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NEPAL: Revolution Denied

Analysis by Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Apr 12 2006 (IPS) - Local news reports described a playful but determined crowd of thousands of Nepalis who sat down to occupy a road for five hours, singing, reciting poetry and, most importantly, stopping riot police and soldiers from entering their community.

Local news reports described a playful but determined crowd of thousands of Nepalis who sat down to occupy a road for five hours, singing, reciting poetry and, most importantly, stopping riot police and soldiers from entering their community.

But a visit to the town of Kirtipur 24 hours later found locals rushing to do their shopping before Tuesday’s curfew began and students in small groups on the narrow streets chatting. The only people sitting were clusters of blue-uniformed riot police with their canes and Plexiglas shields at their sides. Arriving hours before, they waited on doorsteps for the curfew, and protests, to start.

The revolution had not begun in the university town on the hill overlooking the Kathmandu Valley.

Certainly the most vigorous and sustained phase of the “movement” against the direct rule of King Gyanendra continues in Nepal’s capital of two million people and across this South Asian country. Local media reported 100 people arrested nation-wide on Wednesday and one protester killed by a police bullet in Nawalparasi, a six-hour drive southwest of Kathmandu. Four others sustained bullet injuries and 58 were wounded in police beatings, said Nepalnews.com.

But after six days of a general strike called by opposition political parties, the boycott of local elections in February and sporadic rallies of various sizes in the past 14 months to oppose the king’s rule, it appears that it will take days, if not weeks, more of sustained rebellion before the monarch steps down, or aside.

“This is maybe not the decisive tipping point,” says Roderick Chalmers, deputy South Asia Project Director at the International Crisis Group. The government “may ride out the next few days but it’s a bit of a ratchet process. You can’t go back to where you were a week ago,” he added in an interview here Wednesday.

And while several Nepalis have lost their lives in the struggle launched after the king jailed his own prime minister and seized power on Feb. 1, 2005, the alliance of political parties leading this campaign takes pains to point out that it is not marching hand-in-hand to the promised revolution with Nepal’s Maoist rebels.

After emerging from the dirt-poor western hills to toss homemade pressure-cooker bombs at government offices 10 years ago, the Maoists today control up to 80 percent of Nepal’s countryside and last week might have won a major victory when an army helicopter went down in the east. The rebels claimed they shot it from the sky while the military called it a “crash”.

The third force in the ongoing power struggle here, the Maoists set out to deliver justice to the downtrodden and to end the constitutional monarchy, earning them the “terrorist” label from a previous government. But, in November, their leaders conceded Nepal is not ripe for revolution and agreed to join the alliance of seven political parties (SPA) in the mainstream if the parties would deliver a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution for the country.

Yet after painstaking negotiations to deliver that deal, the parties insist it is merely an “understanding” as the king’s men threaten to also tag the parties “terrorists”. Even before the general strike started last week, ministers accused the SPA of letting the rebels into the movement, which the parties denied outright.

“There is no involvement (of the Maoists) in the on-going agitation. There has been no collaboration with them,” said Girija Prasad Koirala, leader of the leading Nepali Congress party. “We are accountable to our movement only,” he told the BBC’s Nepali service Monday.

But the government is insistent. “The Maoists have infiltrated in the movement – regardless of what party leaders say,” Information Minister Shrish Shumsher Rana told journalists Tuesday.

Rana also turned on Washington, which itself has moved sharply anti-king since last week. “King Gyanendra’s decision 14 months ago to impose direct palace rule in Nepal has failed in every regard,” said a U.S. Embassy statement issued Monday.

Daily, the number of associations and groups joining the opposition movement grows. On Tuesday, doctors and nurses at hospitals in Dharan in the east and Pokhara in the west rallied against the government while Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) closed its out-patient department in solidarity.

Tuesday night, TUTH staff scrambled to set up an overflow emergency department in a reception area to handle protesters wounded in a protest on the capital’s outskirts, where police and soldiers reportedly fired blanks and live rounds, wounding 70. White-coated employees ran with intravenous stands and climbed on benches to install fluorescent tubes for overhead lighting.

At one point, 14 patients lay on cots or on mats on the floor, many with arm or leg injuries apparently from being struck by police canes. Others had their heads wrapped in white bandages, including one young man who walked past the cots to the X-ray department, barefoot, his shirt-front covered in blood.

But among those slow to join protesters are locals in Kirtipur, according to one resident. “In 1990 (when huge street protests forced then King Birendra to grant multiparty democracy) it was bigger. Everyone came from their homes with whatever they could find to use as a weapon: knives, hoes, anything,” says Buddha Ratna Mali, a video editor at a production house in the town.

“Today it’s mostly the university students,” he added explaining that citizens distrust all politicians “because the leaders after 1990 were not good”.

According to Chalmers, “The problem with (the parties’) whole anti-regression campaign is that it does look self-serving. They’re saying ‘restore the house (of representatives); give us our jobs back and then we’ll get on with a few things’.”

What they should do, he adds, is lay out somewhat detailed plans that will inspire the public. The international community, for its part, can stop repeating the failed refrain that the “constitutional forces” must come together to talk.

“I’m not sure (the international community) could or should be decisive. But there’s certainly more they could do.this is a king who does not listen to statements – he can shrug them off.they need to give a very clear indication that there is no guarantee for the future of the monarchy,” he added.

Neena Gill, chairwoman of the European Parliament Delegation to South Asia, hinted at such a future Tuesday. “If EU appeals to the king to stop the bloodshed fall on deaf ears, then we will push the UN to take action,” she said in a statement.