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RIGHTS-NEPAL: Children Feared Bound for Maoist ‘Peace’ Camps

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Nov 21 2006 (IPS) - Even before Maoist leaders could assign their soldiers to camps as part of the peace deal ending Nepal’s 10-year insurgency, United Nations officials appeared on the doorstep Monday warning that children will not be allowed into the cantonments.

Even before Maoist leaders could assign their soldiers to camps as part of the peace deal ending Nepal’s 10-year insurgency, United Nations officials appeared on the doorstep Monday warning that children will not be allowed into the cantonments.

“OHCHR (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) impressed upon the Maoist leadership at the camp that international law prohibits the recruitment of children under the age of 18 into armed groups,” said OHCHR-Nepal spokesman Kieran Dwyer on Tuesday.

“OHCHR has received numerous reports of child recruitment by the (Maoists) in recent months, and continues to investigate cases,” Dwyer added in an e-mail interview.

Tuesday is the deadline for PLA soldiers to disarm and enter seven camps at sites being set up across the country, where they will be watched by UN monitors, according to a draft peace pact signed two weeks ago. That latter agreement is also supposed to be finalised Tuesday.

In recent weeks, reports have grown of Maoist cadres recruiting, sometimes forcibly, children under 18 for the PLA. But Maoist leaders say the recruits are joining their political party only.

The UN has vowed to prevent minors from entering the camps. “The UN will certainly require that any persons under 18 are discharged and seek to ensure that they are helped to reintegrate into their families and communities,” Ian Martin, personal representative in Nepal of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told IPS via email on Tuesday.

UNICEF has negotiated access to the camps to ensure they do not house children, but exactly how that process will work is unclear, UNICEF Representative in Nepal Suomi Sakai said in an email interview Monday.

“UNICEF has been working with the OHCHR, our partners and the CPN-M (Maoist party) in returning children to their families with some success,” Sakai added. “While society at large needs to continue putting pressure on the CPN-M cadre about not recruiting children, the children and their parents themselves need to be educated about the harm it does to them and their future.”

Some parents delivered that message personally to Maoist officials in recent days, travelling to cantonment sites in west Nepal to find and reclaim their children. “They have lured my son into their army with their false promises,” said Prem Chandra Poudel, interviewed by the Kathmandu Post “How can a 15-year-old kid understand what is wrong or right for him? I have come here to take him back,” Poudel added.

According to locals interviewed by the Post, the rebels have lured many into PLA jobs with false promises of “high salaries” and later recruitment into the Nepal Army. Hundreds of such incidents have reportedly taken place across this small South Asian nation sandwiched between India and China.

No accurate figures exist on the number of minors used by the Maoists, or state security forces, since the rebels launched their fight for a republic and to deliver social justice for women, indigenous people and Dalits (so-called ‘untouchables’ in the Hindu caste system) in 1996.

As many as 14,000 people – most of them innocent villagers caught in the crossfire – were killed in the insurgency, which spread a blanket of fear over the hinterland of this largely rural country. Tens of thousands of Nepalis intimidated by soldiers on both sides locked their homes and fled to guarded district headquarters towns or across the southern border to India.

Late in 2005 the rebels joined forces with a wary alliance of mainstream political parties to unseat King Gyanendra, who fired his own prime minister and seized power Feb. 1, 2005. In April this year, after three weeks of sometimes violent street protests that swelled to hundreds of thousands of men, women and children marching on the streets of the capital Kathmandu, the monarch gave up power and recalled parliament.

Since then, government and Maoist leaders have been moving slowly to implement the 2005 blueprint, which will culminate in elections to a constituent assembly that will draft a new constitution, deciding the fate of the monarchy.

On Monday, a high-level commission recommended that King Gyanendra and 201 others be prosecuted for suppressing April’s “people’s movement” in which 19 people died. Under the existing constitution the monarch cannot be put on trial but some legal experts have already suggested that a new law could be created to clear that hurdle.

Last week there were reports that signing of the peace pact was delayed because the Maoists objected to certain human rights provisions the government had included in the document. According to UNICEF’s Sakai, “Although we would like to see as much detail as possible about the reintegration process in the peace accord, we believe that if the principles of child protection at time of conflict are included, we can continue working with both parties to get the details in the action plans.”

Tuesday afternoon, Ekantipur.com news site reported that parents in west Nepal had blocked buses carrying PLA soldiers to their camp in Nawalparasi district so they could search the vehicles for their children.