Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS-NEPAL: ‘You Are Being Watched’, Warns UN Official

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU , Feb 18 2006 (IPS) - Nepal’s government should know that the country’s human rights performance is being watched especially closely prior to the March meeting of the United Nations human rights body, said its representative in the South Asian country on Friday.

There is “greater international concern (over Nepal) than at any time since Feb. 1, 2005”, when King Gyanendra took power in a bloodless palace coup, Ian Martin told a discussion at the Nepal Bar Association in the capital Kathmandu.

In part that is because of the recent jailing of hundreds of political party leaders, workers and other activists prior to local elections Feb. 8. “It would be very much in the interest of the government to ensure that there are no (such) prisoners held by the time the commission meets,” Martin added.

But the human rights landscape here was bleak even before those arrests, leading Martin’s office to ask for special permission to write an extra-long report to the Commission (25 pages).

“Nepal has experienced gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law committed by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in the course of its insurgency and by security forces in the state’s response,” says the document.

The report focuses in part on rights violations committed during fighting in the uprising that Maoist rebels launched against the state exactly 10 years ago. At least 13,000 people, most of them innocent villagers caught in the crossfire, have died as a result, thousands more have been injured and tens or even hundreds of thousands of villagers are internally displaced, having fled their homes to district towns or Nepal’s few cities.

Life improved slightly after the Maoists declared a unilateral ceasefire from Sep. 3, 2005 to Jan. 3, 2006, but the move was dismissed by King Gyanendra as a rebel tactic to heal their wounded and re-arm. Since then, they have launched some of their most daring and deadly assaults yet.

“It is a tragedy for the people of Nepal that full-scale conflict has now resumed,” said Martin on Friday. The evidence of that is all too evident in the country’s villages, home to about 80 percent of the country’s 25 million people.

“Please don’t show our faces in your photos. We don’t want to be identified,” said a shirtless villager standing on the bare ground in front of his house a week ago, just 50 metres from Nepal’s east-west highway and the charred shells of two troop carriers destroyed in an attack by Maoist rebels two days earlier.

After a four-hour drive west, another family in another village in south-central Nepal explained how their 18-year-old daughter was killed when she cycled too close to a drunk man trying to pull a Maoist flag from a booby-trapped pile of stones blocking the road.

Sorrow and fear reverberated through the tiny village, where chickens roamed freely around one-storey clay houses and water buffaloes tethered in wooden pens munched on piles of hay. “We have closed the school temporarily because many parents stopped sending their children,” said a local teacher.

According to Martin “we now see greater efforts by both sides in the conflict to respect their human rights obligations,” but as he and his office’s report stated repeatedly, many commitments are yet to become reality.

“There have been regular reports of killings by the Royal Nepali Army (RNA), which it states were deaths during encounters instigated by Maoists. OHCHR-Nepal was unable to determine the circumstances of most individual killings, but noted the lack of RNA casualties during what RNA (called) attacks on regular patrols by armed Maoists,” says the document.

It also singles out violations by the rebels: “Reported killings of civilians by Maoists included the apparent execution on Sep. 11, 2005 of Navraj Thapaliya in Gorkha District after he had been accused of spying. Laxmi Yadav, who had earlier surrendered to the RNA, was shot dead on Oct. 3, 2005 in Rautahat District.”

The report condemns the arrests of hundreds of dissidents demonstrating against a ban on rallies enacted prior to municipal elections, the first step on the king’s roadmap to democracy. Only 20 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, which were boycotted by the main political parties and held during a Maoist-called general strike.

Those detentions are “another serious blot on Nepal’s human rights record”, said Martin. Reacting to growing calls for the world community to impose sanctions against the government he said, “it’s for those governments that make up the (Human Rights) Commission to decide”.

The release of the human rights report appeared to be a further blow to the king’s government in an especially bad week. On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that an anti-corruption agency created by the regime after Feb. 1 was unconstitutional. The body, which had been given powers to investigate, try and decide the guilt of accused persons, in July jailed former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba for two years.

This week Deuba and others found guilty of alleged corruption over a dam-building project walked free. But according to some observers, the move might have been orchestrated by the government in a bid to enhance its image in the international arena.

Dozens of prisoners jailed prior to the elections were also ordered released by the Supreme Court this week, including 37 on Friday.