RIGHTS: Hard for Nepal to Find Friends in Geneva

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Analysis - By Suman Pradhan

KATHMANDU, Mar 14 2005 (IPS) - At the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geveva last year, Nepal’s royal government narrowly escaped tough measures for its appalling rights record, courtesy of the United States and India.

This year though, no such luxury exists at the commission’s 61st session that opened in Geneva on Monday.

Along with the rest of the world, India and the U.S. have been vocal in criticising the power- grab by Nepal’s monarch King Gyanendra on Feb. 1. They have issued strong calls for the restoration of democracy in Nepal and respect for human rights.

But the royal regime has continued in much the same way. The monarch has not only installed himself as the head of government but has also imposed stringent emergency rule that has severely constricted political, civil and press freedoms.

Hundreds of political activists and journalists have been arrested. Rights defenders and civil society leaders have been barred from leaving Kathmandu, the capital. And reports are emerging that royalist security forces last month allegedly encouraged villagers in the western district of Kapilvastu to kill and torch houses of fellow-villagers sympathetic to rebel Maoists.

Reports say that over two dozen villagers were killed and more than 70 houses burnt in Kapilvastu, the first reports of wide-scale rights abuses after the royal takeover.

Unlike last year, India, the U.S., and most of the international community could be bound by their public pronouncements, and therefore less likely to defend the royal regime, analysts point out.

”It will not send the right message, will it? Condemning the coup and defending the coup’s results in Geneva,” a western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

”The government will definitely face a challenge in Geneva since it bungled on its previous commitments,” said Kedra Paudel, acting secretary of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Even though the NHRC is staffed by government appointees, it has won wide respect in the last five years for its relentless campaign to enforce rights, investigate abuses by both the government and Maoist forces, and for its repeated calls to punish perpetrators.

Perhaps anticipating just such an occasion in this year’s session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the royalist government has been releasing political prisoners in the past week to create a favourable impression. Dismissed prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and a few of his cabinet colleagues were released last Friday.

But politicians such as Nepali Congress president Girija Prasad Koirala, Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal and People’s Front Nepal chairman Amik Sherchan are still under house arrest. And over the weekend, authorities again arrested four student leaders who were holding protests against the royal takeover.

In the meantime, international rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued damning statements documenting abuses by both the security forces and Maoist rebels. According to both the groups, Nepal today has the distinction of having the highest number of disappearances, which is backed by a culture of impunity and unaccountability.

Given such circumstances, the bet here is that the international community will unite this time to issue a strong resolution, perhaps even calling for a U.N. special rapporteur to investigate rights abuses in Nepal. The ‘Kathmandu Post’ newspaper summed up the mood in Nepal recently in a headline: ”Government in for tough time at UNHRC session.”

It is not just the king’s actions but also the Maoist rebellion that has pushed the situation to a new crisis.

Nepal reverted to democratic rule in 1990 after three decades of absolute monarchy, only to see democracy uprooted again on Feb. 1. Since 1996, the impoverished Himalayan kingdom has also endured a vicious Maoist insurgency, which has claimed the lives of more than 11,000 Nepalis. The rebels are fighting for a kingless republican state.

Though many Nepalis still adhere to principles of multi-party democracy and a constitutional monarchy, King Gyanendra’s royal takeover and hounding of democratic political parties has exacerbated the situation. Rights groups are poised to pounce on this fact at the Geneva meeting this week.

But the king’s government is hoping to pull off the impossible. Just before he departed Saturday to defend Nepal’s rights record in Geneva, Foreign Minister Ramesh Nath Pandey proclaimed that the royal government would soon relax the emergency measures and respect human rights. Government officials have lately been saying that Nepal will issue a fresh round of commitments shortly. But such commitments have been issued in the past without any results.

The commitments made last year in Geneva was a 25-point plan of action that the government was supposed to implement. It was made to thwart a binding and damning resolution.

But so far, none of those commitments have been implemented, rights activists allege. The NHRC still finds itself constrained in investigating rights abuses, visiting detainees, and calling for respect for habeas corpus petitions. Efforts to establish NHRC field offices in conflict areas have been hampered by the government’s reluctance to cooperate.

An NHRC commissioner, Sushil Pyakurel, was stopped from flying to Rupandehi early this month to investigate the alleged killings of suspected Maoist sympathisers.

Sources in government say, they fear that the Geneva meeting could end up in the appointment of a U.N. special rapporteur to investigate rights abuses in Nepal.

The government certainly does not want that. But many in Nepal’s human rights front say, if the international community is serious, it should seriously press for such a measure. ”Only then will the government be forced to observe universal norms of human rights,” said a leading activist who declined to be named.