RIGHTS-NEPAL: Peace Haunted by Missing Persons

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Suman Pradhan

KATHMANDU, Aug 30 2006 (IPS) - In a rare case this week, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the government to form a probe panel to look into the case of three persons who went missing from army custody soon after the civil war with Maoist rebels began in earnest, a decade ago.

Though disappearances are no longer the massive problem they used to be, the case illustrates the continuing fallout of this impoverished country’s violent Maoist rebellion. And four months after the Maoists joined a popular uprising to force King Gyanendra to back down from his dictatorial rule, Nepal is still grappling with abuses committed by security forces – particularly forced disappearance of suspected Maoists and their sympathizers.

No concrete figures are available, but human rights organizations say hundreds of people who went missing during the fighting remain missing, and are most likely dead by now. “Probably only a few are alive, but we must find their whereabouts and investigate what happened to those who disappeared,” says a foreign human rights worker in Nepal on condition of anonymity.

Most of the ‘disappeared’ were held in captivity inside the army barracks by the then Royal Nepal Army (RNA). One of the most notorious sites for the disappearances was the ‘Bhairavnath Battalion compound’ that garrisoned elite paratroopers in the capital..

A report in May by the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that the fate of 49 people who were detained at the barracks at various times is unknown. It has yet to receive a formal response. Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has put the figure at 66.

“The resolution of outstanding cases of disappearances remains a top priority for OHCHR-Nepal,” David Johnson, officiating head of the OHCHR in Kathmandu, told IPS. “There remain hundreds of outstanding cases of disappearance from previous years after the individuals’ arrest by the security forces.”

Rights activists are now calling on the new government to investigate past abuses and use the present political environment to effect a national catharsis. “The issue of consolidation of the people’s rights must be considered. However, such work should also signify transitional justice,” says Kundan Aryal, general secretary of the Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), Nepal’s leading human rights organization.

Disappearances, as practiced during the civil war, were a particularly brutal counter-insurgency measure. Many of the suspects were held in army barracks where civilian investigating agencies were not allowed to enter. Family members of those disappeared were never informed. Often, they had no recourse but to appeal to the OHCHR, rights organizations, and frequently, to the nation’s Supreme Court on habeas corpus grounds. But the RNA routinely ignored court summons, and acted with impunity during the king’s rule.

It was in this climate of fear that 2003 and 2004 saw the worst cases of rights violations, earning Nepal the unsavoury distinction of being the country with most disappearance cases reported to the Geneva-based U.N. Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances.

In Nepal’s western Terai, the indigenous Tharu community was hit hard by the disappearances. Johnson of OCHR says that in Bardiya district alone, there were over 100 cases by state security forces during 2002-2003, many of them members of the Tharu community.

In late 2004, the NHRC said more than 1,400 people had been disappeared since 1998 in the continuing insurgency. It fingered the RNA for most of the violations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch too issued scathing reports that same year, drawing attention to the growing problem.

Human rights activists say that the disappearances were fuelled by a culture of impunity within the army ranks. “The perpetrators of these disappearances are protected by the systemic impunity extending over the security forces in Nepal,” the Asian Human Rights Commission has said.

But in 2005, despite King Gyanendra’s dictatorship, the situation began to improve. In April that year, under duress of international sanction, the royalist government allowed the OHCHR to establish an office in Kathmandu to monitor the rights situation. The presence of the OHCHR and its vigorous pursuit of rights violation cases helped in easing the situation.

“The single biggest reason, if you ask me, was that a robust OHCHR took up the challenge and the royal government backtracked,” says Narayan Wagle, editor of the influential ‘Kantipur’ newspaper. “Continuing disappearances under the OHCHR’s very nose would have been impossible if the army wanted to keep its lucrative U.N. peacekeeping missions.”

Several rights organizations now acknowledge that new cases of disappearances have dwindled in 2005 and 2006, but investigating past abuses is still difficult. Though access to army barracks has been provided to such groups as OHCHR and Red Cross, the military still refuses to allow observers into court martial proceedings, or even provide records of past cases.

“The army remains uncooperative on the accountability over past abuses, but we no longer have access to barracks as an issue,” says a foreign rights worker. “The climate is improving but it’s nowhere near where we want it to be.”

At this moment though, most of the rights violations are reported from the side of the rebels. Numerous media reports have accused the Maoists of continuing extortion, intimidation and even abductions and murder since April. But the rebels reject such allegations.