NEPAL: New School Year Sees Private Schools Targetted by Maoists

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Akhilesh Upadhyay

KATHMANDU, Apr 21 2005 (IPS) - As the new school year began this week, the latest targets in Nepal’s bloody Maoist insurgency are private schools that the rebels have threatened to bomb if they defy a call to close. This prompted a strong United Nations rebuke, which stated unequivocally that an attack on education and educational institutions is an attack on the next generation of Nepalis.

”To bomb schools is a senseless and cruel act against the children of Nepal,” said Suomi Sakai, representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Nepal.

”When schools are scarce and more than half a million children are not in school in the first place, to wantonly destroy schools only helps push its children back into ignorance,” said Sakai in a statement released late Tuesday.

According to UNICEF figures there are about 591,000 children between the ages of six to 10 years old not enrolled in school. Out of this number 63 percent or 374,000 of them are girls. The Himalayan kingdom has 1.79 million illiterate youth – between the ages of 15 to 24 – and 70 percent of them are females.

”Nepal does not have enough schools for all its children. The private schools play a major part in helping ensure more children get to learn to read, write and count,” Sakai added. “To attack education and educational institutions is to attack the future of the next generation of Nepalis. The children of Nepal deserve better from the adults who made the decision to attack schools.”

Last Friday, three empty private schools in rebel-held western Nepal were bombed as warnings. On Sunday, Maoist rebels bombed a school in the south-western town of Nepalgunj after the operator defied the threat to remain shut.

The Maoists want the private schools closed, accusing their operators of being driven by profits.

UNICEF, however, hit out at the Maoists saying all children have the right to go to school and their parents also have the right to choose the school.

”Destroying or closing down private schools – and thus forcing many more children into an already over-burdened public-school system – will not help improve the quality of education in public schools,” said Sakai.

Nepal has 8,500 private schools where 1.5 million students are enrolled.

”I send my daughter to a private school because it provides a better education that I never received myself in a government school,” said Ramila Shrestha, a schoolteacher, who sees education as the only guarantor to a rewarding career for her daughter.

”First, not all the private schools are expensive. Second, it is shocking that the Maoists should resort to bombings to decide what I should do with my child,” she told IPS.

The Maoists began their fight to replace Nepal’s constitutional monarchy with a kingless communist republic in 1996. Nearly 11,000 people have died in the violence since then.

The London-based rights group Amnesty International accuses the 10,000 strong Maoists of kidnapping and torture. Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group in Brussels says Nepal’s monarch King Gyanendra runs ”a non-party state that has decimated democracy and kills people at will.”

Gyanendra dismissed the government and imposed emergency rule on Feb. 1 in what he said was a move to tackle the Maoists. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, over 600 rights activists, journalists, lawyers, students and political activists remain detained since the king suspended most civil liberties in the country.

For private schools, the road ahead looks rocky.

While the Maoists have been extremely harsh against schools that have defied their call to shut, the government has not been benign either. It has warned the schools that their failure to start the new academic session would be read as defiance of the authorities, and succumbing to Maoist pressure tactics.

On Tuesday, it announced compensations to schools that were destroyed by the Maoists in the past few weeks. But human casualties are clearly irreversible.

”Whom do you listen to?” asked a school principal in Nepalgunj, a western town, where all private schools remain closed after the Maoists bombed one of them last week. ”It’s a no- win situation. We can only hope commonsense will prevail and people realise that it’s in everybody’s interest to keep schools out of conflict.”

Out of desperation, the schools have appealed to the international community for help.

The Private and Boarding School Organisation, Nepal (PABSON) has sent letters to embassies in the capital Kathmandu asking them to help defuse the government-Maoist standoff.

PABSON said the Maoist student wing, the All Nepal National Free Students Union (Revolutionary), had been bombarding schools with threatening e-mails and telephone calls telling them to close unless they met a series of demands.

Among the Maoist demands are that the children of top government officials be excluded from private schools and forced into state schools, and an end to the teaching of Sanskrit, the priestly language the rebels link to Hinduism’s high castes.