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2 Nepal leaps into the
unknown By Dhruba Adhikary
to publicize the fact that they
have sympathizers within the army. After all, one
of their goals is to have their cadres integrated
into Nepal's national army.
Koirala, whose
current status is that of the head of a caretaker
government, has publicly assured Maoists that he
will form an interim government (to match the
interim constitution and interim legislature) by
February 4, anticipating that the ongoing work to
store Maoist weapons in designated containers and
assemble
their combatants inside
special camps would be completed by that time.
And this is where snags have surfaced:
Maoists do not want United Nations monitors to
give access to the media because visualization of
the process would send message to the grassroots
that Maoists have surrendered their arms and
armies.
Sources close to the official
security apparatus say Maoists have exaggerated
the data about the weapons in their possession and
combatants under their command. What they were
doing in recent days was to procure locally
assembled guns and bring in abducted high-school
boys and girls to be registered as their
combatants. Maoist leaders have been claiming that
their People's Liberation Army has a strength of
35,000 members.
One person who has
contested the latest Maoist maneuvers is
Ambassador James Moriarty of the United States,
which has not removed the terrorist tag from the
Maoists. "They are trying to buy primitive,
hand-made weapons down in [the neighboring Indian
state of] Bihar so that they can put crummy
weapons into the containers instead of the modern
weapons," he told journalists on Friday.
Moriarty also alluded to a big recruitment
drive Maoists conducted in November. Political
analysts were flabbergasted when Moriarty's
observations were contradicted on Saturday not by
Maoists but by Home Affairs Minister Krishna
Prasad Sitaula. He called a press conference on
Saturday, a public holiday, and said: "The
government does not believe that Maoists have
purchased arms from India ... and [will] not run
after any statement made by any diplomat or
groups." It is incredible to hear a government
minister speaking like a Maoist spokesman, quipped
an official who did not want to be named.
In fact, Sitaula conveniently ignored
violent incidents where Maoist guerrillas have
flashed their weapons in the midst of unarmed
crowds and also used them to kill civilians. In an
incident reported from Lahan, in the southeast
region, Maoists clashed with a rival crowd in
which a person was killed and several others were
wounded. More than 100 "security personnel",
carrying AK-47 and M16 rifles, escorted Prachanda
when he made a fleeting visit to Dolakha, a hill
district to the east, a couple of weeks ago.
Several Kathmandu residents have said they
have seen private houses and unoccupied public
inns on the outer parts of the road ringing the
city being occupied by armed personnel. They are
mobilized to launch quick strikes in the capital.
On Thursday, Maoist leader Prachanda
issued a statement formally dissolving all
local-level structures of the "people's
government" and "people's court". Earlier, the
Maoist leadership issued circulars to their local
units to reopen police posts. But reports coming
from across the country show that abductions,
beatings and extortion have not stopped. The
Maoists' sincerity is facing a hard test.
"Maoists will not be able to establish
political legitimacy if the power they gained
through weapons did not get endorsed at the
people's level," editor Yubraj Ghimire wrote in
Samaya, a Nepali weekly.
Although Maoists
do appear as a formidable force, an immediate
Maoist takeover is not likely. What looks more
probable is a prospect of an ascendance to power
by a communist front. In the interim legislature,
Maoists with 83 seats can forge an alliance with
the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified
Marxist-Leninist), which also has a strength of
83. The total, 166, represents a simple majority
in the House of 330. If they decide to work in
tandem, they can snatch power from non-communist
groups immediately. The leftist front would be
even stronger if smaller left-wing parties agreed
to lend their support to Maoist-UML group.
In the real world, however, unity among
left-wing parties has not been easy. The
personalities of individual leaders have often
clashed, producing rival factions. There was one
communist party in Nepal in the early 1950s; now
there are more than a dozen groups, and not all of
them have representation in the Parliament.
Maoists are just the latest and the most potent
one that has suddenly become a real rival of the
UML.
Unity among leftist parties, said UML
spokesman Pradip Nepal recently, "is impossible
due to Maoists". What has made the UML - and the
rest of the political groups - unhappy is the
Maoist policy of continuing to terrorize people
even after entering Parliament.
Dhruba Adhikary, who has been a
Dag Hammarskjold fellow, is a Kathmandu-based
journalist.
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