoke of youngsters being forced at gun or
knifepoint to join. As the army and police stamped down
hard, the level of brutality ratcheted up on both sides.
Stories from human rights groups surfaced of villagers
being forced by the Maoists to act as cannon fodder in
attacks on police and army targets. Many are reported to
have lost their lives in suicidal attacks.
Evidence of Maoist brutality grew. Over the past
three years, many of the Maoist village meetings have
ended up resembling the "struggle sessions" of the
Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-76 or the "killing
fields" of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, 1975-79. According to
local sources, the victims were suspected transgressors
to the "cause" - small landowners, richer villagers,
teachers - or those who refused or were too poor to pay
the "tax" demanded.
The "trick" to sowing fear
into the population appears to be to gather together the
villagers to watch. In some cases, the victim's family
members were forced to inflict the punishment, an eerie
echo of the excesses when Chinese Red Guards forced
children to kill their parents. Young male and female
Maoists appear to be the main players in this
"purification". In one case two years ago, a teacher
became the taught when he was stabbed and hung in front
of his school pupils.
Nepalese journalist Puskar
Gautam says the brutality may partly be the result of
the fighters being out of the direct control of the
leaders and that in the massive recruiting, the correct
political ideology was not properly instilled. Other
commentators see the nod of Prachanda behind the
violence. There is discipline in the brutality. Thieves,
drinkers or gamblers, if caught, might lose a hand or
foot, according to reports. They are the fortunate. For
the unfortunate numbering in the hundreds, there is
torture, beatings and eventual murder. People have been
thrown off cliffs or tied down with rocks, then thrown
into the river. Others have been burnt, beheaded,
crucified or disemboweled. This "friendly and
hospitable" trekkers' heaven can change in a flash into
Dante's hell.
International human rights groups
point fingers at both sides in the conflict. Apart from
"the disappeared", those civilians who were said to have
been taken into custody by the authorities, but whose
whereabouts are now unknown, the survivors paint a
picture of savagery. Hospitals and clinics document the
injuries inflicted by Maoist's rocks, bullets and kukri
knives and the effects of beatings, torture and rape
carried out by the security forces. Patients with broken
legs are common. Some never walk again.
It is
not just the rich and middle class who are "terrified"
by the Maoists, or "Maobadi", as they are known in
Nepali. The poor fear both Maoists and security forces,
having to say yes to both, according to local observers.
Little wonder that thousands have fled the countryside
for the city of Kathmandu, into India, or into badly
paid menial servitude in the Middle East. For many
youngsters, it's a choice of fight for the Maoists or
flee.
Terror and tourism
For foreign
tourists flying into Kathmandu airport, it is hard to
get a handle on the situation. Travel agents say there
is a "little trouble" but it is "nothing to worry
about". On most days in the tourist season, Thamel, the
capital's tourist ghetto, is bustling with mostly
Western travelers in search of adventure, pizza and pie,
or good hash. The talk is of great trekking trails and
Maoist encounters.
Only when a bomb goes off or
a bandh, a strike, is called by Prachanda's
Maoists does the Hindu kingdom's capital take on the
persona of a city at war. Soldiers and police hunker
down with their rifles behind sandbags on street
corners, the normally clogged streets taking on the
appearance of a ghost town.
It is not just the
Maoists who bring normal life to a halt. Students,
teachers and others upset with the king, fed up with the
corruption, fed up with the bickering political parties,
and fed up with the killing, often take to the streets
to air their discontent. Shouts are raised. Stones are
thrown. Bullets or tear-gas canisters are fired. And
more casualties fill the hospital emergency wards.
For the tourists who find themselves confined to
their hotels and guesthouses at such times, the astute
read books describing the regicide of 2001. A good
choice is Massacre at the Palace: The Doomed Royal
Dynasty of Nepal by Jonathan Gregson. In it the
author documents how on June 1, 2001, Crown Prince
Dipendra ran amuck when his father, King Birendra,
refused to allow him to marry his sweetheart. The
drunken prince grabbed a shotgun and an M-16 assault
rifle and sprayed his family with gunfire before turning
a gun on himself. The king and queen died, as did seven
other members of the royal family. This wasn't the end
of the monarchy. Prince Gyanendra, viewed by many as the
black sheep of the family, took over as king.
This bloody event, and the arrival of a new
monarch, King Gyanendra, added to the growing chaos in
the country. Now, with millions of dollars' worth of
United States military aid being given to the
government, and with US military advisors to combat what
is now post-September 11 called the "terrorist" threat,
the scene is being set for more confrontation.
Nepal is at war with itself as it struggles to
enter the 21st century. If Comrade Prachanda has his
way, he will take the country back to "year zero". In a
rare interview in 1999 with Li Onesto, a journalist from
the leftist Revolutionary Worker publication, Prachanda
talked of the inspiration Nepal's communist movement
gained from Mao's communist victory in China in 1949 and
the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He said he followed
Mao's path in developing a mass class struggle in the
countryside. "We came to understand Mao's vision that
the backward rural areas will be the real basin of the
revolution," he said.
In this interview, the
elusive Prachanda paraphrased Mao's thoughts on war,
saying: "People usually think that war is very
destructive, war is very bad, it kills people ... But
people do not understand that war is a great process of
construction. War has a very big cleansing effect."
Yet the level of brutality and destruction
pursued by Prachanda's forces appears to eclipse that of
the young Mao. In addition to the human artery cutting
and bone breaking, Nepal's limited infrastructure has
been targeted. Blowing up bridges is understandable. But
the breaking of irrigation channels, the destruction of
electricity solar panels, and the burning or closing of
schools in a country with a 55 percent literacy rate and
a fragile agricultural economy makes little sense,
according to local people.
This is "Prachanda's
Path", as the Maoist leadership now calls it. It bears
the handiwork of Maoist intellectual Bhattarai, but it
owes a major part of its thrust and inspiration to the
Shining Path, the Maoist insurgents in Peru, and their
leader Abimael Guzman's vision. Journalists' reports
indicate Peruvian advisors from Sendero Luminoso trained
Prachanda's fighters in the earlier stages of the war,
though much of the support appears to come from
sympathetic leftist rebel groups in India, where the
Nepalese rebel leaders spend much of their time. As
Prachanda is reported to have said: "There was
international involvement right from the beginning."
In the 1980s, Peru's Shining Path was the
international flag-bearer of Maoism. Guzman's brutal
insurgency, and the Peruvian government's response, led
to over 27,000 deaths in just over a decade and to the
kidnapping of tourists. But with Guzman captured and
sentenced to life in 1992, Prachanda appears to now be
promoted as the new Mao. As Prachanda reportedly said:
"A new wave of world revolution is beginning, because
imperialism is facing a great crisis," adding, "our
people's war may be a spark, a spark for a prairie
fire." Prachanda's Path is also being promoted in effect
as "Prachanda's Thoughts", just as Mao ended up putting
over his message in his little red book, The Thoughts
of Mao Zedong.
Yet in China, Maoism is dead,
the body of its leader Mao lying in his mausoleum in
Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The "worship" of Mao is
just a cult, devoid of ideology, just as the
international commercialization of Argentina's communist
folk hero Che Guevara is just a T-shirt image with no
body. Those Chinese people who are old enough prefer to
put behind them the bitter memories of Mao's Chinese
Cultural Revolution, an orgy of madness and killing that
followed the leader's abortive attempts to
"revolutionize" agriculture and industry. Mao generated
millions of tons of useless scrap iron, millions of
deaths from starvation, and countless deaths and trauma
due to his Red Guards' frenzy. Bar a few leftist
hardliners, China's leadership, rightly or wrongly, has
embraced capitalism and the mantra of the late reformist
communist party leader Deng Xiaopeng that "to get rich
is glorious". Beijing now thumbs its nose at Prachanda.
Chinese border guards eject Nepalese Maoist guerrillas
if they trespass over the mountainous border into the
Tibetan Autonomous Region and China's leaders back the
Nepal government line against the Maoist guerrillas.
Prachanda is trying to succeed where others have
failed. As was made clear in his interview with
journalist Onesto, he rails against "revisionism", the
backtracking of communist leaders who lose sight of the
ideals of communism and "desert the revolution".
Communism is dying around the world not because the
basic ideology or philosophy is unachievable or wrong.
It has collapsed because of the failings of its leaders,
the worst examples being Russia's Joseph Stalin,
Cambodia's Pol Pot and, ironically, China's Mao.
Yet failings of these leaders cannot be put down
to the Nepalese leader's hated "revisionism". For him,
Mao remains a hero. These revolutionaries failed because
of their ego, fanaticism, virtual madness. Today,
Prachanda is the leader of one of the most prominent,
yet small, communist movements in the world still
doggedly hanging on to a vision of a proletarian Utopia.
But Prachanda may ultimately have to pay the price of
excess. The Maoist grip is slipping.
He and
Bhattarai have unleashed a level of brutality that is
traumatizing the Nepalese people and destroying the
minds of many of the younger generation, people say.
Talk on the streets in Kathmandu is that Prachanda's
"people's war" is out of control. Stop the killing, stop
the fear, is the call.
For Prachanda, squeezing
the genie back into the bottle would be tough. Amid the
chaos of Nepal's politics, the political parties have
called for the Maoist leader to put down the gun and for
his communist splinter party to reenter the democratic
arena. Yet his fighters would feel betrayed by a
softening of the Maoist line, says one observer. As
Nepal's capital is beset by political shadow plays,
intrigue and back-stabbing, the tension is rising and
rumors circle, including one in which the king is said
to be trying to cut a deal with the Maoists to undercut
the other political parties.
For the tourists,
the intrigue will pass them by. Nepal remains for them a
great place for temples and lofty mountains. They can
rest easy. The kid gloves treatment of these foreign
guests by Prachanda's Maoists, claims journalist Gautam,
is because these communists are concerned about their
"international" image and their place in the vanguard of
the international Maoist struggle.
But Nepalese
may wonder why "people's leader" Prachanda does not
treat the Nepalese people with such care.
Julian Gearing has covered conflicts
in Asia, including in Afghanistan, India and Iraq, for
over 20 years.
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