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NEPAL: Peace Comes Piecemeal for NGO Workers

Marty Logan

BAJURA DISTRICT, Aug 18 2006 (IPS) - A tall lanky youth rounds a bend in a mountain path and sees a group, stripped of their packs, resting in the shade of a tree near a small waterfall. He approaches, says hello and shakes hands with those nearest and then stretches and even clambers up a small incline to clasp hands with everyone, rare behaviour in this remote hill region.

“A Maoist,” whispers a development worker once the group has filled their water bottles and resumed trudging along the narrow trail hundreds of feet above the ribbon-like Karnali River below.

“In the last 10 years, NGOs have really been unable to work in this area because of the Maoists,” explains one of his colleagues on a mission to observe the distribution of emergency rice to the drought-hit area. They would demand that workers recognise their people’s government by signing a register and making “donations”.

“Generally we’ve always come into contact with the Maoists. If you’re an agency working in the field, particularly in the west, it’s bound to happen, says Richard Ragan, country director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP). “What’s different today is that they’re walking around in the open and being treated as a legitimate political party.”

Ragan’s agency is in the midst of a 5.4 million-dollar project to distribute rice to 225,000 people in 10 northwestern districts – the impoverished Maoist heartland – whose crops withered after the driest winter on record.

But before workers started loading the 40-kg white sacks into helicopters and trucks, WFP invited local representatives – from farmers and NGO staff to teachers and doctors – to verify that they would be in fact targeting the neediest areas. “They would say things like ‘no, this village is selling beans to Jajarkot, they don’t need rice’. It was very useful,” said Ragan in a telephone interview.

“We don’t go out and say ‘where’s the Maoists?’ We just open up the process to community leaders, and obviously they come,” he added.

Other international agencies confirm that they are playing a role in the growing trend to try and bring together local stakeholders in the wake of April’s “people’s movement”. During those three weeks of protests Maoists and mainstream political parties cautiously joined hands to unseat King Gyanendra.

The monarch fired his own prime minister Feb. 1, 2005 saying he was incompetent in dealing with the Maoist problem. He declared an emergency for three months and continued to rule directly until hundreds of thousands of Nepalis filled streets across the land in defiance of shoot-on-sight warnings; a looming showdown with the army at the palace gates was averted when the king restored the lower house of parliament Apr. 24.

But Gyanendra was unable to weaken the Maoists, who control vast chunks of the countryside in this poor, mostly rural nation squeezed between China and India. Local authorities long ago fled to district headquarters surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by security forces, leaving the Maoists free to set up governments that tax villagers and businesses and even to teach a revolutionary curriculum in some schools.

Today they are also freely engaging in legitimate politics after the government removed their “terrorist” label. Maoist leaders are pressuring Prime Minister Girija Koirala to dissolve parliament and hold elections to a constituent assembly and simultaneously working at peace talks that are faltering on the issue of disarmament. As leverage, district-level Maoists continue to intimidate development staff, according to one risk management adviser working for international non-governmental organisations (INGOs).

At the same time he confirmed, local roundtables including Maoists have been held in a number of western districts. “We are very keen to push people to do these kinds of consensus discussions…where they can, our programmes and staff should try and bring people together.”

One downside to the exercise is that the “consensus” often reflects the opinion of the only armed party at the table, he added – the Maoists. “Then everyone turns around and says to the development people: ‘Right, there’s a consensus decision’; but sometimes it’s not. We will act only according to a genuine community demand,” added the employee, who asked to be anonymous.

And while pressure from Maoists is easing in some areas, demands are coming from new quarters, he revealed. Groups purporting to represent dalits (labelled “untouchable” in Hindu dogma) and various indigenous peoples have armed themselves in their fight for justice and are also calling for donations.

Even mainstream political parties are expecting contributions, said the employee. “Far more people are saying to staff working in the districts, ‘you’re either with us (in the people’s movement) or you’re against us and if you’re with us, you must support us’.”

Overall the outlook is positive: the number of deaths in fighting between security forces and Maoists has fallen to one every three days, the lowest in years, the risk management expert added. But exceptions abound. Maoists in Salyan district recently halted all NGOs’ activities after the organisations started working without first getting Maoist approval, reported local media. They also kidnapped a social mobiliser working with one of the groups.

In Bajura, Maoists no longer demand that villagers attend their “talk programmes” but according to one resident met along the trail, locals felt obligated to attend a recent meeting after the Maoists told them that they had organised WFP’s distribution of rice.