A demonstration in Kathmandu to demand rights. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS.

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

In Nepal, where a quarter of the population is steeped in poverty, a man who once led a 10-year Maoist insurgency before joining the political mainstream has been splurging on helicopters for his election campaign.

The extravagance by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a former school teacher and guerrilla leader who went on to become prime minister after the monarchy was abolished in the Himalayan nation, has come under scathing criticism.

Prominent Nepali citizens, rival parties and even former Maoist comrades say it has brought into sharp focus the socio-economic inequalities in this country of 27 million people.

Bhagirath Basnet, a former foreign secretary of Nepal, makes a wry observation.“The Maoists came to power promising to end inequality and poverty. But they have betrayed the war that saw over 15,000 people die.”

“It is difficult to fathom how a proletariat leader and self-touted messiah of the poor could find the resources and moral justification to do so, day in, day out,” Basnet tells IPS.

“This, in a country where 25 percent of people languish in poverty and millions of children are deprived of minimum nutrition and primary education.”

Ironically, the Maoists’ main opponent, the Nepali Congress, had a far more low-key campaign for the Nov. 19 elections.

Its veteran leaders, including a septuagenarian cancer survivor, rode on cycle and horseback to woo voters.

The election results coming in are being disputed by the Maoist leader.

As Nepalis berate the Maoist extravagance on social media, they are joined by former comrades who accuse the party of selling out.

“The Maoists came to power promising to end inequality and poverty,” says Matrika Prasad Yadav, once the most senior Maoist leader in the southern Terai plains. “But they have betrayed the war that saw over 15,000 people die.”

The Maoist insurrection started in 1996 with the avowed aim of ending monarchy, the feudal rule of a nearly 250-year-old dynasty that appropriated national resources for the royal family and nobles.

Though the Maoist war ended in 2006 and Dahal’s Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) came to power through elections, the social and economic inequalities that had triggered their movement remain. Nepal, which lies between the two Asian giants, India and China, has an annual per capita income of 742 dollars.

“I feel embarrassed when I go abroad,” says Binod Chaudhary, head of a Nepali business group and the first billionaire from Nepal to make it to Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest.

“Every day, a thousand Nepalis go abroad in search of jobs because there are no jobs here. We have 16-hour power cuts daily though Nepal has tremendous hydropower potential,” he tells IPS. “We don’t even have enough drinking water in Kathmandu [the capital], let alone in villages.

“People ask me, you are a billionaire, yet Nepal is so poor. What is the reason?”

Emboldened by the Maoists’ success, new groups are mushrooming, seizing their unfulfilled promise of equality and opportunity.

Matrika Yadav, a former Maoist minister, is now an adversary. His grievance is an old one. “The Maoists have exploited Madhes [the Terai region],” he says.

Terai, the food bowl of Nepal, suffered from neglect by a succession of governments because its residents were regarded as immigrants from India and inferior to the hill people.

“Terai people still don’t have citizenship,” Yadav says. “They are still not represented in the army, bureaucracy and judiciary in the numbers the government promised. They lack education, healthcare and opportunities.”

Yadav’s Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) boycotted the election, and he warns the party could go underground.

Another former comrade, Mohan Vaidya, is not just opposing the election but called a 10-day transport strike to prevent people from casting their votes.

Vaidya, once among the top three Maoist leaders, is a hardliner who feels it was a mistake to agree to peace. The reedy, bespectacled Vaidya has his own separate Maoist party now – the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) – and together with splinter groups was adamant about the strike despite the hardship it caused people.

Buses have been set on fire, including one carrying passengers. Improvised explosive devices – the main weapon of the Maoists during their People’s War – were left in public places, creating an atmosphere of fear.

The international community believed the election was a necessity in Nepal. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was present to monitor it, along with European and Indian observers.

Shoko Noda, the United Nations Development Programme country director in Nepal, says it was crucial that elections took place and the political process was normalised so that the focus could return to the economy and jobs.

“Since the 1990s, Nepal has made significant progress in the human development index,” she says.

“Still, historically and spatially, marginalised groups such as Dalits, women, indigenous nationalities and those living in geographically remote places continue to be at the bottom of the pyramid,” Noda tells IPS.

“As a result Nepal has high income and consumption inequality.”

She hopes once politics stabilises, the development process will accelerate, leading to more opportunities for even the poorest of the poor.

“Better infrastructure coupled with an improved business environment can boost the entrepreneurship that can create jobs to accommodate them,” Noda says.

Five former prime ministers from across party lines, including Dahal, have vowed to push the development agenda and collaborate for the common good. But Nepalis themselves remain sceptical.

Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya on their fast in front of the prime minister's residence in Kathmandu. Credit: Bimal Chandra Sharma/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

When the police finally arrested a man this month in the Nepali capital for the murder of a teenager nine years ago, it became a matter of life and death for Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya.

The 18-year-old victim, abducted and killed brutally by Maoist guerrillas in 2004 when the communist insurgency was at its peak, was their son.

Driven by anger and frustration that the killers had not been punished even seven years after the insurrection ended, the couple had been on a fast unto death in Kathmandu, and had to be admitted to hospital.“The era of royal regimes has not ended..."

The arrest, along with an assurance by the interim government that the killing would be investigated and the victim’s family paid compensation, led the Adhikaris to end their fast after 47 days.

But Subodh Pyakurel, head of Nepal’s largest human rights organisation Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), has misgivings about the state’s promise.

“The era of royal regimes has not ended,” Pyakurel told IPS, referring to the two years from 2005 when Nepal’s ambitious king Gyanendra discarded his figurehead role to grab power in an army-backed putsch.

The following two years saw some of the worst human right violations by both the army and the guerrillas and an escalation in killings, abductions and disappearances. Despite the subsequent abolition of monarchy, there is a general feeling that the succeeding elected governments were as dictatorial as the royal regime.

“The Maoists [who came to power after signing a peace pact and winning the 2008 elections] have shown as much disregard for the law as the [ousted] king. They have not only failed to punish cadres responsible for the atrocities during their ‘people’s war’, but also promoted the army and security personnel guilty of similar crimes.”

INSEC’s Human Rights Yearbook 2013 recorded 13,276 deaths in the decade-old civil war that erupted in 1996 when the Maoists walked out of parliament and went underground to wage war against the state demanding equality and the abolition of monarchy.

Over 1,000 people disappeared. None have been found yet.

But not one extrajudicial killing, abduction, rape or torture has been punished though the Maoists and other major political parties signed a peace agreement in 2006 pledging to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to punish war crimes, and a commission to investigate the fate of the disappeared.

Seven years later, the two commissions are yet to materialise.

“As a victim and activist, I am frustrated that not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice so far,” says Jitman Basnet, a lawyer and former editor whose articles earned him the wrath of both the army and the Maoists.

In 2002, the Maoists abducted Basnet for criticising their excesses and their destruction of public property, and threatened him with dire consequences.

The following year, the army came after him for writing about a mass killing that was a deliberate ploy to provoke the Maoists into breaking off peace negotiations with the government.

Basnet remained imprisoned for over eight months in a notorious underground prison run by the army, constantly blindfolded and handcuffed. Along with the other illegally detained prisoners, he was regularly assaulted, given electric shocks and tortured in other ways.

Many of the camp inmates disappeared and have not been heard of since.

After his release, Basnet wrote a book, ‘258 Dark Days’, chronicling the information he had gathered on illegal detention, enforced disappearances and torture.

“I disclosed the names of the army officials involved in human rights abuses at the barracks, hoping it would help investigations into the army’s atrocities and human rights violations,” he told IPS.

The book created a furore and brought him threats, but not one officer was punished.

Basnet then filed three cases in the Supreme Court. One of them was against top army officials as well as King Gyanendra himself. Basnet contended that since the king was the supreme commander of the army, the ultimate culpability for the illegal arrests, torture, disappearances and killings was his.

He also took the cases to U.N. and other international forums. And still, nothing happened.

“No commission has been formed to investigate past crimes,” he said. “The political parties and the government are willing to give amnesty to the perpetrators.”

The army has steadfastly refused to punish its tainted officers. It has only promoted them and given them plum postings. One of them, Col Kumar Lama, served with U.N. peacekeeping forces.

This year, when Lama was arrested for war crimes by British officials while visiting his family in Sussex, Nepal’s government protested, calling it a violation of Nepal’s sovereignty.

The Maoists too have ignored public outrage, appointing at least two leaders as ministers though both were named in torture and murder cases and a court ordered the arrest of one of them.

“We need a relentless campaign for justice,” said Janak Raut, president of the Conflict Victims’ Society for Justice, a platform of about 100 people who suffered either at the hands of the army, Maoists or armed groups and vigilantes that have sprung up in southern Nepal emboldened by the culture of impunity.

After staging public protests and filing lawsuits, society has now turned to social media to widen its campaign with a recently opened Facebook page.

Raut said fresh elections, announced in November to complete the drafting of the new constitution, will not help the victims.

“The election will be won by the same leaders who will keep on shielding the guilty because all of them are involved,” he told IPS. “But justice will be delivered eventually, by the people united against their oppressors.

“It may take time but as history has shown, it will come.”

U.S. lesbian couple Courtney Mitchell (R) and Sarah Welton (L) getting married in Nepal under the aegis of the Blue Diamond Society, an LGBT rights organisation. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Sep 1 2013 (IPS)

Naomi Fontanos is seeing a change from when she went holidaying in 2002. Then she had run into ignorance about transgender people or worse at hotels, restaurants and other business establishments in Boracay, the popular tourist destination south of Manila.

“[Boracay reflected] the general close-mindedness of Philippine society at that time towards lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) issues,” Fontanos, founder of Gender and Development Advocates Filipinas, a prominent transgender rights group in the Philippines, told IPS.

“Many had never met a transwoman before.”

But the passing decade has seen remarkable changes sweeping travel destinations. Returning to the island last November, Fontanos saw her hotel sporting a rainbow-coloured flag, an indication it welcomed LGBT tourists. Other establishments too marketed themselves as gay-friendly.

The changes have been noted in London by Tris Reid-Smith, director and editor of Gay Star News, a news site focusing on LGBT issues worldwide.

Reid-Smith is revamping his site’s travel section to cash in on the growing importance of the pink dollar in the tourism industry.

“LGBT people travel more, take more holidays,” he told IPS. “With the recession in Europe and North America, families are finding it difficult to travel on holidays after meeting the priorities – food, gas bills, education for the children.

“LGBT families are smaller and travelling is more affordable for them.”

The economic change has made the travel industry realise that if they want to improve profit margins, they have to woo this growing segment.

After promotions to entice visitors from Australia and China, two of its largest tourist markets, Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) is now focusing on this neglected sector.

The trigger is the new Marriage Amendment Act that made same-sex marriages legal in the country from Aug. 19.

New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs said more than 1,000 marriage forms have been downloaded a day earlier, three times the average.

TNZ hosted one of these weddings, choosing gay Australian couple veterinarian Paul McCarthy and his partner Trent Kandler through a competition.

National carrier Air New Zealand sponsored the wedding of Aucklander lesbian couple Lynley Bendall and Ally Wanikau on board a plane.

Legal reforms as well as advocacy of gay rights by world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama and Pope Francis have also boosted pink tourism.

“Many countries have recently approved same-sex marriages,” Reid-Smith said. “Like the UK and some states in the U.S. In Asia, it is being discussed in Thailand and Vietnam. In India, colonial (anti-homosexuality) laws have been challenged.

“All this has given the community confidence that the government is on their side, society is on their side.”

A decade ago, many hotels refused to give same-sex couples double-bed rooms and they had to endure discrimination. “But now, with laws recognising them as 100 percent equal to other citizens, gay couples expect more respect,” Reid-Smith said.

Social media and the Internet have played a key role.

“Social media allowed people to discover what’s going on worldwide and comment,” he said. “It built relationships, confidence and a global community against homophobia.”

When gay rights activist Eric Ohene Lembembe was murdered in Cameroon in July, protests erupted in London. And when the Russian government showed an anti-homosexual bias, calls poured in from different parts of the world urging a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi.

“It is important for LGBT people to show that they are willing to boycott events, countries or people that are homophobic,” Jean Chong, founder of Sayoni, a Singapore-based platform for lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women, told IPS. “We can [take] our money elsewhere and we have a choice.”

Singapore is perceived as being more tolerant than its Muslim-majority neighbours like Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. It hosts gay film festivals, saw opposition member Vincent Wijeysingha become the first politician to come out, and its annual gay rally, Pink Dot, drew a record 21,000 people this year.

Still, it has laws that criminalise sex between men and dampen tourism numbers. Surveillance and censorship still exist, and sponsorships for gay events are hard to come by.

“LGBT tourists will be wary of countries that are not welcoming since there are many other choices these days,” Chong said. “Discriminatory policies also create an obstacle to events wanting to create awareness and cater to the LGBT community.”

Gay rights will be largely influenced by how India and China, the two Asian giants with a combined population of over two and a half billion people, treat the community, says Sunil Babu Pant, founder of the gay rights movement in Nepal.

Nepal, once a conservative Hindu kingdom closed to the outside world, recognised homosexuals as natural persons in 2008. The Supreme Court asked the government to make laws to protect their rights and allow same-sex marriages.

Pant says Nepal’s giant neighbours China and India are lagging behind.

China de-recognised homosexuality as a mental illness in 2001 and public display of gay affection is regarded indulgently during Qixi festival, the Chinese Valentine’s Day. But the Beijing Queer Film Festival has faced repeated shutdowns by the state.

And while commerce capital Shanghai has been hosting an annual gay festival since 2009, public marches are still not allowed.

In India, there has been an increase in social acceptance since 2009, when the Supreme Court struck down part of an anti-homosexuality law that had made sex between men a criminal offence.

“We have seen more gay people coming out of the closet, pride parades in major cities and a vibrant gay night life emerging in the metros,” said Suraj Laishram, personal tour advisor at Indjapink, a New Delhi-based gay travel agency.

Widows at a shelter in Varanasi in eastern India. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
VARANASI, India , Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

Namuna Gautam was among millions of Indian women who celebrated Rakshabandhan this year, but one thing set her apart. It was the first time the 80-year-old took part in the festival, in which sisters pray for the long life, health and happiness of their brothers.

For decades, Gautam was part of a dark tradition that shunned widowed women as unlucky, and threw them out of home to fend for themselves.

“I didn’t even know what my husband looked or sounded like,” Gautam told IPS as she sat in the gloomy, dank corridor of the widows’ home in Varanasi where she had been sent to die at the age of 14.

“I was married when I was 10. During the wedding, I had to keep the veil over my face or people would have thought me immodest. My husband died the same year and my in-laws said I had brought them bad luck.” Like many others, she was married as a child, but due to join her husband only later.

Gautam, the daughter of a poor farmer who’d never been to school, was sent to look after her mother’s elderly brother and his wife.

“They decided to spend their last days in Varanasi, the holy city where if you die you are released from the cycle of rebirth and pain,” Gautam said. “I came with them and when they died, I lived on alms. Then I cooked and cleaned for people. I am infirm now and can’t work any more.”

Gautam is among the hundreds of Hindu upper caste widows born in times when female education was rare, polygamy flourished, and daughters had no share in family property.

“Bengal (the eastern Indian state) was renowned for its erudition, culture and social reforms. And yet it treated its young widows so appallingly; you can’t reconcile the two,” says social entrepreneur Bindeshwar Pathak.

His organisation Sulabh International known for its sanitation campaign is now adopting abandoned and forgotten old widows to give them back “the dignity and care they never had.”

“The women were married off at a very young age – some were just five or six. Their husbands, who were much older, married several times. When they died, they left dozens of young widows behind.

“These young girls were forced to shave off their hair, dress only in the coarsest white clothes, eat once a day and were barred from all social events as they were considered ill-omened.”

Usha Mishra broke down as she described her struggle for survival after her husband, a small trader, died four years after their marriage. “I was 15 when I was married,” says the 55-year-old, who looks much older. “By 19, I was a widow with a two-year-old daughter.”

The old practice of sati – burning widows alive on their husbands’ pyres – was banned in 1839. But spared a grisly death, most widows led a life of deprivation and humiliation.

The 16th century social reformer Chaitanya brought a group of widows from Bengal to Vrindavan close to Delhi to give them a home. That started a flood of families bringing their widows to the cities of Varanasi and Vrindavan and abandoning them there.

Besides being reduced to a life of abject begging or menial labour, there are also tales of young widows being forced into prostitution. Indo-Canadian film maker Deepa Mehta’s ‘Water’ in 2005 put the plight of the forgotten widows in the limelight.

This was followed by media reports. “The reports caught the attention of the Supreme Court, which asked its legal division, the National Legal Service Authority (NALSA), to look into the matter,” said Pathak.

“In August 2012, we were surprised to receive a letter from NALSA, saying there were around 1,700 such destitute widows. It asked whether Sulabh and ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a religious organisation), could provide two meals a day for these women.

“Though it was not Sulabh’s area of expertise, we still went to Vrindavan to meet them. What we saw was heart-breaking.”

While most of the women are in their seventies, a few are in their eighties and nineties. The Uttar Pradesh state government had offered them 500 rupees (eight dollars) per month after their plight became known. But three years ago the money stopped.

“In Vrindavan, they then survived on ten rupees (15 cents) a day, money paid to them by the temple authorities if they attended the morning and evening prayer sessions,” Vinita Varma, who heads the widows initiative at Sulabh, told IPS.

“The younger ones augmented it a bit by making lamp wicks and stitching tiny garments for idols. But the older ones, who could not work any longer, had no option other than begging.”

Sulabh has adopted 1,000 widows in Vrindavan and Varanasi, providing them monthly support of 2,000 rupees (32 dollars) each, basic medical care and education.
Now it is trying to unite them with the community that had deserted them.

Last year, the white saris of the widows in Vrindavan turned a miraculous pink and green as they played Holi, the festival of colours, once prohibited for them.

This year, the Varanasi widows celebrated Rakshabandhan, and in October, some will return to Bengal after decades to watch Durga Puja, their biggest annual festival.

Pathak is lobbying for a law to ensure that widows receive basic education and vocational training. “Once they become breadwinners, their families will regard them with new respect.”

What’s less than two months old, has hit the headlines globally, and has more than 79,000 ‘likes’ and over 16,000 people talking about it?

No, it’s not Prince George Alexander Louis but the precocious SQUAR of Myanmar, the once isolated Southeast Asian nation’s own version of social networking site Facebook.

China has Weibo, the ‘Chinese Facebook’; Indonesia has Zuma; and now Myanmar has jumped on the bandwagon of Asian countries seeking a virtual place to meet, chat and do business, all with a truly local flavour.

What makes SQUAR unusual is that it is the initiative of two outsiders – 37-year-old Rita Nguyen and 28-year-old Quynh Anh Nguyen. Both are techies, born in Vietnam but brought up in the West, and quick to spot the business potential in Myanmar.

Myanmar has undergone a sea-change after the reforms in 2010. Elections have been held, a civilian government has replaced the military regime, the country’s most celebrated ‘prisoner’, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has been released from years of house arrest, and Western sanctions have been lifted.

The government has been opening up the country to foreign investment, and multinationals like General Electric and Coca Cola are rushing in to do business.

SQUAR’s time too had come. Rita, a Canadian citizen, has 15 years of experience in mobile gaming and social networking applications. Anh, her partner in the project, is a business administration graduate who till now had lived mostly in the U.S.

The inspiration came when Rita, a former executive with U.S. gaming company Electronic Arts, moved to Vietnam three years ago to work with the co-founders of VNG, the country’s premier digital platform, and mig33, a popular social network in Asia with over 70 million users in developing markets like Nepal and Bangladesh.

In January, Myanmar capital Yangon hosted BarCamp, the open-house conference of techies from all over the world which was started in the U.S. in 2005 to discuss technology and the Internet.

Though Myanmar, with a population of nearly 60 million, has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates – about one percent – the Yangon meet is said to have been the largest in the world, attracting over 6,000 participants.

Rita attended the Yangon event, her first visit to Myanmar, and found the “perfect storm” for her.

“The timing was perfect as I have been living in Asia for a few years and was looking for a new challenge,” she told IPS.

“I’ve built and launched online communities internationally for almost a decade. Myanmar was an exceptionally cool challenge: how would I build a community in a place that was so disconnected, both from a geographic as well as technological perspective? So I convinced Anh to move back to Asia from Seattle and here we are.”

“Yangon has a lot of youth and they host the largest BarCamp in Asia,” Anh adds. “We thought it would be cool to create something to connect the users and provide them the ability to share information. Myanmar is quite cool right now. Everyone is interested in it.”

After a pre-launch in late June to test the waters, SQUAR is now up and running. What’s more, it has already managed to snag a major corporate sponsor.

In July, Coca Cola returned to Myanmar after a six-decade hiatus and began a promotional blitzkrieg. Along with Facebook, SQUAR too was involved in the online promotion of the ‘Coca Cola Happiness Journey’, accompanied by roadshows in Yangon and Mandalay.
During its pre-launch phase, SQUAR was available only on mobile phones. Now it can be accessed on PCs, Macs and tablets.

Besides being in the Myanmarese language, SQUAR’s unique selling point, according to Rita, is that it is built specifically for the Myanmar market as it is today.

“We are highly focused on an open, public experience that encourages [Myanmarese] nationals to discuss and share information with one another,” she said.

“Facebook specifically is much more of a closed loop community focused more on your personal relationships. In a country like Myanmar, where most of your friends and family are not online yet, Facebook can be a lonely experience. SQUAR is a place to find friends who are already connected.”

One of the most active users is someone by the name of Phyonaing. The new SQUAR user’s first post is a laborious instruction to fellow users on how to use the keyboard to type in the local language.

Besides creating a platform where community meets technology in Myanmar, Rita says SQUAR can be used to boost business.

“SQUAR offers a unique opportunity in Myanmar to connect directly with the youth of the nation,” she says. “This is why our partnership with Coca Cola was so successful. They had traditional media (coverage) but there was no real way to activate the youth directly with real-time contests and promotions.”

That’s something SQUAR was doing daily for Coca Cola, leading up to the Happiness Journey.

Getting funds for the project – 500,000 dollars – was a piece of cake.

“Though not substantial, we did need some start-up capital, specifically because Myanmar is so expensive to operate in,” Rita said. “Raising the funds was incredibly easy through my own established networks. Myanmar is a hot story and there is so much opportunity there; so it wasn’t difficult.”

The major challenge was connectivity. Internet access in Myanmar is limited and the speed slow, prompting Facebook pages like ‘I Hate Myanmar Internet Connection’.

However, with Myanmar due to host the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in 2014, the government is working to improve infrastructure, connectivity and telecom services.

In a landmark move in June, it awarded two new licences to Norway’s Telenor and Qatar’s Ooredoo companies to provide additional mobile phone lines.

These would be a blessing for initiatives like SQUAR.

Describing how they operate, Anh said they have an office in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, where all the developers sit. There is another office in Yangon with six staff members.

The plan now, she says, is to add new features that the community is asking for. “This means creating fun and unique experiences for the SQUAR community through contests, promotions and partnerships.”

Generating revenue is not a priority yet. “At the moment we are only focused on ensuring that we are building the best social experience for [Myanmarese] nationals,” Anh said.

Rita laughed off the question whether they are Myanmar’s Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. “Oh no, definitely NOT Zuckerberg,” she grinned. “Too hot to wear hoodies here.”

A woman in Riau in Sumatra wears a mask for protection from the pollution caused by forest fires. Credit: Ulet Ifansasti/Greenpeace.

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, India, Aug 11 2013 (IPS)

When there is feasting in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there could just be a connection between the celebrations and the fires on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island that trigger frequent transboundary smog.

And when China’s population of more than a billion consumes yet more noodles, Malaysia should perhaps brace for greater air pollution.

Though not as simplistic and direct, there is nevertheless a tangible link among all these happenings and countries. It’s called palm oil, Asia’s new “liquid gold”.

Southeast Asia – read Indonesia and Malaysia – are the biggest producers of the oil obtained from the fruit of the oil palm tree, accounting for nearly 85 percent of global output.The wonder oil carries an ecological price tag.

India and China are its biggest consumers, with Pakistan and Bangladesh emerging as growing markets. As the major buyers, they not only influence price and production, but can also impact the way the oil is produced, currently controversial because of its adverse effect on the environment.

Dr Reza Azmi, founder and executive director of Wild Asia, a social enterprise in Kuala Lumpur working for sustainable tourism and agriculture, explains why oil palm has become such a hot product in Asia.

“It provides a higher source of income compared to other cash crops like paddy or rubber,” he tells IPS. Farmers can harvest bunches of oil palm fruit twice a month, while paddy can be harvested twice a year. Oil palm also produces the highest yield per area compared to other crops.

Moreover, it is cheap and used in an amazing variety of products: food from Nestle’s Kitkat to halwa, the dessert obligatory during most festivities in South Asia; a wide array of cosmetics, from lipsticks to shampoos; and biodiesel.

However, the wonder oil carries an ecological price tag.

As farmers fell trees and set fire to vegetation to clear more area for cultivation, it destroys forests and endangers wildlife, triggering smoke and recurrent hazes.

This June, Southeast Asia suffered the worst air pollution in 16 years. Smog from Indonesia choked Malaysia and Singapore. Visibility decreased, schools were closed and public programmes cancelled. Hospitals saw a rush of patients with respiratory diseases. A diplomatic row erupted between Singapore and Indonesia over culpability.

A transboundary meet in Kuala Lumpur in July saw the environment ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand and Singapore agree on a joint haze monitoring system. Indonesia also agreed to ratify a regional treaty to fight smog. But the fires continue to burn.

This is where China and India can play a major role by insisting on buying only palm oil produced without endangering forests.

The movement for sustainable production gathered momentum in 2004 with the formation of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an industrial initiative to persuade planters to keep off primary forests and conservation areas and minimise their environmental footprint.

“RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil currently represents over 15 percent of global crude palm oil production spread over 50 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea,” Darrel Webber, RSPO secretary-general tells IPS.

“A number of countries are making national commitments to sourcing only sustainable palm oil by 2015, including the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, France and Germany,” he added.

However, the two biggest consumers, China and India, are yet to follow the trend.

“While businesses in the West are making big strides to support the sustainable production of palm oil, large volume users in India and China are yet to get on board,” says Bob Norman, general manager at GreenPalm, an RSPO associate. “If the movement is to be a global success and achieve its aims, food service companies, retailers and other volume users in Asia need to engage with this issue.”

After India, China is the second-largest importer of palm oil. The demand is expected to grow 10 percent annually, which would make China the largest market by 2015.

However, only 15 Chinese companies are RSPO members so far.

Still, Webber thinks the sustainability campaign will find more takers after RSPO’s alliance with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Foodstuffs and Native Produce under the ministry of commerce.

The Chinese government’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) emphasises low carbon consumption.

India accounted for 19 percent of the global palm oil consumption in 2011-2012, more than China (16 percent) and the European Union (14 percent).

Dr B. V. Mehta, executive director at the Solvents Extractors’ Association in Mumbai estimates the Indian demand will increase by three to four percent per year as the cheap oil is used more and more in India’s food and hotel industries.

“Considering their use and import, it is imperative for Indian companies to move towards sustainable palm oil and practices,” says Webber. “By committing to source only certified sustainable palm oil, Indian companies can take a step towards ensuring future supply of clean palm oil while also taking responsibility for the global impact of their imports on the environment and the climate.”

Indian companies began joining the RSPO in 2006. Currently, there are 26 members.

Webber calls it a “strong indicator that business commitment and demand for sustainability is increasing in the country,” but Mehta says the huge population that still remains below the poverty line will pose a tough challenge.

“India supports sustainability but the poor Indian consumer is looking for cheap oil,” Mehta says. “People in the EU can afford to pay a higher price for certified palm oil but not in India, where thousands are struggling to feed themselves.”
Norman remains optimistic. “Economic prosperity in India and China has seen a rise in ethically conscious consumers,” he says. “Over time, this broader understanding and concern about the issues surrounding the production of palm oil will invariably lead to an increase in demand for food manufacturers and retailers to support sustainable production.”

Four months after her murder, you can see Rosy Maharjan flashing the two- finger victory sign – from a Facebook page. With police arresting the 21-year- old’s boyfriend and the people he hired to kill her due to jealousy, agitated civil society members have opened accounts on social networking sites, demanding justice for the slain college student.

A protest campaign in Kathmandu to demand change for women. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS.

Siyadevi Mandal, 45, has survived 13 murderous attacks. The woman from Mahadeva village in southern Nepal’s Saptari district cries inconsolably as she describes how she has been branded a witch. If someone falls ill in the village, crops fail or cows yield less milk, she is accused of black magic.

Last month, Siyadevi had to be admitted to hospital after being severely injured by neighbours who blamed her for their daughter’s illness. Eight years ago, Siyadevi’s mother-in-law Durgadevi died after villagers assaulted her following a livestock mishap.

Human rights defenders say violence against women is spiralling despite the end of a civil war in 2006.

Anbeshi-2011, a yearbook launched by Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, a Kathmandu valley-based non- governmental organisation (NGO), to record cases of violence against women, documents 1,569 incidents July 2010-June 2011.

Domestic violence tops the list, accounting for 64 percent of the attacks. It is followed by social violence (17 percent), rape (8 percent) and murder (4 percent). The attackers are the husband (74 percent) and family members (26 percent). In cases of murder, the husband’s involvement shoots up to 85 percent.

The yearbook also records 293 rapes and 54 incidents in which women were accused of practising witchcraft and beaten up, stripped, force-fed human excreta and treated to other savageries.

The escalating attacks come despite Nepal’s government kicking off a campaign last year to end violence again women by December 2010. The high-profile movement included setting up a telephone hotline in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Sarada Pokhrel, founding member of Women Security Pressure Group, an NGO taking part in the ‘WE CAN end all violence against women’ movement in South Asia, blames it on the continued political turmoil in Nepal.

“We have been in a transitional phase since the 2008 elections, waiting for a new constitution and a new elected government,” she says. “With a succession of weak governments, there is a growing sense of frustration and a culture of impunity. Women become targets of both.”

Rights activists note with dismay that the age of rape victims is going down; in many cases, the attackers are teenagers. According to Informal Sector Service Centre (Insec), Nepal’s largest human rights organisation, 190 rape victims were below 18 and six below 10. Twenty were killed.

Insec’s Human Rights Yearbook 2011 also records the murder of 68 women in domestic violence. Some died because their parents failed to provide dowry – money, gold and other expensive gifts like motorcycles. Some died because they had not given birth to a son, and some simply because the husband came back home drunk.

“Many incidents of domestic violence remain unreported and many reported incidents reach a compromise, either initiated by police or society itself,” says Bijay Raj Gautam, Insec’s executive director. “Very few cases of rape are made public as rape is a secret crime. The victims face social stigma in both cases.”

Gautam narrates two incidents to illustrate his point. Two sisters, aged 10 and eight, were raped by a teenaged youth in Syangja district. The girls’ family decided to hush it up after villagers threatened them with ostracisation.

In Khotang in eastern Nepal, a woman was set on fire by her husband. Though her sons complained to police, the victim withdrew the charge, saying she had an accident.

With Nepal shooting past Bangladesh and the Philippines in the migration of blue-collar workers abroad, families are breaking up and domestic violence is increasing.

“When the husband goes to work abroad, the wife faces violence at home,” says Mohana Ansari, member of the National Women’s Commission. “Neighbours or in-laws are accusing migrant workers’ wives of extramarital affairs and forcing them to leave home. We now have a new category of displaced victims.”

When Nepal saw its decade-old Maoist insurgency end in 2006, there was an agreement between the state and the rebels that a commission would be formed to punish war crimes.

However, six years later, the commission is yet to be formed. Instead, a string of governments has withdrawn cases against powerful party leaders, nurturing the culture of impunity that encourages fresh crimes.

Mandira Sharma, executive director of Advocacy Forum, an NGO fighting legal battles for violence victims, links the attacks to women’s lowly status in Nepal’s feudal society.

“In most cases of violence against women, the perpetrators have greater social, economic and political clout than the victims,” says Sharma, whose eight-year campaign to punish a group of army men who killed a 15-year-old schoolgirl remains fruitless. “Also, there is a growing nexus between politicians and criminals, which allows the latter to go free.”

Besides, there is mounting corruption in police, she says. “Look at the Suntali Dhami incident.”

Suntali Dhami is a household name though law and convention dictate that the identity of a rape victim be kept confidential. Dhami, a 25-year-old police woman, was gangraped by six of her male colleagues inside a police station.

Despite repeated calls by the National Human Rights Commission, only three of the rapists, who held junior posts, were charged and found guilty. Three senior officers still remain scot-free.

The government also ignored the Commission’s recommendation to punish two more senior officials who tried to obstruct investigation and gloss over the rape as consensual sex.

Excerpt:

Sonikumari Jha puts on her green camouflage fatigues, deftly laces up her boots and is ready to step out and announce her decision to embrace a new life. Her four-year-old son, who has been watching the same rote for years, is puzzled by an important omission. “Mama, you have forgotten your gun,” he calls out.

Rama Thakuri (left) now plans to seek voluntary retirement and open a shop to look after her five-month-old daughter. Credit: Gopal Gartoula/IPS.

“No darling, mama won’t have to carry a gun any more from today,” the 26-year-old says with a smile.

Eight years ago, Sonikumari joined the Maoist guerrillas, who were waging an underground war to abolish monarchy in Nepal and promulgate a constitution of, by and for the people.

Today, the section commander in the 2nd Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has decided to say farewell to arms five years after the insurgency ended.

Hundreds of Maoist women warriors, who had joined the PLA attracted by its promise of equality and justice during the 10-year war fought from 1996, are now bidding adieu to warfare for the sake of their children, like Sonikumari.

“After our People’s War ended in 2006, the combatants lived in cantonments hoping they would be inducted into the national army,” says Yam Bahadur Adhikari, commander of the 1st Division of the PLA.

“It took almost five years for things to move. During that long interval, it was natural that many of them would marry and have kids. Now that the government has finally started addressing the lot of the PLA, most of the mothers, who have young children, are opting for voluntary retirement instead of joining the army.”

When the Maoists signed the peace accord in 2006, it was decided that the PLA, comprising over 19,500 combatants, would be merged with the Nepal Army. However, after opposition from both the army and major political parties, it was decided that only up to 6,500 guerrilla fighters would be recruited.

The rest have two options: voluntary retirement with cash compensation or rehabilitation, which includes education since many dropped out of school to join the guerrillas, vocational training and assistance in setting up micro business.

In November, a Special Committee fanned out across the seven major cantonments to ask the PLA fighters what they would like to do.

According to Lt-Gen Balananda Sharma, coordinator of the committee, over 60 percent of the combatants want to join the army. The rest are seeking voluntary retirement, with only six plumping for rehabilitation.

But of the 3,526 women combatants, most of the married ones, especially those with young children, are seeking voluntary retirement.

Besides the necessity of looking after the children as well as fears that they might fail the physical fitness test, many of the women, married to fellow PLA combatants, are opting to return to civilian life so that their husbands stand a better chance of joining the army.

Muna Limbu, the daughter of a poor farmer in Ilam, eastern Nepal’s tea garden district, joined the PLA as a ninth grader. Three years ago, the 26-year-old married fellow PLA soldier Bimal Limbu and the couple now have an 11-month-old daughter.

As Bimal wants to be in the army, Muna has decided to take voluntary retirement though the decision leaves her unhappy.

“My dream was not fulfilled,” she says and her face darkens. “I joined the Maoists to see the birth of a people’s republic where there would be no oppression and injustice. I sacrificed the best years of my life and now, have been told by the party to make a sacrifice once more for peace and the new constitution.”

Though the Maoists agreed to disband the PLA within six months of the peace accord and help to write a new constitution by 2010, neither materialised.

Now, with the Supreme Court ordering the government to complete the new constitution by May 2012 or face fresh elections, the Maoists, who now head the government, have finally started the process of discharging the PLA.

The combatants are not happy with the options offered; still they have to make a choice under pressure from the party.

Though unmarried women warriors are free to pursue their dream to join the army, there are some noted exceptions.

Kamala Sharma, who received a bullet in her left knee during the civil war is now severely disabled. Kamala, in her twenties, wants to join the army but doesn’t stand a chance due to the physical fitness criteria.

Though the government has announced education, marital status and age concessions for PLA fighters wanting to join the army, dozens of disabled warriors – including those suffering from untreated war injuries, amputees and the visually impaired – are agonised over their future.

Adhikari says there are 19 disabled women in his division alone. Their number will be higher when all the seven main cantonments and 21 satellite camps are taken into consideration.

“It’s an injustice as well as humiliation for the disabled women combatants,” Adhikari says. “They are being forced to seek voluntary retirement. But if they do that, the money they will get will be spent on treatment and there will be nothing left to ensure their future.

“Also, in our society, women have to work harder than men. The disabled combatants can manage in the cantonments because their comrades look after them. But how will they survive when they go back to their village homes?”

The PLA is urging the party and government to come up with other options for women combatants; the Special Committee too has made similar recommendations.

“Those with young children can be given leave while the disabled can get non-combatant jobs in state departments,” Adhikari says. Otherwise, he warns the consequences could be grave.

“These are people who received combat training and know how to make explosives and plan ambushes,” he says. “If ignored, frustration and hopelessness could drive them into crime. Then the cycle of violence will never end in Nepal.”

Nepal will implement five projects with 110 million dollars sanctioned by the controversial Climate Investment Funds (CIFs), ignoring protestors who say this least developed country merits grants rather than climate loans.

The money – 50 million dollars in grants and 60 million in credit – will be disbursed through the Asian Development Bank, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank through four years as the projects start early next year, Nepal’s environment secretary Krishna Gyawali said.

Nepal is among eight developing countries that were offered CIFs, under either the Clean Technology Fund or the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF). Other potential CIF recipients were Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Niger, Tajikistan and Zambia.

In May 2009, Nepal’s first Maoist government agreed to participate in the pilot programme for climate resilience (PPCR) developed under the SCF.

Besides the environment ministry, the nodal agency for implementing the projects, other stakeholders include relevant ministries, the National Planning Commission and the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI).

In 2010, a new government led by the Communists identified four priority areas where the funds would be spent.

Building climate resilience of watersheds in mountain eco-regions is top priority. It will focus on communities living in watershed areas significantly vulnerable to climate change.

A second priority is responding to climate-related hazards through early warning systems as well as developing insurance.

The other two components are mainstreaming climate risk management in development, and building climate-resilient communities through private-sector participation.

Later, on Nepal’s request, a fifth project was added to build the climate resilience of endangered species.

However, several non-governmental organisations, trade unions, legislators from ruling parties and civil society members are campaigning against the climate loans, saying they add insult to injury.

“Developed countries must provide unconditional financial support on adaptation to countries vulnerable to climate change to build their resilience,” says Keshab Thapa, programme coordinator at Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development.

Thapa says climate loans violate both the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, where developed countries have committed adaptation support to vulnerable countries, as well as Nepal’s own policy on climate change, the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA).

With NAPA requiring 80 percent of the funds of any adaptation programme to flow directly to the community level, the PPCR in Nepal, Thapa says, violates the principle of country and community ownership.

He also objects to the private-sector participation component, to be effected through IFC and FNCCI.

“The PPCR proposes to lend money to private-sector companies which will never achieve community resilience,” he told IPS. “Private companies are often happy to use the loan money for their own benefit, simply looking at the scheme of interest and repayment; they are often totally unaware of climate change, adaptation, resilience, and the principle of equity and justice.”

With Nepal being at medium risk of debt distress and spending eight percent revenue to repay foreign debts, protesters say climate loans will burden the taxpayer with additional debt.

“We petitioned two earlier prime ministers against taking climate loans and are following it up with the current one,” says Hari Parajuli, secretary of the All-Nepal Peasants’ Federation, an umbrella of 22 organisations that has participated in public rallies against the PPCR.

“Nepal has one of the lowest greenhouse gas emission levels in the world due to its low industrialisation,” Parajuli adds. “It also has forests covering nearly 40 percent of its land. Yet, the developed countries that cause pollution are now seeking to make Nepal take loans and pay them interest.”

Parajuli says the protests are also against the involvement of the World Bank.

“We don’t regard it positively,” he says. “It is not service-oriented but works for profit.”

The growing corruption charges against ministers and government officials have also fuelled fears about the climate loans.

“Past precedents make us fear that new loans may not be utilised properly,” says Madan Lall Shrestha, academician at the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology. “Before taking a new loan, the old ones should be reviewed first.”

A parliamentary committee on finance and labour relations has also criticised the government, saying it should ask for grants, not loans.

“Climate loans go against the ‘polluters should pay’ principle,” says Sunil Pant, a legislator. Pant has been campaigning against climate loans in parliament and advocating the idea of a grant.

“Climate change cannot be mitigated by putting poor nations in deeper debt, especially when the problem is generated by the wealthy nations,” he says. “Rich countries emit huge amounts of carbon and then hypocritically impose debt and loans on the poor countries they take resources from, creating deeper poverty.

“We are calling on the wealthier nations to compensate Nepal and the rest of the world for the damage and environmental destruction they have caused that threatens us all.”

The World Bank, one of the targets of public criticism, says it is merely the fund disbursal instrument.

“Whether or how the available resources are used to address urgent financing and knowledge gaps is entirely up to Nepal,” says Christine Kimes, the Bank’s acting country manager for Nepal. “Concerns regarding climate financing in Nepal should therefore be discussed with the government.”

As for the government, officials defend the decision to take the loan.

“The apex body on climate change, the Climate Change Council headed by the prime minister, approved of the funding, provided it was used on priority sectors like agriculture, biodiversity and renewable energy to enhance productivity,” says Gyawali. “Besides, it is a remarkably concessional loan.”

The 60 million dollar loan has to be repaid in 40 years with a 10-year grace period. Also, Gyawali says, there is no interest, only a 0.10 percent service charge to be paid semi-annually.

But the protesters say they have not given up.

“Civil society organisations will closely monitor the use of the PPCR grant and loan,” says Thapa. “They will also continue lobbying to prevent further climate loans.”

By Walter García and Sudeshna Sarkar
Dec 5 2011

A mountainous country that boasts of eight of the 14 highest peaks in the world, including Mt Everest, Nepal is threatened by both deluge and drought with climate change shrinking its glaciers by 21 percent in 30 years. As rising temperature disturbs the balance of snow, ice and water in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region where it is located, millions of mountain people and 1.3 billion people living downstream in Asia’s major river basins face the loss of livelihood, homes and lives due to flash floods and droughts.

Monks at a prayer session against climate change. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KAVRE, Nepal , Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

There are gasps from the audience as a series of shocking images flash across the screen: human hands eaten away by arsenic, the carcass of a cow so emaciated that it looks two-dimensional, a starved child with matchstick legs grasping at the udder of an animal for sustenance.

“I am showing you these images to make you understand why we need to focus on the environment,” says the red-robed Tibetan Buddhist monk who has put together a chilling collection of photographs titled ‘A true story of Mother Earth’ on his laptop.

Karma Samdup Lama, a poor peasant’s son who became a Buddhist monk at the age of 12, now the vice-principal of a school for Buddhist novices, is showing the documentary to nearly six dozen monks and nuns gathered at the Thrangu Tashi Yangste monastery in Namo Buddha village, about 40km east of the Nepali capital.

It’s an unusual gathering. Though it started with the ‘Tashi Tsikgye’, Tibetan prayers chanted as benediction, it is a meet on climate change.

The ‘Monks’ Meet on Climate Change’ in November brought together renunciates from different monasteries and nunneries in Nepal to discuss what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions and why they need to do it.

The meet was the brainchild of The Small Earth Nepal (SEN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoting sustainable lifestyles and conservation. It had support from the Korea Green Foundation, a Seoul-based organisation working on environment conservation.

“We decided to start a climate change awareness programme with the monks and nuns because Nepal is a deeply religious place,” says Niranjan Bista, SEN’s coordinator for the project. “It looks up to the religious communities for inspiration and role models.”

Though Nepal is home to diverse religions, SEN chose the Buddhist community after research by Sundar Layalu who, as part of a British Council project, made the surprising discovery that monasteries have higher than normal carbon emissions.

Buddhism rejects physical luxuries to achieve spirituality and monks live an austere life. Yet Layalu, who chose the Thrangu Tashi Yangste monastery for his 2009-2010 research, found its carbon emissions unusually high due to a combination of fossil fuel use and a regular stream of visitors.

“The monasteries are often located at remote, high places; transporting food and other things require more car fuel. They also use generators to pump up drinking water. Besides, there is also the heavy use of incense,” says Sudarshan Rajbhandari, vice-president at SEN.

SEN trained monks to cook their food using briquettes made out of waste materials. In addition, the monastery has started using solar panels to heat water, replaced tea cups with bio-degradable earthen mugs, stepped up tree plantation and banished plastic bags.

“The Buddha taught to protect the environment,” says Karma Sandup. “He said we owe our existence to the four elements – water, earth, air and fire – and we have to conserve them. He also said plants should be nurtured till they became trees, like a mother protects her child.”

Karma Drolma a 55-year-old nun from Nepal’s remote, mountainous Manang district, who joined the Thrangu Tara Abbey for Tibetan Buddhist nuns when in her early teens can read and write only in the Tibetan language and remains cloistered, but she is aware of the changes taking place due to global warming.

“The mountains are melting and rivers are receding,” she says. “If this continues, all water would vanish one day and both people and animals will die.”

Bista says there was a special reason to choose the monastery at Namo Buddha for the climate awareness meet. “It is a well-known trekking and tourist destination and we hope the message will go out to these people as well.”

The monks’ meet ends with a pledge to do whatever is possible to resolve the global threat of climate change “which will ultimately entail ever greater human suffering, inequity, and irreversible damage to the earth.”

A billboard, standing sentinel at the monastery entrance, reminds residents and visitors of the Buddha’s teachings.

“The Buddha taught that the well-being of all life on earth, not just humans, is important and equally valuable,” the billboard says. “Hence we have an obligation to adhere to a more thoughtful way of living, which results in a natural balance and a harmonious future.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Sudeshna Sarkar and - -
KATHMANDU, Nov 20 2011 (IPS)

Chungda Sherpa, a former herder from eastern Nepal, has a warning tale ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Durban.

At World Wildlife Fund-Japan’s ‘Climate Witness’ programme in Osaka and Tokyo this month, to apprise communities around the world how climate change is threatening lives and livelihoods, the 48-year-old described how the glacier on Mt Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world, is shrinking rapidly.

“When I was young … I was told it was one of the largest non-polar glaciers in the world,” he said. “But it has retreated now and I can see glacial lakes forming, which could grow larger over time and become GLOFs (glacial lake outburst floods), posing a threat to our lives and property.”

With global average temperature increasing by approximately 0.75 degrees Celsius in the last century, its most visible and direct effect can be seen on mountains, says Pradeep Mool, remote sensory expert at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

“The health of glaciers indicates the state of the climate,” says Mool. “In 1957, when Swiss geologist Dr Toni Hagen took the photograph of the Gangapurna glacier on the northern slope of Mt Annapurna, it lay over the Manang valley. But recent photos show the glacier is now just a hanging strip. We have witnessed the change in our lifetime.”

The shrinking and retreating of the Himalayan glaciers – which provide life-giving water to over a billion people – became visible after early 1970. Three decades later, the phenomenon accelerated, resulting in the formation of moraine-dammed glacial lakes which are swelling ominously.

There are over 20,000 glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas and a GLOF risk assessment report by ICIMOD in 2010 compiled a list of 179 potentially dangerous ones in China, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. In addition, experts have identified another 25 in Bhutan.

So far, China has recorded the highest number of GLOFs (29), followed by Nepal (22), Pakistan (9) and Bhutan (4).

“There is a dearth of data,” says Mool. “For instance, people talk of cold floods in India and Myanmar (Burma), which could have been GLOFs; even some satellite images indicate that. But there is no recorded literature.”

The geography as well as geopolitics of the region comes in the way of extensive surveys and information sharing.

The high altitude of glacial lakes and glaciers – 4,800 m above sea level and higher – makes them virtually inaccessible. Also, many of them are near international boundaries or in disputed territory, like the Siachen glacier near India’s boundary with Pakistan, and Arunachal Pradesh state in India, part of which is claimed by China.

The disputes make them sensitive areas, often out of bounds for scientific surveys.

Political instability and ensuing violence, like in Afghanistan and Pakistan, also obstruct research. But despite the difficulties, ICIMOD has now for the first time conducted additional survey of GLOFs in Afghanistan and Burma.

The new inventory of nearly 1,700 lakes in the two countries, done mostly by satellite imaging, will be tabled in Durban during 17th conference of the parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban.

Though most of the governments in the region realise the need to combat climate change and have individually formulated national action plans as well as laws on disaster management, there is still little collective effort.

For instance, on Nov. 19, Bhutan hosted a ‘Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas’ to address climate change impacts on bio-diversity, food and energy security and the natural freshwater systems of the Himalayas.

However, only India, Nepal and Bangladesh participated, besides the host country, raising eyebrows at the non-participation of China and Pakistan.

“The meeting was intended only for countries from the eastern Himalayas,” says Krishna Gyawali, secretary at Nepal’s environment ministry. “We have to start somewhere and then gradually expand.”

However, it is felt that India’s uneasy relationship with China and Pakistan could have kept them out.

“Some of Asia’s major rivers like the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Mekong flow through more than one country,” says Mool. “Water-induced disasters spill over borders.

“Ten of the GLOF devastations experienced by Nepal originated in Tibet. The effect is long-lived. Besides the immense cost of rebuilding infrastructure in mountainous regions, there is the possibility of increasing landslide and avalanche. So, regional cooperation is a must.”

What is promising is that some of these countries are working with multilateral donor agencies to lessen GLOF risks, create an early warning system in case of floods, and devise optional livelihood means for displaced people.

According to Martin Krause, team leader at UNDP Asia-Pacific regional centre’s environment and energy division, the agency is engaged in projects in Bhutan and Pakistan with a new one to start in Nepal next year.

In Bhutan, it is focusing on the Buddhist kingdom’s two most vulnerable areas, the Punakha-Wangdi and Chamkhar valleys, home to 10 percent of the country’s population and important infrastructure.

The projects are co-financed by the UNFCC, Least Developed Countries Fund and the Austrian government. UNDP hopes that a component of the project – reducing the water level of Lake Thorthormi, ranked among Bhutan’s most dangerous glacial lakes – will provide valuable experience to other countries like China, Pakistan, India and Chile

In Pakistan, UNDP is working with the government to create an institution to address GLOF risks and other issues affecting communities and livelihoods in northern Pakistan and help them respond.

Ironically, though Nepal remained closed to the outside world till the 1950s and was affected by a 10- year communist insurgency from 1996, it remains the most open to surveys, research and disaster mitigation projects.

Next year, UNDP will start a many-layered disaster risk management programme in Nepal that, among other things, will seek to reduce human and material losses from GLOFs in two mountain districts: Dolakha and Solukhumbu.

Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, including Mt Everest, has been using the iconic peak to draw global attention to the risks faced by its mountain community.

“In 2009, the then government of Nepal called a cabinet meeting at Kala Patthar (a 5,242 m high plateau at the foot of Mt Everest),” says Ghana S. Gurung, conservation programme director at World Wildlife Fund Nepal.

“Later, at COP 15 in Copenhagen he gave rocks from Mt Everest to U.S. President Barack Obama and the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to emphasise how the peak’s snow cover was receding. It succeeded in drawing global attention to the peril faced by the world’s highest mountain due to climate change.”

Excerpt:

Suntali Shrestha wrings her hands in tension and despair as she recounts how she has been spending sleepless nights fearing that the flood alarm in her village would go off while she slept and she would be submerged.

Women in Nepal’s Dolakha district testify to living in fear of being submerged by a glacial lake outburst flood. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“The sirens are always there at the back of my mind, they won’t let me have any peace,” the 45-year-old farmer’s wife cries out addressing a crowd of people, mostly women, who have gathered in this town to talk about the hardships they have been facing due to changes in the climate.

It is one of Nepal’s “women and climate justice hearings” and the village women, some of whom had walked for hours to reach the venue, are hoping their voices would be heard by the authorities, perhaps also at the U.N. conference on climate change to be held in Durban this month.

Organised by Jagaran Nepal, a Kathmandu-based non-profit working to promote women’s rights, peace and governance, and local host Mahila Utthan Kendra (Centre for Women’s Upliftment), the tribunal, held on Oct. 30, was supported by the feminist task force group of the GCAP (Global Call for Action Against Poverty) Foundation.

It focused on select villages in Dolakha, a mountainous district about 135 km northeast of the capital city of Kathmandu, which lives with the threat of potential submergence.

Nagdaha, the village Suntali comes from, lies under the shadow of Tsho Rolpa, the largest glacial lake in Nepal and now, the most potentially dangerous. Lying at 4,580 m at the foot of the 7,146 m high Gauri Shankar peak in the Himalayas, Tsho Rolpa was formed by the gradual melting of the Trakarding glacier.

Though walled in by a natural moraine dam, the 1.76 sq km lake has been swelling as the Trakarding is melting due to the rise in temperature. Nepal’s annual mean temperature has been rising by 0.06 degrees Celsius per year with the mountains warming even faster by an additional 0.08 degrees Celsius.

This has caused glaciers to recede and glacial lakes in the Himalayan region to grow in number as well as in size. With the Trakarding retreating at the rate of 66 m per year, frequent avalanches now pose a greater threat to Tsho Rolpa’s natural dam.

Since the 1960s, Nepal has seen 17 glacial lakes breach their boundaries, causing death and destruction. Studies had forecast that Tsho Rolpa would also cause a GLOF – glacial lake outburst flood – in 1997. If the dam gets breached, a flood of nearly 80 cu m of water could put the lives of over 6,000 people at risk and destroy a 60 megawatt hydropower project.

Villagers say in the worst-case scenario, a Tsho Rolpa GLOF could also affect the Tamakosi river that flows through the region. The Tamakosi is a tributary of the mighty trans-border Kosi river that flows through Tibet, Nepal and China. The Kosi creates frequent monsoon flood havoc in Nepal and India and a GLOF could increase its power to devastate.

Though Nepal’s government installed 17 stations to issue early flood warnings – through air horns backed by sirens – villagers say some of them were disabled during the 10-year civil war fought by the Maoist insurgents. Also, while people from the at-risk zone moved to safer areas in 1997, they returned to their villages when nothing happened.

The warning signs put up by the government mean nothing to people like Suntali, who cannot read or write.

“There is no school in Nagdaha,” Kamala Shrestha, a 24-year-old poultry farmer, tells the tribunal. “The nearest school is in Charikot, which is two hours drive. So only two or three women in this village can read and write.”

There are no health posts either. “Even to buy paracetamol we have to go to Charikot,” Kamala adds. “Plus, there is no motorable road, which means we have no access to the market. We wish the tribunal will make the government build a school, health post and road.”

Sharmila Karki, Jagaran Nepal’s president, says the tribunal’s report will be forwarded to COP 17 when it starts in Durban on Nov. 28.

“We want a member of the community to raise the issues in Durban but it is a tough challenge,” Karki says. “Though Nepal is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, people here are still not aware of the dangers. Also, there is a huge deficit in gender perspective when it comes to making policies.”

When the first tribunal was held in Kathmandu in 2009, a participant told the audience she was suffering from a prolapsed uterus due to climate change.

“She said the streams in her village were drying up and she had to walk for nearly five hours to fetch water,” Karki said. “Doctors affirm that carrying heavy burdens for long periods can cause uterine prolapse in women; yet many people in the audience, unaware of that, laughed in derision when they heard her.”

Karki finds an ominous development since the last hearing. In 2009, women talked about physical problems: being displaced by floods, food insecurity and poor health. But this time, they talked of mental stress as well.

While the government last year made policies to prevent domestic violence, there is no policy to help women get climate justice.

“Living in an environment of psychological terror is also a violation of women’s basic rights,” Karki warns.

“Women who have to manage households are under growing stress, especially since there is no policy to ensure their access to natural resources like water, healthcare or the education that they need in order to be able to cope with change.”

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Sep 20 2011 (IPS)

Though Nepal was relatively unscathed by the earthquake that wreaked havoc in the adjacent areas of India this week, it showed up this Himalayan country’s inadequate disaster preparedness.

“The impact of Sunday’s earthquake was relatively low,” says Amod Mani Dixit, executive director at the National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal. “Though 6.8 on the Richter scale, it measured about 5 on the Modified Mercalli Scale (that measures the intensity) in Kathmandu. But what if a bigger one comes along?”

Dixit has in mind the historical temblor on the Indo-Nepal border in 1934 that killed over 8,000 people in Nepal alone and destroyed more than 80,000 buildings. Fifteen other major quakes have rattled Nepal since 1223 with the last one, occurring in 1988, destroying nearly 65,000 buildings and killing at least 700.

In comparison, Sunday’s quake has an official toll of six deaths, though other reports say that nearly a dozen people died. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai called an emergency meeting of the cabinet soon after the quake, and security forces swung into action to rescue those trapped under the debris of collapsed buildings.

But, Nepal still needs to massively scale up its disaster preparedness to cope with a killer quake.

While India has a National Disaster Response Force comprising 10 battalions, with about 1,000 trained personnel per battalion, Nepal has no such force dedicated to combating disasters.

India deployed about 5,000 army troops to help deal with the aftermath of Sunday’s temblor, which claimed at least 50 lives and left thousands stranded in the worst affected eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim.

In Nepal, Dixit estimates there are about 600 trained personnel at the mid-level and another 1,000 – 2,000 at a basic level for providing medical first response, collapsed structure search and rescue, and light search and rescue.

But to cope with a really severe tremor, there should be at least 2,500 mid-level trained rescuers for the rural areas and 1,500 for the urban areas. In addition, Nepal also needs a major taskforce of at least 80,000 community volunteers to fan out to the nearly 4,000 village development committee areas.

The biggest danger during a killer quake, Dixit warns, will come from Nepal’s buildings, almost 93 percent of which are non-engineered and informally constructed in the traditional manner without any or little intervention by qualified architects and engineers.

“You can imagine the vulnerability of these buildings, their resistance to earthquakes,” he says.

In the worst-case scenario, he assesses that 60 percent of the buildings in Kathmandu will be damaged beyond repair, which is also likely to be the case in the rest of Nepal.

“We have an excellent building code but we have not had much success in implementing it,” he says. “Perhaps about five of the 100-odd municipalities follow them, like Kathmandu and Dharan.”

A major tremor will also hit other critical infrastructure like hospitals, airports, telecom, drinking water supplies, bridges and roads.

“These will function only at 50 percent of their capacity in a worst-case scenario,” Dixit estimates.

A key factor in battling the next earthquake or any other disaster will be state policies and leadership.

While international donors are ready to help a developing country like Nepal cope with crises, an acute political instability continuing for nearly a decade has hampered a succession of governments from taking advantage of the offers fully.

Though the government approved of a National Strategy for Disaster Risk Management in 2009 and the cabinet approved a Bill for a new Disaster Management Act the same year, it is yet to be approved by the parliament.

“That is definitely impairing our progress,” U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator Robert Piper told the media.

Piper says “emergency actors” like the U.N. agencies, and “long-term development actors” like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, the governments of the U.S., Britain and Australia, and the European Commission have built “a strong international collaboration to help Nepal prepare for and deal with risk.”

The new Nepal Risk Reduction Consortium has already drawn up a work plan but is hampered from putting it into action due to the absence of a National Disaster Management Authority that will be formed once the shelved Bill becomes an Act.

From 2007-2010, the Japanese government funded a natural disaster reduction programme, seeking to minimise the impact of potential earthquakes on seismically vulnerable communities in five municipalities in Nepal.

It was part of a five-country regional programme in South Asia with the goal of supporting regional cooperation through knowledge sharing and development of best practices. The other four countries were Bhutan, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.

Political friction has come in the way of effective regional cooperation even though the eight South Asian states – Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan – are formally part of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

SAARC is yet to show a united face to disasters though the 13th SAARC summit of the heads of states of the member countries agreed in 2005 that mutual cooperation was a must for effective disaster preparedness. In the following year, the SAARC comprehensive framework on disaster management was articulated.

At home, Nepal needs large-scale awareness programmes to change the mindsets of both its leaders and people.

Images of the reaction to Sunday’s quake, broadcast by the local TV stations, showed pandemonium in parliament as lawmakers rushed out pell-mell once the tremors began. Panic-stricken people jumped out of windows suffering fractures and other injuries.

“If an eighth grader in California can behave calmly during an earthquake, why not a grownup person in Nepal?” asks Dixit. “In our schools we teach what earthquakes are and what causes them. But how to survive them and what to do during an earthquake is not included in the curriculum. We have islands of success, but we need is to upscale everything.”

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Sep 16 2011 (IPS)

While a Nepalese campaign to stop human trafficking gains recognition by the White House and Hollywood, Nepal continues to be a prime source for sex trafficking, thanks to unsettled conditions created by a protracted political crisis.

Charimaya Tamang (holding certificate), who received the U.S. government's anti-slavery award for 2011, with other trafficking survivors. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“We wanted to hand them over to the minister for women, children and social welfare (WCSW). Unfortunately, there is no such minister.”

Since 2002 there have been nine short-lived governments that failed to combat trafficking. The tenth, sworn in last month, is yet to appoint a full-fledged WCSW minister and relief measures announced this month ignore trafficking.

Perhaps the biggest state failure has been the absence of a single survey on how many people are trafficked annually.

“The most oft-quoted survey on trafficking was sponsored by the International Labour Organisation in 2001,” says Hari Paudel, spokesman at the WCSW ministry. “It estimated that around 12,000 Nepalese girls were trafficked annually to India for prostitution.

“The only government data is from the 2001 census that listed 83,000 people as missing. Of them, 36,000 were women. However, the data is insufficient as all the missing people may not have been trafficked.”

The number reported by police, the main data source for the state, is impossibly low – below 200 per year.

“People are loath to report incidents of trafficking,” Paudel says. “We have come across villages that have no women. The villagers say their women have gone to India in search of work and will be back.”

The 11th Annual Trafficking in Persons Report released by the United States this year, points out gaps in Nepal’s anti-trafficking laws, though the Human Trafficking and Transportation Control Act (2007) and Regulation (2008) have tough penalties, including 10 to 20 years’ imprisonment and fines.

“Politically connected perpetrators enjoy impunity from punishment,” the report said. “There were no trafficking-related investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of government officials for complicity in trafficking during the reporting period.”

Because society stigmatises survivors, their rehabilitation is painfully difficult.

A classic case is that of Charimaya Tamang, recipient of the U.S. government’s 2011 ‘Hero Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery Award’, who was abducted from Sindhupalchowk district at 16 and sold into a brothel in India’s Mumbai city in 1994.

For 22 months, she was regularly beaten, raped and burnt with cigarette butts in the notorious Kamathipura red-light area. Then in 1996, Charimaya and hundreds of other prisoners were rescued in one of the largest-ever police raids on Mumbai’s brothels.

Charimaya says her village ostracised her. But, she personally filed a case against the eight villagers who had sold her, becoming the first survivor to do so. In 1997, the Sindhupalchowk Court convicted all.

Sunita Danuwar from eastern Nepal’s Udaypur was sold to the same brothel when she was 15 but rescued soon afterwards.

“There were nearly 200 girls from Nepal,” Danuwar says. “Many of them were 12 or 13. One died of AIDS in the rescue home. That made me decide we have to do something when we returned home.”

In 2000, Charimaya, Sunita and 14 other survivors founded ‘Shakti Samuha’, an anti-trafficking non-government organisation (NGO). Today, they run three safe houses for rescued victims and conduct awareness and intervention programmes in 10 of Nepal’s most vulnerable districts.

This year, Charimaya, now 34, travelled to Washington to receive the anti-slavery award from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The work of another campaigner, Anuradha Koirala, a 62-year-old former teacher whose NGO, ‘Maiti Nepal’, rescues and rehabilitates trafficking survivors, also received widespread attention this year when Hollywood star Demi Moore visited Nepal to make a documentary for CNN.

The documentary, ‘Nepal’s stolen children’, records the stories of some of the girls rescued by Maiti Nepal.

Thanks to these campaigns, social attitudes are changing towards trafficking survivors.

“In 1996, there was stiff resistance when the Kamathipura victims were returning home,” recalls Benumaya. “The public sentiment was that they would spread HIV/AIDS and pollute society. Some even advocated that they be burnt alive. The state needs to do more.”

In 2000, the U.N. adopted the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime that covers trafficking. It is supplemented by three protocols, of which the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, gives the greatest boost to anti-trafficking campaigns.

Though Nepal signed the convention in 2002, it is yet to ratify the protocol.

Campaigners also want legislators to ensure education and jobs for survivors, free healthcare and citizenship in the new constitution they are drafting.

“Many of the victims were sold as minors and did not have a citizenship certificate,” says Benumaya. “When they come back, some have children. Both mothers and children become stateless. They should be granted citizenship.”

The other major demand is for compensation. Offenders are fined up to Nepali rupees 200,000 (about 2,580 dollars), half of which goes into a state rehabilitation fund.

“How can the government take half the money?” asks an indignant Charimaya. “It is the state’s responsibility to rehabilitate survivors.”

Excerpt:

Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal’s women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks.

Chandrakumari Paneru, (fifth from right), at the Bhorle Community Seed Bank. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“I had a crop failure two years ago,” says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which is part of the Langtang National Park, a protected area encompassing two more districts, Nuwakot and Sindhupalchowk.

“The maize was attacked by pests, the paddy had no grain and the soil grew hard. I had a tough time trying to feed my three daughters and sending them to school.”

Since her marriage 17 years ago, Shobha had been sharing farming chores with her husband Ram Krishna. However, when he left for Dubai four years ago to work as a security guard, farming became her responsibility entirely.

Though she has never been to school and can only scrawl her name, Shobha and other women in the village who share similar backgrounds, are keenly aware of changing climate and its adverse impact on livelihoods.

“Daytime temperatures are rising, rainfall has become erratic and there are frequent landslides and hailstorms,” she says.

In 2007, when World Wildlife Fund-Nepal (WWF-Nepal) launched its Langtang National Park and Buffer Zone Support Project to conserve biodiversity and enhance livelihood opportunities by integrated management of land, forest and water resources, it commissioned a study on the impact of climate changes in Rasuwa.

The study by Resource Identification and Management Society-Nepal, after consultations with villagers and analysing data from 1978 to 2007, came up with alarming findings: There was an increase in seasonal, yearly and monthly temperatures in summer and monsoon while winter temperatures were decreasing.

Even more critically for agriculture, the average annual rainfall distribution showed a decreasing trend of nearly one mm per year.

Nepal’s women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

The changes were believed to have led to frequent landslides, droughts, hailstones, and windstorms. In addition, there were frequent outbreaks of diseases like jaundice, typhoid and diarrhoea.

Agriculture, the mainstay of the district, was hit by loss of arable land due to landslides, pests and crop diseases.

When WWF-Nepal started consultations with villagers on how to protect water resources and crops, the women pointed out that the indigenous seeds they had used in the past were better suited to the changing weather conditions.

“The local seeds we used could withstand both excessive rain and drought,” says Chandrakumari Paneru, a 27-year-old female farmer from Bhorle village and a university degree holder in a district where almost 60 percent of the population can only sign their names.

“But we had to use hybrid seeds imported from India as local stocks were decreasing. The hybrid seeds produced a good crop one year, but the next year they would prove sterile. It led to farmers using more chemical fertilisers and the soil turned hard while health hazards increased.”

Paneru is also a member of the Mahalaxmi Women’s Savings and Loan Cooperative. In a village that has no banks, it collects small sums of money from its 200-odd members to create a modest fund that can provide loans in times of need.

“As we were running our own cooperative, we felt we could do something more on our own,” says Paneru. “So we asked WWF-Nepal to help us set up a community seed bank.”

In 2010, Paneru and another member of the cooperative, Ambika Poudel, went to visit three community seed banks in the far western districts of Bardiya and Kailali to see how they worked.

Encouraged by the seed bank they saw at Masuria in Kailali district, also run by women, they established the Bhorle Community Seed Bank, the first of its kind in Rasuwa, with Nepali rupees 80,000 (about 1,084 dollars) provided by WWF-Nepal.

Operating from a room in a one-storey building, the seed bank today stocks 68 varieties of seeds, including grains like rice, maize and millets, and vegetables like tomato, green chilli, cauliflower and cabbage. The women’s cooperative runs from the adjacent room.

Members of the bank can take loans of one to two kg of seeds and have to repay twice the amount within six months.

This year, the seed bank put up a stall at an organic biodiversity fair to explain how local seeds meant better insurance against weather swings and how the bank operated.

Unknown to the women of Rasuwa, the government of Nepal has been following their example. The department of agriculture has established community seed banks in three more districts: Sindhuli, Sindhupalchowk and Dadeldhura.

“In 2009-2010, there was a severe maize crop failure in two districts in southern Nepal, Bara and Parsa, that imported about 30 percent of their seeds from India,” says Dilaram Bhandari, chief of the seed quality control centre in the agriculture department.

“The seed banks were started to boost the replacement of quality local seeds as well as preserve biodiversity,” Bhandari explained.

While women comprise more than 50 percent of Nepal’s nearly 29 million population, in many districts their numbers are higher due to outmigration of men in search of jobs. That has led to nearly 40 percent of farming now being done by women, according to Bhandari.

In the seed banks and other cooperatives run by the government, the state policy is to ensure at least 33 percent participation by women.

“We chose Rasuwa because it is much more vulnerable to climate change, being both a mountain community and a poor district,” says Moon Shrestha, senior climate change adaptation officer at WWF- Nepal. “We had to also keep in mind the capacity of the community to adapt to the changes.

“Today, the Bhorle Community Seed Bank is not just a pilot project it is a demonstration site as well.”

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Sep 1 2011 (IPS)

Inspired by Indian socialist leader Anna Hazare’s celebrated public fast against corruption in the Indian capital of New Delhi, starvation protests have sprung up in Nepal to press for a timely new constitution.

Former legislators and ministers on a relay hunger strike in Kathmandu. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“There is growing pessimism among young people in Nepal,” said Saurav Bikram Thapa, a 20-year-old student of Kathmandu’s Kadambari Memorial College, who, along with six of his peers, sat on a two-day protest fast in Patan, the site of an old kingdom.

“The new constitution has been delayed (by 15 months) and corruption is growing. To battle this, we are advocating the empowerment of young people.”

In another part of the capital, close to parliament, former MPs and ministers had pitched up a marquee on Aug. 24 to undergo a five-day public fast.

“We were influenced by Anna Hazare’s fast in India,” said Jhalak Nath Wagle, who was elected to parliament 17 years ago from the Nepali Congress, the second largest party in Nepal after the Maoists, and became a junior minister before losing the next election.

“We had been protesting earlier too but the government took no notice of us,” added the 52-year-old from Jajarkot, a district in mid-western Nepal, one of the strongholds of the 1996 – 2006 Maoist rebellion. “So we decided to go on a fast.”

The nearly 50 protesting former legislators have a manifold manifesto: restoration of law and order, an end to corruption, reining in inflation, a guarantee of peace and other demands.

However, the legislator’s protest lacked the same compelling power of Hazare’s fast, which forced Indian parliament to pass a resolution to bring in a strong ombudsman capable of checking corruption in high places.

Wagle blames it on the 10-year civil war that he says taught Nepal that might was right.

“People have little faith in peaceful protests here,” he rued. “They increasingly believe in aggressive protests: padlocking institutions (like universities and government offices), forcefully detaining officials and even smearing targets’ faces with ink.”

Female protestors are having far better luck with non-violent protests. Their marquee is full of people, music and even vigorous dancing that draws passersby so that their small huddle swelled during the 12 days of their peaceful public fast.

“We began our fast from Aug. 18, asking the government to give us at least the draft of the new constitution,” says Tulasa Lata Amatya, executive director at Community Action Centre Nepal, an NGO working to raise HIV/AIDS awareness among sex workers.

“There are over 100 laws that discriminate against women and we want the new constitution to be women-friendly. We also want it to be inclusive and providing for proportional representation in all spheres.”

Seven networks of women’s rights organisations began the public protest under the banner of Women’s Pressure March for Peace and Constitution after caretaker Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal resigned on Aug. 14, tacitly admitting that the new constitution would not be ready within its Aug. 31 deadline.

It was the third time that Nepal’s parliament, elected in 2008 to write the new constitution, failed to meet a deadline.

Women have suffered from political instability. Though an earlier government had announced that 2010 would see an end to all forms of violence against women, incidents of domestic violence, rape and murder shot up.

Women’s groups began coming together when the second deadline for promulgating the new constitution was dawning on May 28. They held a vigil in front of parliament till the government enforced a ban on all meetings within a 50 metres radius of the house.

“This time, we are sitting outside the prohibited area as ours is a peaceful protest,” says Amatya, who was arrested briefly last time.

“Unlike Anna Hazare, who fasted continuously for 12 days (in August) we are fasting for 12 hours a day. Our protesters are women who have families to cook for and children to look after. But, in spite of that we kept up our protests for well over four months, which is an achievement.”

The women’s networks decided to call off their protest on Aug 29, a day after a politician with a brilliant academic record and clean image – Baburam Bhattarai, the deputy chief of the Maoist party – was elected Nepal’s new prime minister.

“The new prime minister has promised he would conclude the peace process in 45 days,” said Amatya. “So we have decided to give him time till then. Meanwhile, we are meeting to discuss our next strategy, and if he fails to deliver we will be back on the streets.”

In 2006, Nepal created history with a peaceful public protest that approached the proportions resorted to by Mahatma Gandhi in compelling the British to grant independence to India in 1947.

After King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah seized power with an army-backed coup in 2005, political parties and civil society came together to stage peaceful protests throughout the country for 19 days that forced the king to step down.

But, this time the parties and civil society failed to ignite a mass movement, with isolated groups trying valiantly to keep the flame alive.

Veteran journalist and social commentator Yubaraj Ghimire says it is due to the parties and civil society losing credibility.

“Though civil society played a considerable role in the pro-democracy movement of 2006, its leaders then became discredited because they showed double standards,” says Ghimire, editor of The Reporter weekly. “They failed to speak out against the continued killings and violence.

“Only the women stuck to the same issues. They are the ones who did not give up,” Ghimire said.

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Aug 10 2011 (IPS)

Six years ago Shantimaya Dong Tamang went to Kuwait to work as an illegal domestic worker, falling for brokers’ tales of how she could earn good money and stand on her own feet.

Shantimaya Dong Tamang's bid to earn money as a domestic worker in Kuwait ended with her becoming a quadriplegic. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

“Officials of the Nepalese embassy in Kuwait told us she was found in a hospital, unable to speak or move,” says a dazed Tej Bahadur Tamang, Shantimaya’s father, a landless agricultural labourer from Makwanpur.

“She had fallen from the fifth floor of her employer’s house. No one knows how it happened. Did she try to escape? Was she thrown down? My daughter alone knows but she can’t speak.”

Shantimaya lies in a cocoon of blankets in Kathmandu valley’s Patan Hospital, not talking, moving or seeing anything. She has to be fed through a pipe and her diaper has to be changed regularly.

For almost five years Shantimaya lay in Kuwait’s Farwaniya Hospital till embassy officials and the network of Nepalese migrant workers managed to identify her and trace her family in Nepal.

Kani Sherpa, another Nepalese domestic worker, died under similarly mysterious circumstances. While Kani’s employer said she fell to her death from the top storey, her family alleges she was murdered after being raped.

The ensuing outcry forced the Nepalese government to ban women from going abroad to work as domestic help. However, the ban was lifted late last year after illegal migration increased and more women fell prey to the traffickers.

“Poverty and unemployment are the main factors driving women to seek work abroad even though the Maoist insurgency (that spurred migration from 1996 onwards) ended in 2006,” says Bijaya Rai Shrestha, director at Pourakhi, a non-profit organisation founded to counsel migrant workers and rescue them from trouble abroad.

“The third reason is domestic violence: abusive husbands who take a second wife or in-laws who beat and torture them,” Shrestha told IPS.

According to the department of foreign employment under the labour ministry, the fiscal year 2010-11 saw an all-time high in registered migrant workers’ exodus: 354,716 people left Nepal to work abroad, indicating a 20.61 percent surge. Of these, 10,416 were women.

This year has seen the figures growing, with over 8,000 women having left for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE in a surge that has made Nepal the largest recipient of remittances sent in by migrant workers.

A World Bank study on large-scale migration and remittances reported in June that Nepal received 2.5 billion US dollars as remittances in the fiscal year 2009 – 2010 overtaking Bangladesh and the Philippines, the two largest manpower-supplying countries.

Bank economist Hisanobu Shishido’s study finds the phenomenon a mixed blessing. On the credit side, it has “helped reduce poverty from 42 percent to 31 percent, bridging the gap between rich and poor, and brought better education and healthcare to migrants’ children”.

However, the dark side includes family separation, abuse, and trafficking as well as a reduction in local labour supply by almost 15 percent.

“Between 2008 and 2010, 15 Nepalese maids working in Lebanon committed suicide,” says Sthaneshwar Devkota, executive director at the state-run Foreign Employment Promotion Board. “Being mostly illiterate and unaware, they are easily duped. For instance, though they get free visas, many agencies swindle them.”

“The more dangerous ruse is making them go though India. If their documents are not in order or they are being lured to banned destinations like Lebanon, immigration authorities at Kathmandu airport will spot the fraud. So they are made to go to India first. It increases the danger of the women being forced into the flesh trade.”

Then there are the disappearances. While the labour ministry says there are nearly 30,000 to 40,000 Nepalese maids in the Gulf, Pourakhi estimates that the actual number is over 300,000. Most of them are undocumented, having no valid papers.

“Though the law says housemaids can work in a foreign country for a maximum of two years, Renu Gurung, who went to Oman, was missing for 10 years,” says Reecha Sharma Tiwari, administrative officer at Pourakhi.

“She contacted her family only about five months ago, saying she is now ‘holed up with some friends’. Tulasa Devi Lamichhane and Ranjana Pariyar were accused by their employers of theft and are doing time in Oman. With no documents, it is near impossible to rescue such workers.”

Faced with protracted political instability, Nepal finds it hard to attend to issues like migrant women workers’ safety. This summer, though, agreements were signed with the four major Gulf countries employing Nepalese maids: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.

“A nine-point yardstick has been drawn up,” says Devkota. “It has fixed the minimum salary and laid down conditions like a secure separate room for the maid and allowing her to contact her family and the embassy once a week.”

Employers are also required to show sound financial status to pay the promised salary and must have no morality-related cases against them.

Perhaps the reforms should begin at home.

On the day Shantimaya was brought back to Kathmandu, Sita Dahal, also 23, was waiting at the foreign ministry’s passport counter for an emergency passport. From eastern Nepal’s tea garden district of Morang, she was going to Dubai to work in a factory.

“In Morang, you have to pay Nepali rupees 200,000 (2,765 dollars) to get a government job,” says Sita. “That’s why I am going abroad: to make that money.”

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Aug 9 2011 (IPS)

When Binita Lamichhane got married she was troubled by her husband’s bloodshot eyes. “What happened to your eyes?” the 18-year-old bride asked. “Smoke,” came the answer.

Women in Nepal's plains make improved cooking stoves as a means of livelihood. Credit: Hari Gopal Gorkhali/IPS

The cooking stove – an open fire on three bricks packed with a layer of mud – filled the single-room house with smoke that blackened everything and caused the family members respiratory ailments.

“It’s a common problem in Nepal’s villages,” says Binita, now 29 and the mother of two. “My mother had severe asthma but we never realised it was due to the smoke. There were also frequent deaths due to asphyxiation.”

In Nagarkot, a picturesque tourist destination in central Nepal’s Bhaktapur district where Binita lives, a neighbour died two months ago due to her smoking stove, she says.

The human misery apart, greenhouse gases (GhGs) and black carbon produced by inefficient combustion of wood and biomass have been identified as prime agents in global warming that is said to cause climate change.

A report published this year by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank – ‘Household Cookstoves, Environment, Health, And Climate Change: A new look at an old problem’ – says developing countries annually burn about 730 million tonnes of biomass fuel for household use, releasing several GhGs.

In areas close to ice and snow accumulations like the Himalayas, the study says, there is evidence that soot from cooking stoves is accelerating the melting of glaciers. Soot is suspected to be behind shifts in rainfall patterns in India and China.

Global inventories have found that traditional stoves account for nearly one-fourth of soot emissions. These stoves also consume vast quantities of firewood, leading to rapid forest degradation which, if unchecked, could lead to deforestation.

In 2008, the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC), under Nepal’s environment ministry, commissioned a study that found indoor air pollution (IAP) to be the fourth most important health risk factor after malnutrition, unsafe sex and unsafe drinking water and sanitation.

“More than 80 percent of Nepal’s population (approximately 20 million people), principally comprising the rural poor, are exposed to dangerous levels of IAP…,” the study says.

Among the poorest countries in the world, most of Nepal has no electricity, and cooking gas is both expensive and in short supply, having to be brought from India, Nepal’s southern neighbour.

A beginning was made in the 1980s when Nepal included improved cooking stoves (ICS) in its planning, and the research centre for applied science and technology under Tribhuvan University developed a model based on local materials.

In 1999 a sustained campaign was launched by AEPC to get villages to switch to ICS under its Energy Sector Assistance Programme (ESAP) with financial support from the Danish government.

“About Nepali rupees 370 million (5.1 million US dollars) were allocated for ICS in two phases,” says Karuna Bajracharya, manager at ESAP.

“The first phase ended in 2004 and the second started from March 2007. Supported by Norway, it will continue till 2012. By June this year, we had set up almost 480,000 stoves. They reduce fuel consumption by at least one-third and eliminate health hazards.”

AEPC’s strategy is to create a network of promoters who are trained to make the ICS and then persuade villagers to adapt them. “Our policy is to train three people in each village development committee,” says Bajracharya. “At least two of them have to be women.”

Besides improving lives and the environment, the ICS is also empowering village women.

Sushila Gaire lives in Kapilavastu district in southern Nepal where women have little say in household matters and are confined to the home. But the 29-year-old, who did not finish school, is the family bread earner following her husband’s death.

A trained ICS maker, Sushila now makes about 30 pieces a month, earning about 5-6 dollars per piece. She frequently travels to distant villages to install the ICS and train others.

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Jul 28 2011 (IPS)

The recent gang-rape of a Buddhist nun and her expulsion from her sect have sparked a debate about the deep-rooted religious traditions and biases that foster discrimination and violence, especially against women, in this South Asian state.

The public outcry against the nun’s expulsion forced the Nepal Buddhist Federation to reconsider, saying now that once she recovers, the victim can return to her nunnery.

But it is only a minor triumph. While public debate on a discriminatory socio-religious practice led to its retraction, thousands of women continue to be victims of other religious rituals in Nepal.

The expulsion debate started after the 21-year-old nun was attacked on June 24 while travelling in eastern Nepal. Bad weather disrupted the journey and the young woman, easily recognizable as a nun by her shaved head and red robes, was persuaded by the bus driver to spend the night in the vehicle.

She was later raped by five people, including the driver and his two helpers, who also looted the money and other belongings she was carrying.

“It is a nightmare,” says the nun’s uncle, Surya Bahadur Tamang. “We took her to a private hospital in Siliguri but the doctors said they would certify it as an accident since rape would mean police intervention. How can we fight a legal case against the culprits if the doctors don’t support us?”

When the nun’s family brought her to Kathmandu for further treatment, the state-run hospital they went to refused to admit her at first. By then, however, media reports about the attack had begun to appear and Nepal’s National Women’s Commission as well as indigenous organisations intervened, forcing the doctors to treat her.

But more suffering awaited the victim. A joint statement supported by 15 organisations— including Nepal Tamang Lama Ghedung, an organisation of Buddhist monks, Nepal Buddhist Federation, and Boudha Jagaran Kendra (Buddhist Awakening Centre)— condemned the attack but said she had lost her celibacy and her religious status. The rejection triggered widespread debate, with Buddhist groups from across the world criticising it.

“There is a great deal of shock and disbelief at the very idea of such an action by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists in the U.S. and abroad,” wrote Matthew Frazer, an American who established the Yeshe Tsogyal Foundation to defend Buddhists targeted by violence or abuse. “Such an action reflects badly not only on Nepal, but on Buddhists in general to the rest of the world. It will set a very perilous precedent that can be used to take similar actions against future victims.”

The Syracuse Buddhism Examiner reported last week that the attack had shaken up the Buddhist community in New York state. “The rape issue is taken very seriously here,” the Examiner said, at the same time offering help and the space to discuss rape issues.

Others like the Australian Anthony Best, now a monk known as Bhante Sugato, are mobilising support through blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The nun belongs to the Tamang community, a Tibeto-Burman people once living in the high Himalayan ranges who migrated to Tibet, India, Bhutan and Nepal. They are among Nepal’s most disadvantaged groups, lacking education and access to economic resources. They are also among the worst victims of human trafficking.

Poverty has led to the perpetuation of a religious practice—the Jhuma tradition—among Tamangs and other Buddhist communities of western Nepal.

“As land is scarce in the mountains, families with several children seek to prevent it from being split up,” says Uttam Niraula, executive director of the Society for Humanism Nepal (SOCH Nepal), a non- government organisation campaigning against superstition and paranormal practices. “While the eldest looked after the family, the one in the middle was sent off to become a monk or nun. This is the Jhuma tradition.”

SOCH Nepal recently worked with Nepal’s women, children and social welfare ministry to produce a draft law to prevent discrimination and violence in the name of social malpractices, many of which stem from religion, like Jhuma and two more celebrated traditions, the Kumari and Deuki.

The Kumari – Nepal’s famous Living Goddess – is the tradition of choosing a girl at pre-puberty, sometimes as young as three years old, as the guardian deity of the city and installing her in her own palace, away from her family. She does not go to school and is not allowed to walk outside. Her reign ends when she nears puberty and is replaced by another young girl.

The Deuki system, similar to India’s notorious Devadasi or temple slave custom, exists in far western Nepal where families “gift” a young daughter to a temple, abandoning her to a fate of poverty, exploitation and often enforced prostitution.

“All these customs violate a child’s rights and are clearly banned by Nepal’s Children’s Act of 1992,” says Niraula. “The Act says a child should not be separated from the parents, should be allowed to go to school and play and should not be dedicated to god. It specifically says that a child under 16 can’t be made to become a nun or monk. But the implementation is weak. The new act will have tougher deterrents.”

But the government faces an uphill task trying to implement the new law, even if parliament passes it.

In 2005, lawyer Pundevi Maharjan filed a public interest suit, arguing that Kumaris should be allowed to go to school, stay with their families and enjoy the rights granted to all children by the constitution. Though Nepal’s Supreme Court vindicated Maharjan’s stand, the Kumari still continue to lead a sequestered life, with a succession of governments fearful of antagonising the powerful Newar community, whose deity she is.

Buddhists, too, are not ready to see the Jhuma tradition end.

“It will be a violation of our cultural rights,” says Ang Kaji Sherpa, general secretary of Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities. “The government needs to consult the stakeholders and initiate social reforms first instead of trying to impose a law unilaterally.”

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Jul 22 2011 (IPS)

Dawa Gyalmo Sherpa’s three sons went to look for blue-collar jobs in Malaysia, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, saying Mulkharka, their tiny village in Kathmandu valley, had no livelihood prospects.

Mulkharka's women cleaning up the trekking trail that is an economic lifeline for the village. Credit: Arun Shrestha/IPS

Unlike her sons, 46-year-old Sherpa is illiterate but capably runs the ‘Riverside Khajaghar’ tea house. Once an unassuming eatery it began to get better custom after an old trekking trail running through the village was revived by a local non-government organisation (NGO).

“There are 200 houses in Mulkharka,” says Ashok Maharjan, secretary at Nepal Environment and Tourism Initiative Foundation (NETIF), an NGO founded in 2006 to develop and sustain the environment and rural tourism. “Around 60 percent of the population consists of women and it is mostly they who run the tea houses and trekkers’ lodges.”

Thousands of women like Dawa have been shouldering the double burden of looking after the family and earning for them as husbands and sons went abroad in search of jobs as a 10-year civil war exacerbated poverty and unemployment in Nepal.

With tourism the mainstay, the government launched in 2001 the Tourism for Rural Poverty Alleviation Programme aimed at developing sustainable rural tourism, focusing on the poor, women, environment and community.

Funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)in Nepal, the British government’s Department for International Development, and the Netherlands Development Organisation, the programme operates in six districts outside the Kathmandu valley, building infrastructure and providing training to run micro enterprises.

Now NGOs are also coming forward to promote tourism. Funded by the Finnish government and Suomen Latu, a Finnish NGO focused on recreational sports and outdoor activities, NETIF is promoting the Kathmandu Valley Cultural Trek, on a 72 km trail winding through six towns – Sundarijal, Chisapani, Nagarkot, Dhulikhel, Namobuddha and Panauti – as well as the Shivapuri National Park.

“An old trekking trail existed here, but it became disused for lack of maintenance,” says Prabin Paudel, coordinator of the heritage trail project. “We helped the community repair and green it by planting trees. Last month, in Chisapani alone 3,200 rhododendron saplings were planted.”

In Mulkharka, where cooking gas is yet to make its appearance, villagers use firewood for cooking. It caused widespread felling of trees, forced the women to spent several hours of their day scrounging the forest for wood, and also led to eye and respiratory diseases caused by the smoky, primitive clay stoves they used.

NETIF began by offering new improved cooking stoves that reduced wood consumption by almost 50 percent. These are manufactured by the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre run by the environment ministry under its energy sector assistance programme supported by the Danish International Development Agency.

“We then provided them training in briquette-making,” says NETIF president Arun Shrestha. “These are processed from either dung or banmara (mikania micrantha), a pernicious weed that overruns and destroys forests.”

This was rounded off with training in organic farming, so that the women can grow vegetables and crops like maize, basic hotel training and skills in making handicraft items.

“Before the heritage trail was developed, the area saw about 20,000 tourists a year,” says Paudel. “Now, it has reached around 80,000.”

More tourists means better business for the tea shops and lodges. Dawa Gyalmo is planning to upgrade Riverside Khajaghar to a lodge for trekkers to stay overnight.

Other women are following suit. The new demand for financing has given rise to six major women’s groups in Mulkharka with the members starting their own micro-finance cooperatives.

“Each woman contributes about Nepali Rs 100-200 (1-2.5 US dollars) and the accumulated fund is loaned out,” says Dawa Sherpa, secretary of the Sundarijal Environment and Tourism Development Society. “They decided to form their own cooperatives after they realised that loans taken from the outside carried far higher interest.”

Tourists bring business, but litter the trail with plastic bags, mineral water bottles and wrappers. Women’s groups now voluntarily scour the entire trail twice a year segregating biodegradable waste and burning it in incinerators gifted by NETIF. The rest is taken down to the municipality’s garbage collectors.

Other organisations have begun promoting similar trails. In hilly western Nepal, the Micro Enterprise Development Programme (MEDEP), a multi-lateral, donor-funded poverty reduction initiative, the ministry of industry and UNDP are supporting two trails and spent 138,120 dollars on infrstructure since last year.

MEDEP’s 7-9 day ecotourism trek through the districts of Parbat, Myagdi and Baglung includes a stay in a 20-bed lodge that is expected to bring in dollars.

The indigenous Magar community, which provides the bulk of the ‘Gurkhas’ serving in the British and Indian armies, dominate the region. With Magar men mostly out of the country, their women take all the key decisions at home.

“While we put up 60 percent of the money for the lodge, the community contributed 40 percent,” says MEDEP’s Laxmi Pun. “The revenue earned by the lodge will go back to the community,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Jul 12 2011 (IPS)

Every time Bijaya Dhakal goes out to meet people and tell them what she does for a living, the simple task becomes an act of courage requiring nerves of steel. Dhakal is the founder of Nepal’s first and only organisation of women sex workers now trying to make the state and society listen to a community long hushed by poverty and discrimination.

Sex workers in Kathmandu demonstrate to demand their rights. Credit: Ghanshyam Chhetri/IPS.

“Sex workers suffer at the hands of the police and, at times, their customers who beat them up or rob them. Yet they can’t complain because the moment people learn what they do, a change comes over them,” Dhakal says.

“Landlords throw them out, and even doctors and nurses at the hospitals loathe touching them for fear of contracting some disease. I began to wonder one day, how long can we stay hidden? If we continue to hide, how will our needs and demands be met?”

Six years ago, Nepal’s growing gay rights movement inspired Dhakal to cast aside the veil of anonymity and start Jagriti Mahila Sangh. Jagriti means awakening, and Dhakal hopes it will catalyse sex workers hidden in the 75 districts of Nepal to unite for a change in their lives.

“I saw all these male sex workers, transgenders, and people living with HIV/AIDS declaring their status in public and demanding their right to be treated like any other citizen,” she says, sitting in Jagriti’s office in Kathmandu, a three-room apartment that did not have a single stick of furniture when it opened with seven registered members.

“They gave me courage. Besides, I was tired of speaking through intermediaries who often failed to convey correctly to the state authorities and donors what we wanted,” she added.

Today, Jagriti Mahila Sangh has grown into Jagriti Mahila Mahasangh, a federation with 26 associates spanning 23 districts, mostly in eastern Nepal and the southern Terai plains bordering India. Its major donors are the U.N. Development Programme, the British government’s Department for International Development, and Save the Children.

Dhakal feels even the donors are uneasy. “They prefer working with the HIV/AIDS community over us,” she says. “They think, being uneducated, we won’t be able to manage our projects and also, what we do for a living puts them off.”

Nepal’s sex workers have a chance to be heard, with the parliament writing a new constitution slated for promulgation by Aug. 28. But Jagriti fears sex workers will be excluded from the new charter.

“No one asked us what we want,” complains Shobha Dangol, general secretary of Nari Chetana Samaj (Society for Women’s Consciousness) that is a member of the federation. “And we have no access to the lawmakers drafting the constitution.”

Security is the foremost demand. “Sex workers should be allowed to follow their trade without harassment by police,” says Dangol. “Things are so bad in Kathmandu that if you go to public parks in the evening and carry a condom in your purse, the police will arrest you. During raids, only the women are arrested while their customers are let off. The arrested women are abused and even extorted.”

Jagriti also says the government should assign red-light districts, like in Thailand, with health camps in each area. The group also wants an end to discrimination against sex workers.

Supreme Court lawyer Rup Narayan Shrestha, who works with the Forum for Women, Law and Development (FWLD), an NGO providing legal support to Jagriti, says sex workers’ invisibility partly stems from the fact that sex work is not recognised by law.

“While the law does not criminalise the sex worker, the act of running a brothel or forcing someone into commercial sex is a punishable offence,” he says. “It is not the law that says the women should be harassed, it’s what police do. Most of the women are actually charged with being a public nuisance, which allows police to present them before the chief district officer and not the court, which would have thrown out such weak cases.”

Shrestha also argues that Nepal’s courts are considerate toward sex workers’ rights. Till 2002, the law had a discriminatory legal provision for rape. If the victim was a sex worker, the perpetrator would face a fine of 500 Nepalese rupees – about seven dollars — or imprisonment for a maximum of one year, or both.

However, FWLD founder Sapana Pradhan Malla successfully filed a public interest litigation challenging the provision before the Supreme Court. Now, all convicted rapists face a maximum 10-year jail term.

Besides rights activists, Nepal’s health experts are also urging the government to sensitise the police, especially in view of the rising incidence of HIV/AIDS.

According to Nepal’s state-run National Centre for AIDS and STD Control (NCASC), the estimated number of HIV positive people as of 2009 was a little over 63,500. Women formed 28.6 percent, out of which 605 – about one percent – were sex workers. Every year, an average of over 4,700 new infections are reported, with about the same number of deaths. The government has just conducted a new survey which puts the number of known commercial sex workers at 28,000.

“The HIV figures are just the tip of the iceberg,” says NCASC director Dr Krishna Kumar Rai. “These are the people who came forward for treatment or condoms and so their status was known. But it is likely there is a large group which has not come forward. Police raids will only serve to drive HIV positive sex workers underground. And then it will be impossible to trace or treat them.”

Excerpt:

When Bina Tamang was told that she could earn money by not felling trees in the tiny forest that serves as the source of fuel and fodder for 65 families in her area, the 27-year-old was incredulous.

Forest users’ group members learn how to measure carbon sequestration in Nepal’s Gorkha district. Credit: Nabaraj Dahal/IPS

That was two years ago. In June, when Tamang was informed that she and over 100 other groups like hers, that have been sharing forests as community property, had been awarded cash incentives worth 95,000 US dollars disbelief gave way to joy.

“It really works!” says Tamang, who has woken up at 4 am as usual to milk the cows, cook and then get ready to plant vegetables. This is the usual lifestyle for the forest user groups (FUGs) in Dolakha where she lives, a remote northern district close to the Tibetan border and home to indigenous or disadvantaged communities.

“The money will be an incentive for villagers to take better care of their forests,” she said. “We will use our share to augment our revolving fund, meant for assisting the neediest members.”

Tamang is the former secretary of the Palung women’s community forest in Dolakha. Just eight hectares, Palung forest cannot even provide the 65 families wood for such basics as windows. Still, it is unique because all the users, including the 11-member committee that controls the revolving fund, are women. “We cut the grass that grows in the forest for fodder and collect fallen or dead branches,” says Tamang. “Grazing livestock inside the forest is prohibited. So is logging. One member was fined seven dollars for cutting a tree.”

Now 105 FUGs in three districts – Dolakha and Gorkha in the west, and Chitwan in the south – are celebrating the fact that they have made money grow on trees.

The story began in 2003 when the Netherlands government funded research into how communities living on forest produce can be taught to conserve them so that the trees can absorb carbon dioxide released on burning bio-fuels. The research was conducted with regional partners in East Africa, West Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Himalayan region.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the partner in the Himalayan region, undertook the research in India and Nepal and in 2008, at the climate change talks in Poznan, Poland, proposed that a “Forest Carbon Trust Fund” be established for a pilot project in Nepal – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+).

Communities in Nepal are getting involved with forest conservation projects. credit: Fidel-Márquez-IPS

“The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation gave seed money of 100,000 dollars for the fund,” said Bhaskar Singh Karky, resource economist at ICIMOD. “We call it the carrot and sermon policy,” Karky added. “Timber is valued more than standing forests and the fund seeks to change that perception. The message to the forest users is that if you cut down a forest, we can’t penalise you but then you don’t get carbon money either.”

The Charnawati watershed in Dolakha, spread over 14,037 ha, the 1,888 ha Ludikhola watershed in Gorkha, and the Kayarkhola watershed in Chitwan, covering 2,382 ha were found to have done the best job in sequestering carbon.

As an incentive, on Jun. 15, these watershed areas were paid a total of 95,000 dollars by ICIMOD. Charnawati got the most, 45,535 dollars, followed by Ludikhola with 27,560 dollars while Kayarkhola received 21,905 dollars.

This is the first time that carbon money has been paid in Nepal.

“We have to see now if the carbon money is a greater incentive than the value of felled timber,” said Karky. “We plan to take the concept to the market and ask international investors to invest as part of boosting their corporate social responsibility image.”

Besides contributing to the conservation of forests the money also comes as a shot in the arm for women who form more than 51 percent of Nepal’s 29 million population. According to the Federation of Community Forestry Users, Nepal (FECOFUN), over 50 percent of the members of the15,000-odd FUGs are women. Also, the committees governing the groups must have a woman either as president or secretary.

“The three districts were chosen partly in recognition of their conservation work and partly for the inclusion of women, Dalits (formerly untouchable Hindu caste), indigenous communities and other disadvantaged groups,” said Sita Chettri, FECOFUN’s project coordinator in Dolakha. FECOFUN as well as the Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bio-resources have been ICIMOD’s local implementing partners for the carbon project.

“We first heard about the incentive money to protect the forests two years ago. None of us quite believed that people would be paid for not cutting trees. Now the FUGs have cash they can use for a livelihood,” Chettri said. Though the carbon money, after being distributed among all the stakeholders, may seem meagre, in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world, it is considerable.

“Our revolving fund had only 21dollars and the money was lent to a disadvantaged member so that she could buy a goat,” said Chettri. “There are 19 such women in the group and the carbon money will mean faster succour for them.”

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Jun 18 2011 (IPS)

Nine years ago, Bhagwati Devi Gautam was a field labourer in Rukum, one of Nepal’s worst insurgency-hit districts. Hurrying to attend a programme on the occasion of International Women’s Day, she was forced to halt at a police checkpoint for the mandatory examination of her handbag.

Moves to clear the last of the mines in Nepal. Credit: UNMAT

There was a flash of blinding light and a peal of thunder, and Gautam knew no more.

When she regained consciousness, she was told she had stepped on a landmine, and that the doctors had to remove half her right leg.

“I regard the incident in two different ways,” said Purna Shova Chitrakar, coordinator of the Ban Landmines Campaign Nepal, a non-profit organisation founded in 1995 to raise public awareness about the loss of life and property caused by mines. “It was undoubtedly a tragedy. But on the other hand, it was a turning point, exposing the hollowness of the government’s claim that it was not using landmines.”

The Bhagwati Gautam incident created a furore, forced the government to acknowledge that it was using mines, start fencing them off and plant warning signs. “It also drew international attention to Nepal as a country using landmines,” Chitrakar added.

On Jun. 14, Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal and Nepal Army chief Gen. Chhatra Man Singh Gurung finally pressed buttons to detonate the two last army-planted mines buried in Pulchowki, a forested area in Kathmandu valley. This makes Nepal the second minefield-free country in Asia after China.

But while the destruction of the last minefield marks the end of a dark chapter in Nepal’s history, there is widespread concern that it is not the end of the story.

“Victim-activated explosions are still occurring, maiming and killing, mainly children,” said Will Parks, UNICEF representative in Nepal.

In 1996, Nepal’s Maoist party went underground and began waging war on the state, demanding the abolition of the monarchy and the drafting of a constitution by and for the people. After police forces failed to subdue the guerrillas, the government deployed the army, which then began to plant mines to protect their garrisons and vital installations like telecom towers, airports and power projects.

“The army planted 10,941 mines in 53 key areas,” said Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Ramindra Chhetri. The civil war ended in 2006 with the signing of a peace accord. “From October 2007, the army began to demolish the mines it had laid,” Chhetri said.

The accord pledged to demolish within 60 days all mines as well as improvised explosive devices (IEDs). But it took the turbulent republic – wracked by political instability and a succession of governments – five years to accomplish part of the task.

In 2007, the U.N. sent a monitoring agency to Nepal to watch over the army as well as the Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The government asked the U.N. body for help in destroying the mines and IEDs.

“Besides the mines, the army also planted IEDs in more than 275 areas while the PLA had more than 52,000 IEDs in its arsenal,” said Shaligram Sharma, undersecretary for peace and reconstruction. “The PLA handed over its stock to the U.N. which destroyed them, while the army cleaned up 170 areas.”

Nepal needed over eight million dollars to train the army to de-mine the conflict areas, with the British and Danish governments providing the bulk of financial assistance.

Since the civil war ended, 473 casualties, including 78 deaths, have been reported. More than half the victims were children aged between eight and 14 years. Women, especially those venturing into forested areas to collect fodder and firewood, formed the second-largest group.

Victims have complained of bureaucratic red tape preventing them from claiming compensation, although an assistance plan for the injured and the families of those killed is supposed to be in place.

“The procedure is long and unfriendly,” said Chitrakar. “The victims have to submit all bills to the chief district officer and then chase them through two ministries. From remote villages they have to trudge to four-storey offices in the capital where there are no lifts to assist people without a leg, arm or eye. People sell their livestock and assets to see them through hospitals but often receive only a fraction of what they spent.”

The Bandarmude bus explosion is a case in point. In 2005, when the Maoist rebellion was at its peak, the guerrillas blasted a public bus in the picturesque southern district of Chitwan frequented by tourists. While 38 people were killed on the spot, one more died in hospital and over 70 were injured. One survivor reportedly committed suicide while another went insane.

It was the worst attack in the course of the decade-old conflict, yet none of the victims received any compensation.

There is also the threat of explosive remnants of war. “While the army kept records of the mines and IEDs they used, the Maoists haven’t,” says Sharma. Some PLA fighters who knew where the mines were planted have either died or fled the country, leaving hidden bombs that unwary civilians or even stray animals could detonate.

With new rebel groups mushrooming, the government is calling for dialogue, while anti-mine activists like Chitrakar and the U.N. are urging Nepal to sign the Ottawa Treaty that bans the use of mines.

“I urge the government to remember the victims of explosions these past few years and agree on two words: never again,” says Robert Piper, the U.N.’s resident coordinator in Nepal. “While we are celebrating the clearance of all minefields in the country, it would be fitting (for Nepal to sign) the Ottawa Land Mine Treaty, becoming the 157th country to commit to the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and their destruction.”

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, May 26 2011 (IPS)

With the May 28 target for a new constitution approaching and Nepal’s coalition government admitting it would not make the deadline, women are pushing for rights they want enshrined in the document.

Women sing in Kathmandu to demand a better constitution. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS

Even before the ban became public knowledge, riot police swung into action, beginning an assault on the women coming from almost 70 of Nepal’s 75 districts who have been holding peaceful meetings in front of parliament, asking for the protection of their rights.

Police said they had arrested 32 women demonstrators, including some of Nepal’s best-known rights activists like Tulasalata Amatya, president of Shanti Malika, a network of nine organisations working for women’s empowerment.

Others arrested were Rita Thapa, founder of Tewa, a non-government organisation working for the economic self-sufficiency of women’s groups in villages, and Stella Tamang, founder of Bikalpa Gyan Tatha Bikash Kendra Ashram, a school for children from her Tamang community, who are the worst victims of human trafficking.

The demonstrations started on the Nepalese New Year on Apr. 14. Over 40 women’s organisations from across the country gathered on the pavement opposite parliament to sing, dance and address passersby for six hours a day. It was intended to remind the nearly 600 MPs that women existed and that they expected the constitution to be finished by May 28, guaranteeing their rights.

On May 15, when it was clear that work on the constitution was not making any progress, they lengthened the vigil to 12 hours.

“The constitution of 1990 said during elections, political parties would have to field at least five percent women,” says Sharada Pokharel, a former MP and president of Women’s Security Pressure Group. “But the last census, conducted in 2001, showed women accounted for 51 percent of the population. So we want the new constitution to give us 50 percent representation in all state institutions.”

Women MPs cutting across party lines, even those from the ruling parties, are also supporting the demand.

Jayapuri Gharti Magar is a senior member of the Maoist party, a former guerrilla organisation that fought a 10-year battle against the government to abolish Nepal’s Hindu monarchy. After signing a peace accord in 2006 and contesting elections two years later, it is now the largest party in parliament as well as the ruling alliance.

Gharti Magar’s family members, who lived in the remote western district of Rolpa that was the cradle of the Maoist insurgency, were imprisoned during the “People’s War”, while her husband Bibek KC was killed by the army.

This month, for her contribution to the movement, the party nominated her minister for women, children and social welfare. But the 40-year-old refused to take the oath of office.

“We live in a male-dominated society,” she says bitterly. “Even the communist parties, which pledge equality for women, are no different.”

Gharti Magar said that if women had not participated in the People’s War and the pro-democracy movement against King Gyanendra’s army-propped government in 2006, neither would have been successful.

“So when the parties drafted the interim constitution in 2007, they gave 33 percent representation to women. But no one is actually implementing it. Though there are 33 percent women MPs in parliament as eyewash, there are just four ministers (in a 36-member cabinet),” she said.

Gharti Magar said the caucus of 196 women MPs has petitioned the parties as well as prime minister Jhala Nath Khanal and parliament chair Subash Nembang, asking them to ensure 33 percent representation for women in the council of ministers and all state organs.

“If they still ignore us, we will seek legal redress,” she said.

While Gharti Magar is an influential legislator, Bimala Paswan is a daily wage labourer who has come from a landless squatters’ colony in Siraha in the southern lowlands to add her voice to the call for women’s rights.

“We want the right to land,” says the 30-year-old Paswan. “We want the new constitution to ensure the equitable distribution of land as part of the promised land reforms, and we want it done quickly.”

The other rights demanded by women are the right to land and housing, keeping in mind the plight of landless women who are frequent victims of rape and murder, and wives being turned out of homes by abusive polygamous husbands. They also want domestic violence to be recognised as a form of torture with the state bearing the responsibility of ensuring compensation for battered women.

Despite the setbacks, Nepal’s women, used to long and hard battles for every little right they have, including the right to get a passport without the husband’s approval, say they will carry on with the campaign.

“We are continuing our protests outside the prohibited area,” says Dilli Chaudhary. The 38-year-old belongs to the Tharu community, an exploited indigenous group whose members are still sold in bonded slavery.

Chaudhary, a health worker counselling village women in Siraha, is a rarity in a community that sends out daughters as young as 12 years old to work as virtually unpaid slaves.

“It may take time but we are going to win,” she says. “The MPs who betrayed us will have to return to their own constituencies one day. Then we will tie a rope to their feet and drag them through the villages, teaching them a lesson they will never forget.”

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, May 10 2011 (IPS)

The temperature is 10 degrees below freezing and the wind is like a hurricane, threatening to sweep away the unwary from the treacherously slippery mountain slope that has been home to Suzanne Al Houby and 39 other iron-willed women for almost a fortnight.

Al Houby, a mother of two, aims to make history this month by scaling Mt. Everest, the highest peak in the world. If she succeeds, she will be the first Palestinian woman to do so.

Originally from Jaffa in Palestine, the 44-year-old started climbing for a cause. As she told the Palestinian news agency WAFA, “When I climb, I send a message to the world: that we Palestinians have the will to live in peace.”

Al-Houby is the first Arab woman to conquer Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest peak in Africa, Mt. Blanc in France, and Mt. Elbrus in Russia. Now, her sights are on a mountain once regarded as a male domain.

“I left my job (as vice-president at the Dubai Bone and Joint Centre) to make this attempt,” Al Houby told IPS from the Everest base camp, where she has come down for rest from Camp III located at 7,200 metres. “No Arab woman has ever climbed Mt Everest. It’s time that was changed.”

It’s an echo of the challenge thrown to a disbelieving world six years ago by the first all-women’s team from Iran when it announced its Everest expedition. “We want to show the world that Muslim women don’t lag behind just because they wear the headscarf,” Farkhondeh Sadegh, a computer graphics designer and the leader of the team, had told IPS while reconnoitring in Kathmandu.

In 2005, she and Laleh Keshavarz, a newly married dentist, became the first Muslim women to stand on the top of the world, still wearing their headscarves.

When New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first conquered Mt. Everest in 1953, it was thought to be a feat achievable only by heroes— men who were strong and lionhearted. It remained a male bastion for 22 years till a frail looking Japanese teacher with an indomitable spirit—Junko Tabei—hoisted herself up to the summit and proved women could claim the top spot as well.

“It’s the mind that matters, not muscles,” the tiny climber told IPS when she returned to Nepal in 2005 to celebrate the 30th year of her ascent with other women Everest conquerors.

“I willed myself to reach the top of Mt. Everest,” she said, surviving an avalanche and injuries in 1975.

Since then, nearly 100 women have conquered Mt. Everest, a few of them more than once. At least six all-women’s expeditions have reached the top, as well as women who braved the dangers and perished on the mountain, and others who, like male climbers, even became involved in controversies.

Spring 2011 has been witness to an amazing assortment of women climbers. Nepal’s tourism ministry says of the 258 people attempting to reach the summit of Mt. Everest this season, 41 are women.

The youngest is 19-year-old British student Rebecca Bellworthy, while the oldest was Eiko Funahashi, a Japanese patent attorney who is 71. Had she reached the summit, Funahashi would have become the oldest woman to achieve the feat, breaking the record of fellow Japanese Tame Watanabe, who did it in 2002 at the age of 63.

It was the frail looking, bespectacled grandmother’s sixth Everest bid, the first being in 2006. After five attempts in five consecutive years, all failed due to a combination of bad weather, health problems and insufficient acclimatisation, Funahashi had to abandon her attempt a sixth time on Sunday, May 8.

“This time, Everest has been different,” says Tam Ding, manager of Mountain Experience, the mountaineering agency handling Funahashi’s expedition logistics. “It has been colder than usual and we advised Funahashi to abandon her attempt for fear of accidents. So she is now climbing Mehra, a 5,820-metre peak close to Mt. Everest. But she says she will be back next year.”

What does she hope to achieve by risking her life to reach the summit? This season, Mt Everest has already claimed two lives. The intrepid 82-year-old statesman Shailendra Kumar Upadhyay, Nepal’s former foreign minister, and American Rick Hitch, 55, died of high altitude sickness.

Funahashi says she wants to complete the documentary that she began in 2006, recording her climb, ending at the summit one day.

For Australian Sharon Cohrs, who is climbing with her husband Allan Karl Cohrs, the summit will mean a victory beyond a mere climbing feat. “I am 39 years old and a breast cancer survivor,” she writes in her Facebook page, Climbing for a Cause.

“My goal is to be the first breast cancer survivor in the world to summit Mount Everest, and in doing so raise awareness and much needed funds for breast cancer research. We WILL find a cure!” she says.

Cohrs aims to raise 250,000 dollars for breast cancer research. “Through taking on this climb, I hope to give inspiration to the women and men who are fighting the difficult battle with cancer,” she writes.

The saga of women on Mt. Everest would not be complete without Edurne Pasaban Lizarribar, the 38-year-old Spanish climber who completed a mission last year, becoming the first woman to summit the 14 highest peaks in the world that jut above 8,000 metres. It is a feat only 20 others, all men, had accomplished before.

Now Pasaban is back, seeking to re-conquer the mountain she had climbed 10 years ago. Her reason: Of the 3,145 people who climbed Mt Everest, only 132 did it without the help of bottled oxygen. And all were men.

Pasaban has set herself the “14+1” challenge: becoming the first woman to climb all the 14 highest peaks in the world—and then aiming to become the first woman to summit Mt. Everest without an oxygen cylinder.

Excerpt:

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KATHMANDU, Apr 19 2011 (IPS)

A knock on the door of his home in Bhutan one midnight turned middle-level government official Balaram Paudyal into a fugitive overnight, after he managed to elude policemen arresting him for “anti-government activities”, and then fled the country.

Twenty-two years later, Paudyal is living in a refugee camp in Nepal, along with thousands of fellow Bhutanese driven away in the 1980s. Last week, Bhutan agreed to resume talks to have them repatri- ated, raising hopes of a possible homecoming. But those hopes were dashed the next day, when the government insisted on screening the refugees, and verifying their identities.

The refugees have reacted with anger, saying Bhutan is simply stalling. “Nepal and Bhutan jointly verified refugees of Khudunabari, one of seven camps, some years back,” says T. P. Mishra, the 28- year-old editor of the Bhutan News Service (BNS) that operates from exile. “Though most of them were categorised as genuine Bhutanese, not a single refugee has been repatriated.”

The exodus started in the late 1980s. “Tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese were arbitrarily deprived of their Bhutanese citizenship,” says Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its report Last Hope. “Some were then expelled from Bhutan, while others fled the country to escape from a campaign of arbitrary arrest and detention directed against the ethnic Nepalese.”

Some one-fifth of the population were driven out, most of whom reached Nepal in the 1990s after wandering through India, which stands between the two tiny Himalayan nations. As the trickle of ref- ugees became a flood, an alarmed Nepal asked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for help and in 1992, UNHCR launched a major emergency assistance programme with the World Food Programme and other non-governmental partners.

In 2006 to 2007, the number of registered refugees living in seven camps run by the UNHCR in east- ern Nepal’s Jhapa and Morang districts had surpassed 108,000. Some 20,000 more live outside the camps in Nepal and another estimated 25,000 in India.

Life in the camps has been one long tale of hardship and deprivations. Several families are crammed into one-room shacks, sharing the same toilet. When the sun sets, darkness engulfs the camps, which are without electricity. In summer, fires devastate the camps; during the monsoon, downpours drench the rooms. Domestic violence, alcoholism and prostitution have grown, as have cases of HIV/AIDS.

Though Nepal allowed the refugees asylum, it does not allow them to work or run businesses, fearing increased competition for locals.

“Refugees have the right under international law to their own country,” says HRW. “However, in a flawed process that was widely discredited by international observers and refugee experts, Bhutan and Nepal instituted a joint verification process to determine which refugees would be able to return.”

The camp residents were to have been classified into four groups: bona fide citizens; those who had surrendered their citizenship and would have to apply again; non-Bhutanese, who would not be al- lowed to go back; and criminals, who would face trial once they went back. Despite the verification process, no one was allowed home.

In 2006 to 2007, western countries led by the U.S. persuaded Nepal to allow the refugees to be reset- tled in third countries.

Today, the relocation of Bhutanese refugees has become the UNHCR’s largest and most successful resettlement programme. Assisted by the International Organisation for Migration, 40,000 refugees had left the camps by 2010. Of the 72,733 refugees left, the UNHCR says approximately 55,000 have shown interest in resettlement and could leave by 2014.

Last week, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley arrived in Nepal on a three-day state visit, and said his government was ready to resume the repatriation talks halted eight years ago. However, he added that there should be a fresh “study” or “investigation” of the “people living in the camps.”

“They are economic refugees, they are environmental refugees, they are refugees of political instabil- ity,” Thinley said at a press conference in Kathmandu Saturday before his departure. “And they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. But I maintain that the question of whether they are refugees from Bhutan is a subject of discussion.”

“Each time the Bhutanese PM visits Kathmandu, he continues to say that Bhutan is serious about the repatriation of Bhutanese refugees,” said Mishra, who last year accepted resettlement in North Caroli- na and now works for a resettlement agency assisting Bhutanese refugees to assimilate locally. He also continues running BNS, which is a matter of pride for the refugees.

“It is nothing but a tactfully played game to hoodwink the international community,” he added.

Mishra said he would like to return to Bhutan but his wife Renuka feels their lives would be in danger if they do. He also points out that some of the inmates in the Khudunabari camp, who were not ac- cepted as Bhutanese citizens by the verification team, have been resettled in various western coun- tries. “So Bhutan’s claim that not all camp residents are Bhutanese is baseless,” he says.

Bhutan People’s Party (BPP), the party founded by the refugees, has delivered an ultimatum. “We are asking Bhutan’s new king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, to learn from the democratic trans- formations around the world and resume repatriation talks by 2011,” said Paudyal, BPP chairman. “Otherwise, we will plan tougher measures.”

Mishra said an underground Maoist party wants to overthrow the monarchy in Bhutan through an in- surrection, and has been gaining support in the camps as well. The refugees draw parallels between Bhutan and Nepal. Till 2008, Nepal too had been a monarchy. However, its Maoist party waged a ten- year war against King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah and in 2008, managed to abolish monarchy through an election.

“History shows that you can’t defeat the people,” Paudyal cautions. “If the king of Bhutan doesn’t heed the warning, he would end up losing one day. The people will prevail ultimately.”

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