NEPAL: Initial Peace Talks on, But Displaced People Still Lost

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Rita Manchanda

KATHMANDU, Apr 20 2003 (IPS) - Initial peace talks between the Nepali government and the Maoist rebels get underway on Monday, but questions persist around how to protect the rights of the ‘invisible’ – the 150,000 people who have been internally displaced by the war.

Initial peace talks between the Nepali government and the Maoist rebels get underway on Monday, but questions persist around how to protect the rights of the ‘invisible’ – the 150,000 people who have been internally displaced by the war.

How to facilitate the return or resettlement of these displaced people is a challenge after six years of the Maoist-led civil war, which is aimed at turning this Himalayan kingdom into a multi-party republic and has killed more than 7,000 people.

”The vulnerable groups such as women, children and the elderly have been left behind in their villages”, said one researcher in the first structured study of internally displaced people in Nepal, a controversial subject.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place since January. Many hope that Monday’s talks, which the government’s five-member panel calls ”introductory talks” and the rebels’ five-member group calls ”talks for talks”, will lead to substantive discussions soonest.

However, reports also say that while the government is keen on ”humanitarian issues”, the rebels want to talk about ”political” issues early on, including their key demands in the war.

But the return of those displaced is difficult to do without formal recognition that internally displaced people exist in the first place.

Under the ceasefire agreement, ‘armed’ Maoists will remain in control of the villages and the Royal Nepal Army in the district towns. The chief government negotiator, Narayan Singh Pun, says that on the talks’ agenda is the construction of ‘safe corridors’ to assess basic needs of displaced people.

In the mid-western districts of Achcham and Bardiya, officials have observed that while Maoists have lifted the blockade on movement of people and food, the army continues its blockade, curfew and search and cordon operations. The Maoist leaders have been calling for people to return.

Thus far, the busloads of people leaving has stopped, but there is no evidence of return. ”Some will return and some will stay,” according to the internally displaced people (IDP) Research Initiative Report of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The council took a major step on the issue of internally displaced people visible when in March, it put Nepal on its Global IDP Project. It coordinated the various sporadic initiatives by the United Nations Development Programme and non-government groups and profiled the pattern of forced relocation of displaced people and its co-relation with rapid urbanisation.

Assessing the scale of the problem of displacement is a crucial and controversial issue, especially because in Nepal it is difficult to distinguish between internally displaced people and economic migrants.

The IDP Research Initiative, in its break-up of reasons for displacement, cites as primary factors education 38 percent, followed by security 24 percent, work 14 percent, services 12 percent, business three percent and others nine percent.

This difficulty of identifying who is an IDP persuaded the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) to take on board this issue it had identified this as a concern as early as 2001.

The IDP Research Initiative extrapolated from a Nepal Red Cross study based on a sample study of 21 districts that assessed 10,500 displaced people. Extrapolated to all the country’s 75 districts, it would be 37,000 internally displaced people.

An NRC official estimated that in all likelihood the figure was barely 10 percent of the actual figure, making it 150,000 to 200,000. However, a Nepal Red Cross official at the March meeting to discuss this was sceptical.

The report cites also cites a Home Ministry definition of ”a person who has been displaced due to murder of a family member by the terrorists”. But Kathmandu-based Home Ministry sources denied the existence of any such authoritative definition, which excludes those who have fled the violence of the security forces and ex-Maoists.

Anecdotal evidence of internally displaced people are plenty. At one point last year in the ‘Peoples War’ of the Maoist rebels, crammed busloads of 250 men, daily, were seen leaving Mangalsen, the district headquarters in Achcham district in the mid-west, flattened by a Maoist attack in February 2002.

In nearby Jajarkot and Rolpa districts, the Maoist stronghold in the mid-west, whole families and groups of families were seen leaving.

As the cadres of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) spread their control over the villages, the security forces fortified district headquarters and bazaars.

Generalised violence, forced recruitment, the use of food as an instrument of war, the disruption of agricultural production, food for work programmes, education and health services drove thousands to leave and thousands not to return from seasonal migration. It created the phenomenon of the ‘internally stuck’.

Primarily, locally elected village committee officials, teachers and political party activists were targets of the Maoist rebels.

For example, Tham Bahadur Sunar, a leftist party activist suspected to be an informer, moved with his family from his village Gartigaon to the safety of the garrisoned district headquarter, Libang.

Aite Majhi moved to Manthali district headquarters of Ramechamp because a Maoist unit of five, including two women, warned him to produce his missing first wife. He was charged with her disappearance. He fled with his second wife and infant daughter.

Some walked for a day or two from the village to the district headquarters to move on again by bus to municipalities in the Terai plains abutting the Indian border.

At the border town of Nepalgunj, an international non-government monitoring unit estimated that between November to December 2002, more than 1,200 people were crossing the border into India.

That is also the normal period of peak seasonal economic migration to India. In Nepal, one in three men is involved in seasonal migration.

But the estimate was four to six times the average flow and included boys as young as 12. The Maoists have been accused of recruitment of child soldiers and army camps have been located in village schools.

The IDP Initiative also co-related the flows of internally displaced people with the growth rate of Nepal’s municipalities. A spurt in ‘normal’ migration was noted, up from an 3.6 percent to 5.2 percent per year in 2001 to 2003. Thus, the report recommends a focus on marginalised communities in arrival areas rather than only on those internally displaced.

”Not all who internally relocate are poor”, Leonard van Duijin, a co-author of the IDP Initiative report.

This approach, activist say, is a recognition of the difficulty of distinguishing between internally displaced people and economic migrants.