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Another dirty little US war in
Nepal?
By Conn Hallinan
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
More than 8,000 Nepalese
have died since a civil war broke out in 1996, and the
death rate has sharply increased with the arrival of
almost 8,400 US M-16 submachine-guns, accompanied by
United States advisers, high-tech night-fighting
equipment and British helicopters.
For most
Americans, Nepal, birthplace of the Buddha and home to
Everest, the world's highest mountain, is a charming
tourist haven. For the native Nepalese, 42 percent of
whom, according to the World Bank, live below the
poverty line, Nepal is a land enchained by caste, riven
with ethnic rivalries and dominated by a feudal landlord
class.
The central protagonists in the current
war are King Gyanendra, who abolished an elected
parliament last year, the Communist Party of Nepal
(Maoist) (CPNM), which is leading a rural insurrection
or "people's war", and a group of five political parties
that found themselves out in the cold when the monarchy
took over.
The administration of US President
George W Bush has concluded that the civil war threatens
to make Nepal a "failed state" and a haven for
international terrorists, leading it to place the CPNM
on the State Department's "Watch List", along with such
organizations as al-Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf and Lebanon's
Hezbollah.
US Ambassador to Nepal Michael E
Malinowski compares CPNM leader Baburam Bhattarai to
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Malinowski,
whose track record includes service in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, advocates an all-out military offensive aimed
at the insurgency, and recently told the New York Times
that the CPNM "literally have to be bent back to the
table".
But it was the Nepalese government's
attempt to crush rural unrest that set off the civil war
in the first place, and virtually no one thinks there is
a military solution to the insurrection. "The government
forces, under the present policies, could win a couple
of battles here and there," writes analyst Romeet Kaul
Watt in the Kashmir Tribune, "but will never win the
war."
Roots of war
The present war
finds its roots in both the ongoing poverty of a nation
that is 85 percent rural and the failure of the
government to institute land-reform measures after the
restoration of representative government in 1990.
King Mahendra, father of the present king,
dismissed an elective government in 1960. He ruled until
his death in 1972, when his son, King Birendra, took
over, and eventually restored democracy. But when
conditions did not improve in rural areas, peasants
began agitating against onerous rents. The government
responded by sending the military into the countryside -
Operation Romeo and Operation Kilo Sera II - that did
little more than radicalize poor farmers and recruit
members for the CPNM.
The war, like most civil
wars, has been brutal. While most of the civilian deaths
are attributed to government forces, Amnesty
International accuses both sides of "unlawful criminal
deaths". The CPNM has assassinated government supporters
and police, and occasionally bombed the capital
Kathmandu. The government has "disappeared" opponents,
razed villages and executed CPNM members and their
supporters.
Over the past two years, the Royal
Nepal Army has beefed itself up to 72,000, but it isn't
large enough to win a war against the CPNM's 4,000 core
members and 15,000 or so militia supporters. In any
case, most of the army is concentrated near Kathmandu.
However, with the recent influx of US M-16s,
Belgian FAL submachine-guns and British helicopters, the
army has grown more aggressive, and death rates have
climbed. A government massacre of 19 villagers set off
the latest round of fighting. In the first month after
the collapse of a seven-month ceasefire, civilian deaths
tripled. According to the Nepalese human-rights group
Informal Sector Service Center, 800 of the 1,100 deaths
since the end of the ceasefire have been inflicted by
government forces.
A major culprit in the
escalating death rate is the appearance of modern
assault rifles, the real "weapons of mass destruction".
Since 1990, more than 5 million people have died
in wars around the globe, upwards of 90 percent of them
from AK-47s, M-16s, FALs, German G3s and Israeli Uzis.
According to the Red Cross, more than 60 percent of
civilian casualties are caused by submachine-guns, and
the United Nations Development Program estimates that
small arms kill 300,000 people a year.
Modern
assault rifles are far more deadly than the previous
generations of weapons because they combine rapid-fire
power with high-velocity ammunition. The combination of
rounds per minute (RPM) - the AK-47 delivers 600 RPM,
the M-16 up to 950 RPM - and the enormous speed of the
bullets is a deadly one. Fatalities from wounds have
skyrocketed, particularly in places where medical care
is primitive.
At US$13.3 billion a year, the
United States is the No 1 arms dealer in the world, far
ahead of the Russians ($5 billion) and the French ($1
billion). The bulk of that - $8.6 billion - goes to
developing countries such as Nepal.
Small,
savage wars
Besides killing and wounding
civilians, these small but savage wars inflict enormous
indirect damage. Studies on Cambodian and Bosnian
refugees by Richard F Mollica, a psychiatry professor at
Harvard Medical School, found that more than two-thirds
suffered from clinical depression and almost 40 percent
from post-traumatic stress disorders.
But
efforts to curb the small-arms trade have met with stiff
resistance. A recent proposal by Canada to ban the sale
of small arms to "non-state actors" was derailed by the
Americans, who have used such forces as an extension of
foreign policy in such places as Afghanistan and Central
America.
America's ally in the Nepalese civil
war hardly fits the alleged aim of promoting democracy
the Bush administration talks so much about. One of King
Gyanendra's first acts was to dismiss the elected
government of premier Sher Bahadur Dueba for alleged
"incompetence" on October 4, 2002.
Kathmandu has
been the focus of demands for democracy and the
reinstatement of parliament ever since, including one
demonstration that drew 8,000 in late December. The
Nepalese daily Rajdhani reported on January 25 that the
five political parties had thrown their support behind a
growing student movement demanding a republic. According
to Rajdhani, "The parties decided to support protests of
women, laborers, farmers, intellectuals and different
professional organizations as well."
Krishna
Sitaula, central committee member of the Nepal Congress
Party, warned that the attempt by the king to impose an
autocracy would backfire and hinted that the
insurrection in the countryside and the protests in the
cities might have common ground. "Right now, the country
is moving towards a republic," he said, adding: "Maoists
will give up violence and join us in the movement."
Whether the CPNM would actually do that remains unclear.
The US has once again aligned itself with
absolutism in its "war on terror", a war that is not
only costing Nepalese lives but has wrecked the economy
and tanked the lucrative tourist trade. For the second
year in a row, the Nepalese economy shrank.
It
is also heating up an area of the world with explosive
potential. Nepal borders both India and China (Tibet).
Both generally support the royalist forces, but neither
is too happy about the growing US involvement. According
to Asia Times Online (Nepal attracts US attention, to India's
dismay, August 13, 2003), last summer Indian Foreign
Secretary Kanwai Sibal warned against "outside
assistance" to Nepal, and the Indian press is grumbling
about the US ignoring a 1950 friendship agreement - one
that greatly favors India - between New Delhi and
Kathmandu. Publicly, India and China have soft-pedaled
their opposition to US intervention, but if the war
expands, it could spill over into both countries. Tibet
is restless under Beijing 's rule, and northern India
has a number of long-standing separatist movements.
According to US reports, the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) is exploring ways to
add another $14 million in "insurgency relevant" aid to
the $17 million in current US military aid. USAID was
one of the main funnels for the US government's support
for the South Vietnamese regime.
While it seems
a stretch to compare Vietnam to Nepal , replace
"terrorism" with "communism" and the parallels are
disturbingly similar. In his book In Retrospect,
former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara admitted
that the United States was "wrong, terribly wrong",
about Vietnam. He recently told Doug Saunders of the
Canadian daily Globe and Mail pretty much the same thing
about the US in Iraq: "It's just wrong what we're doing.
It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's
economically wrong.?
One can only hope that 30
years from now we don't read similar words about US
intervention in Nepal.
Conn
Hallinan, connm@cats.ucsc.edu,
is a provost at the University of California at Santa
Cruz and a political analyst for Foreign Policy in
Focus.
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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