Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Gender, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights

NEPAL: Make Way for Women, Marginalised Groups

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Dec 9 2005 (IPS) - Although the 12-point pact agreed by the country’s main political parties and Maoist rebels is still far from becoming a road map to peace, women’s groups and marginalised sections are already asking if they will finally be represented in a ‘new’ Nepal.

The understanding was announced in November by the leaders of the insurgents and a seven-party alliance. It calls for a conference of democratic forces that would form an interim government, followed by elections to a constituent assembly and finally restoration of parliament.

The biggest obstacle to turning this initial agreement into a peace plan is the palace, which has yet to acknowledge the understanding. On his return home from a three-week trip abroad last week, King Gyanendra welcomed all steps towards a return to multi-party democracy but referred only to municipal and parliamentary elections he has called for 2006 and 2007- which the 12-point document dismisses.

The monarch fired his appointed prime minister on Feb. 1, after dismissing parliament in 2002, and declared a state of emergency. He lifted that three months later but, since then, the king and a handpicked council of ministers have governed by decree, tightening laws over the media, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and labour unions.

On Wednesday, King Gyanendra shuffled and expanded that council, a signal that he does not plan to budge from his current path, say some analysts.

The Maoists launched their war against the monarchy and to build a society that would provide justice to indigenous people, Dalits (also called “untouchables”) and other disadvantaged groups almost a decade ago. They are now said to control up to 75 percent of the countryside, after the killings of more than 12,000 mostly rural people in this country, once labelled “Shangri-la”.

An alliance between the rebels and the political parties has been rumoured since Feb. 1, leading government ministers to warn politicians that if they dealt with the Maoists they too could be outlawed as “terrorists”.

The parties have also been wary to hook up with the insurgents because the rebels have targeted grassroots political workers along with government representatives as they have gradually assumed control of the villages where about 90 percent of Nepalis live.

The 12-point deal has today injected some hope into the nation’s war- weary 25 million people, many of them disillusioned with politics after 1990s people’s spring appeared to blossom only for corrupt politicians and the country’s elite, leaving a gaping chasm here between the richest and poorest.

And some segments of society are already pressing the parties to ensure that they are not again left out when multi-party democracy returns.

“Not at any level are there women involved (in negotiations with the Maoists). In the parties also we are not given that (senior) role,” says Sahana Pradhan, chairperson of the Women’s Security Pressure Group (WSPG).

A member of the standing committee of the mainstream United Marxist- Leninist (UML) party, Pradhan was co-chairperson of the United Left Front of parties that joined forces to win democracy from the palace on Nepal’s streets in 1990. “So some women were involved then,” she added Friday after a WSPG meeting on women and human rights.

Pradhan told IPS that although Nepal signed the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1991 and the government has ratified it, 118 laws and bylaws remain on the books that discriminate against women. “This discrimination should have ended but this government isn’t paying any attention. Neither were the previous democratic governments,” she said.

“If these seven parties had had a vision, they wouldn’t have made all these mistakes. they would have realised the condition of women and worked for inclusive democracy. But they didn’t – they only thought of men,” argued Pradhan.

Indigenous people make the same case. “We have our solidarity with the democratic movement (but) we have also warned the parties that will be the government tomorrow that the present system, which is unrepresentative of indigenous people, is unacceptable to us,” says Om Gurung, general secretary of the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN).

“The ongoing conflict is one of the results of that past mistake (of not being inclusive). They should not repeat that mistake,” he added in an interview.

Indigenous people officially account for 41 percent of Nepal’s population and overall they score lowest on the human development index. But they are overrepresented in the Maoist army.

Gurung says the 49 groups he represents are demanding “proportional representation of indigenous people or at least minimal representation” in the next democratic government but that the parties have pledged only to mend their ways.

How development is done in Nepal should also change in the future, says one of the country’s longstanding foreign donors. The focus should be “a decentralised state structure where the money is going down to the district and local communities and they become the chiefs of their own development”, says Gunther Baechler, special adviser for peace building in Nepal from the Swiss department of foreign affairs.

According to the United Nations Development Programme’s 2004 annual report, the opportunities offered by democracy “have not yet reduced the powerlessness of the vast majority of (Nepal’s) citizens or significantly diminished the isolation, vulnerability and marginality in which they live”.

This week, the Swiss government’s office here placed ads in local papers arguing that development and other specific issues should be discussed in a second round of talks between the parties and Maoists, whose date is unknown.

NEFIN’s Gurung adds that before the political players create a constituent assembly, “they must clearly spell out how it will include excluded groups”.