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Nepal - cleaning up the
mess
By Conn Hallinan
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
While the United States, India and Great
Britain have sharply condemned the February1 coup
by King Gyanendra of Nepal, the policies of those
three governments vis-a-vis the ongoing civil war
in the Himalayan nation must share considerable
blame for the present crisis. Declaring a state of
emergency, the king placed the leaders of Nepal's
political parties, as well as Prime Minister Sher
Bahadur Deuba, under house arrest. Gyanendra also
suspended constitutional rights to freedom of
speech, assembly, and a free press, and authorized
preventive detention.
The purported
rationale for the takeover was the inability of
the Deuba government to end the nine-year
insurgency by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist
(CPN-M) and the failure to organize parliamentary
elections. Nepal has not had a parliament since
the king dissolved it in 2002. But the real reason
appears to be a chimera, a fantasy that the
government can win a military victory over the
CPN-M.
It is an illusion fueled in large
part by an avalanche of modern weaponry, plus
military training that has poured into the country
from India, the US and Britain. More than 12,000
US M-16s, 5,000 Belgium FLN sub-machine guns and
some 20,000 rifles from India have filled the arms
coffers of the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) since 2001.
Britain has added helicopters armed with machine
guns and rockets. The size of the RNA has grown
from 50,000 to 73,000 and is due to reach 80,000
next year. If one counts the police, royalist
forces now number 138,000. While the insurgent
forces are small - 4,000 core soldiers and about
15,000 supporters - virtually no independent
observers believe the central government can
defeat them because the roots of the war are in
the social and economic poverty of the nation.
Poverty and violence
Nepal is
the 12th poorest country in the world, where,
according to the World Bank, 42% of the population
lives below the poverty line. The Asian
Development Bank estimates that the annual
national income is just $241 per capita.
The civil war, which has claimed some
11,000 lives, has been an ugly one, the brutality
of which has sharply escalated with the recent
influx of arms and counterinsurgency training.
Over 800 people died this past December alone.
According to Amnesty International, there
has also been a "dramatic escalation" in the
number of "disappearances", some 378 in just the
past year, more than in the previous five years
combined. Amnesty has called on government
security forces to halt the practice and to stop
blocking investigations into the disappearances by
the courts and Nepal 's Human Rights Commission.
Amnesty also charges widespread use of torture and
extrajudicial executions by the RNA and the
police.
While the majority of deaths have
come at the hands of government forces, both sides
engage in murder and intimidation, and the CPN-M
has been accused of forced recruiting in the
countryside.
The coup was roundly
denounced by the king's foreign allies. "These
developments constitute a serious setback to the
cause of democracy in Nepal and cannot but be a
cause of grave concern for India," said a
statement by India 's Foreign Ministry shortly
after the takeover. India also pulled out of a
meeting of the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation in Dhaka to protest the coup,
effectively torpedoing the summit. US State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Bush
administration was "deeply troubled by the
apparent step back from democracy" and called for
an "immediate move toward restoring of multiparty
democratic institutions". The British government
expressed similar sentiments.
But while
the king's allies appeared genuinely distressed at
this latest development, it should hardly come as
a surprise. Back in early December, The Economist
was predicting a coup and provided a virtual
blueprint for what happened on February 1. Citing
the arming and training of the RNA by India and
the US, the editors wrote:
This [the foreign military aid]
helps contain the Maoist threat. But it also
bolsters those in the king's camp who think that
a military victory is possible and might be
easier if the trappings of democracy were
jettisoned. The information minister, seen as
the king's man in the cabinet, has dropped hints
of a more "authoritarian" government. Many
human-rights activists and politicians in
Kathmandu expect the king and the army to assume
more direct power and, blaming the war, suspend
many civil liberties. On February 4,
Reuters reported that the RNA chief of staff said
the coup was aimed at forcing the Maoist
insurgents back to the negotiating table. As the
arrest of trade union and political leaders
continued in Kathmandu, the army chief said, "Now
we can solely go after the Maoists in a
single-minded manner without having to worry about
what's going to happen on the streets, people's
agitation." The comment on how to negotiate with
the Maoists echoed a statement made last year by
former US Ambassador Michael Malinowski that the
CPN-M "literally have to be bent back to the
table".
War on terror redux?
The Bush administration sees the Nepal
insurgency as another domino in its international
war on terrorism, arguing that the country could
become a "failed state" and hence a haven for
terrorists. The CPN-M has been placed on the State
Department's "Watch List", along with al-Qaeda,
Abu Sayyaf, and Hezbollah.
While the White
House claims this is about "terrorism", there are
suspicions in the region that American involvement
is also part of an overall US plan to ring China
with military bases and regimes friendly, or at
least beholden, to Washington.
India is
deeply involved in Nepal, in part because Nepal
borders long-time adversary China, in part because
of its own internal "war on terrorism". India has
stepped up counter-insurgency operations against
what it calls "Naxalites" (India's term for Maoist
or communist insurgents) in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh,
Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra
Pradesh. In a speech last year, former Indian home
minister Lai Krishna Advani said, "Maoists of
Nepal are trying to create trouble in India and
the central government will initiate immediate
steps to launch a stringent action to end existing
relations between the Maoists of Nepal and the
Indian Naxalites."
While it is true that
Nepal's Maoists occasionally use India as a haven,
there is no evidence of any serious cooperation or
coordination between any of these groups. The
Indian insurgencies are driven more by local
conditions than by any pan-Indian collusion with
Nepal Maoists. And in any case, the groups don't
share a common ideology, political program, or
even goals. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party,
of which Advani was a founder, went down to be
defeated in the last Indian election, but there is
no indication that New Delhi has altered its
policies vis-a-vis Nepal or its own internal
insurgent movements.
India recently
arrested Mohan Vaidya in Darjeeling, West Bengal ,
the number three person in the CPN-M, and turned
him over to the Kathmandu authorities. The CPN-M
retaliated by attacking some Indian-owned oil
tankers near the Uttar Pradesh border, and trying
to whip up a nationalist campaign that India
intends to invade Nepal . The Maoists have even
been building fortified trenches on the border to
repel such an invasion, although it is a very
unlikely scenario.
Next steps
The coup puts the king firmly back in
power, which will undoubtedly ramp up the war in
the countryside. However, besides adding to the
list of dead, wounded and disappeared, such
escalation is unlikely to alter the present
stalemate. Breaking that deadlock will be almost
impossible unless two things happen.
Firstly, an immediate embargo on arms and
training for the RNA by the US, India and Britain.
While Washington and New Delhi warn that such an
embargo could mean victory for the CPN-M, no
serious independent analyst thinks that the
Maoists can overthrow the government by force of
arms. And secondly, mediation by either
independent parties, or the United Nations.
Some Scandinavian nations have already
proposed UN intervention, as has the Asian Human
Rights Commission. In a recent statement, the Hong
Kong-based rights group said, "If no serious
intervention is made at this stage by the United
Nations and the international community to stop
the escalation of violence, a bloodbath could
easily take place while the movement of the people
and news is restricted."
It is a step the
Maoists favor, but which the US and the Indians
oppose. The former do so because of the Bush
administration's reflexive hostility to the world
body; the Indians because they fear external
mediation might be used to address their own
insurgent movements and the ongoing crisis in
Kashmir.
These countries have intervened
in Nepal 's civil war for reasons having to do
with their own internal affairs, foreign policy
strategies and political ideologies, not because
any of them are overly concerned with the welfare
of the Nepalese. In the name of a jihad on
"terrorism", or paranoia about their own internal
insurgents, they have nursed the pinion of
military aid. Can they really be surprised when
that pinion finally impels the steel of a military
coup?
Conn Hallinan is a foreign
policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and a
lecturer in journalism at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
(Posted with
permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) |
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