RIGHTS-NEPAL: Displaced Await Action

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, May 12 2005 (IPS) - The United Nations labelled it a ”pre-crisis”, yet no one in Nepal appears to know what to do next.

One month ago a U.N. team spent 10 days in this country assessing the lives of tens of thousands of people who have fled their homes during nearly a decade of battles between the army and Maoist insurgents.

The mission concluded that those internally displaced people (IDPs) ”have been largely overlooked and neglected.”

”There has been no coherent assistance and protection response, either from the government or from national or international organisations,” reported the U.N. representative on the human rights of IDPs, Walter Kalin, at a press conference after the mission.

”The problem can be addressed while the situation is still not out of control,” he added.

Yet today none of the main actors in this South Asian nation – the many U.N. and other international agencies based in the capital Kathmandu, local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or the government – seem ready to take the lead in helping people like Ram Gopal Tamoli.

Though security forces in Banke have deterred all but a handful of bombings and shootings during the increasingly violent uprising that has killed more than 11,000 Nepalis, Tamoli still feels uneasy. He told IPS that even in Banke’s heavily guarded district headquarters capital he feared for his safety.

Sitting in the bare office of the Maoist Victims Association in downtown Kathmandu he said the group’s 25,000 members were surviving thanks to help from friends and relatives or from strangers who gave them money when they pleaded for funds going from door- to-door.

U.N. officials ”came here; they interviewed us, but now” – he turns his hands palms up to emphasise the point – ”nothing.”

Nor has the government assisted the group’s members, who have seen husbands killed, family members’ limbs chopped off and their houses looted, added Tamoli as a half-dozen middle-aged men and women sat in the room listening.

Nepal’s government in 2001 created a fund for conflict victims – those targeted by Maoists not by security forces – but it stopped distributing money in 2002. Last October the previous administration promised 1.4 million rupees (20,086 U.S. dollars) but again reserved it for victims of Maoist atrocities, according to a report by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR).

”Narrow definitions such as those used by the government, becomes a deterrent to those sections of the population who have become advertently or inadvertently the victims of state action, justified or not,” adds the report, which focuses on IDPs who migrated to Kathmandu and Birendranagar, district headquarters of mid-western Surkhet district.

Kalin’s mission found, ”a large majority of IDPs have not been registered by the authorities because of several factors, including a restrictive process, a general fear of IDPs to declare themselves and the movement of many conflict-induced displaced persons across the border in India.”

Nepal is surrounded by India to the south, east and west and by China (including Tibet) to the north.

On Feb. 1 King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah fired the government for corruption and incompetence in dealing with the Maoist crisis. He imposed a state of emergency, suspending most constitutional rights. On Apr. 30, however, the ruler ended the emergency but he retained power and many dissidents arrested in the past 100 days remain behind bars.

According to SAFHA’s report, ”Specific assistance needs to be provided to (IDP) women … Many of the women we met have become de facto household heads and are totally disoriented and bewildered about how to manage their lives and take on the sudden responsibilities of managing households.”

Young people also need special attention, adds the document, ‘A Pilot Survey on Internally Displaced Persons in Kathmandu and Birendranagar’, published in March. ”According to the young girls we met, there are many girls who have left the villages and continue to leave. They are not sure where these girls eventually land up.”

”Most are not able to go home for fear of again being pressurised to join the Maoists and that their visit may escalate problems for their families.”

The U.N. mission found that some villages have lost 80 percent of their young people.

On Tuesday the SAFHR report’s author, Deep Ranjani Rai, said she hopes the U.N. steering agency in Nepal will take the lead and respond to the IDPs’ needs but added, ”I’m not really sure anything will come of (the mission) so quick.”

The U.N. Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in Kathmandu, did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

An official at one local NGO says he is hopeful more will now be done for IDPs because after Kalin’s mission, ”the U.N. agencies in Kathmandu … have started listening. They are discussing the issue,” added Dilli Raman Dhakal, executive chairman of the Community Study and Welfare Centre (CSWC).

But he disagrees with the U.N.’s estimate of 100,000-200,000 IDPs in the country.

”The real number you’ll find when you visit the hinterland, visit house to house,” Dhakal told IPS. ”Visit at least one VDC (village development committee). Visit at least 20 houses (and they will tell you who has left). People are leaving very quietly. They are trickling down. They quietly leave the country and once they cross the border (into India) they are not recognised as IDPs.”

CSWC estimates that there could be anything from one to 1.2 million IDPs in Nepal.

A government official counters that the figure ”cannot be more than 15,000,” but that just over half that number have actually registered at government offices. Most people on the move are economic migrants, who have long been lured by the open border with India, he adds.

The official agreed that talks between the government and the Kalin mission were tense. ”They (the U.N.) had a pre-conceived notion of IDPs, of everything … that (the situation) is very chaotic and people are suffering very much.”

That described the situation in one hotspot, where vigilantes – with officials’ backing – had earlier killed dozens of alleged Maoists, but nowhere else in the country, he adds.

While Kalin reported that government officials told him they are developing a new policy on IDPs, the ministry of local development, which shares responsibility for the displaced with the home ministry, has set aside no money for them in the upcoming budget, according to the official who talked to IPS.

SAFHR’s Rai said the government and agencies must realise that IDPs are no longer a short-term problem. ”I don’t think the government should daydream about the people going back to their villages…the young definitely aren’t going back, they told us.”