Suman Adhikari, son of Muktinath Adhikari, a school principal who was killed by Maoist rebels during Nepal’s People’s War, says his family is still waiting for justice to be served. Credit: Renu Kshetry/IPS

By Renu Kshetry
KATHMANDU, Feb 24 2015 (IPS)

The picture of Muktinath Adhikari, principal of Pandini Sanskrit Secondary School in the Lamjung district of west Nepal who was killed during the country’s decade-long civil conflict, became an iconic portrayal of the brutality of the bloody ‘People’s War’.

The then Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which waged a 10-year-long armed struggle, killed Adhikari in 2002 after he refused to ‘donate’ 25 percent of his salary to the cause and attend functions organised by the rebels.

"The consultation, ownership, and participation of conflict victims are a must for the successful completion of the transition to justice." -- Suman Adhikari, son of Muktinath Adhikari, a school principal who was killed by Maoist rebels during Nepal’s People’s War
“Our life changed drastically for the worse after my father was killed; the memory of him being killed with his hands tied behind his back still haunts us,” recalls Suman Adhikari, the slain teacher’s son. “We want justice to move on with our life.”

Eight years after the war ended, Nepal’s newly formed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission to Investigate Enforced Disappearances (CIED) will now take up the case of the Adhikari family, and thousands of others like them who are still waiting for closure.

Originally agreed upon during the signing of the 12-point understanding between the then CPN (M) and the Seven Party Alliance – which includes the current ruling Nepali Congress (NC) and Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) – and reaffirmed during the signing of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), these commissions have been a long time coming.

According to records kept by the Informal Sector Services Centre (INSEC), a non-governmental organisation, 13,236 people were killed during the Maoist insurgency, while the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has recorded more than 1,350 cases of disappearances that are yet to be accounted for.

Both the TRC and CIED have been given the mandate to probe serious violations of human rights during the armed conflict, investigate the status of those missing and create an atmosphere for reconciliation in Nepali society.

Many hope that a robust reconciliation process will also give the country an economic boost, including improving the lives of the 25 percent of its 27-million strong population that lives below the poverty line.

However, rights activists have criticised the TRC Act for falling short of international standards, while several prominent groups fear that unaddressed criticisms could derail the process altogether.

Amnesty for war crimes?

International rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists have joined local activists in voicing grave concern that the TRC Act fails to uphold Nepal’s commitments under international law – namely, the possibility of granting amnesty for war crimes.

Statements released by the watchdog groups echo fears voiced by locals that flaws in the Act could leave thousands out of the reconciliation process.

Others are disgruntled about the lack of consultation prior to appointing members of the TRC.

Mohana Ansari, spokesperson of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), is unhappy that the TRC recommendation committee did not pay heed to the names suggested by the NHRC. “The culture of impunity should not be encouraged at any cost,” she stressed.

Others fear that a flawed TRC Act could lead to “forced reconciliation”, with survivors compelled to go along with a process that does not represent their best interests.

Surya Kiran Gurung, the newly appointed Chairperson of the TRC, is also sceptical about the Commission’s mandate.

“There is a need for amendments to the TRC Act because it is not clear what will happen to those cases that have been filed and investigated in court,” Gurung told IPS. “Parallel jurisdiction can create problems later on.”

However, he was confident that the TRC would recommend amendments to its Act in order to ensure consensus and consent of victims in the reconciliation process. He was similarly aware of the need to bridge the river of mistrust between survivors of the conflict and the commission.

“We will to reach out to them even if they are not willing to come forward,” he said.

Despite Gurung’s optimism, 53-year-old Kalyan Budhathoki of the Ramechap district in central Nepal is not as hopeful.

He, along with his 35-member extended family, fled their village in 2000 when rebels threatened to kill them and seized property after he refused to pay a “donation” of one million Nepali rupees.

“Why are these culprits roaming freely and why has no action been taken against those selling our cattle and seizing our property?” asked Budhathoki, a supporter of the ruling Nepali Congress (NC) who now works as a daily wage labourer in Kathmandu. “We are yet to feel the presence of law and order in the country.”

Thousands of futures at stake

The Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction formed a task force in 2006 to collect data on the dead, displaced, disabled, and those who suffered property damage during the war.

Available records indicate that of the 79,571 internally displaced persons (IDPs), only about 25,000 had received relief funds from the government and returned to their homes by October 2013.

According to the Relief and Rehabilitation Unit of the Ministry, a total of 14,201 families who lost their kin have received relief, while families of 1,528 missing people have availed themselves of government aid amounting to 100,000 rupees (about 1,000 dollars) each.

“Local leaders who are not conflict victims have been receiving compensation and relief packages by submitting fake documents and exercising political influence,” alleged Budhathoki. “In this situation, how could we believe that the TRC, with its members picked by the political parties, will not be biased?”

Rights activists too believe that political parties have reached an understanding on the controversial provision of granting blanket amnesty, even for those allegedly involved in serious rights violations.

Some politicians have offered the view that penalizing perpetrators will hinder the peace and reconciliation effort.

However, TRC Chairperson Gurung is confident that the Commission’s work will not be affected by political interference. “We will strictly abide by the TRC mandate of finding the truth and investigating the war-era issues,” he said.

He stressed that there would be public hearings that are expected to bring all manner of atrocities to light, after which the country can begin to move ahead with the reconciliation process.

Those like Suman Adhikari, however, believe the process will not go far without the active participation of those affected. “The consultation, ownership, and participation of conflict victims are a must for the successful completion of the transition to justice,” he told IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Women in Allankulam, in Sri Lanka's Mullaitivu district, where thousands have been missing since the end of the war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 17 2012 (IPS)

A bloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all.

Fighting during the early months of 2009, in the last phase of Sri Lanka’s 30 year-long civil conflict, was so intense that a Tamil couple in their sixties was forced to make a heart-wrenching choice when they fled the bloody warzone: whether or not to leave behind Thangamathi, the elderly unmarried sister in the family who had been mentally handicapped since birth and required constant care.

Finally, Thangamathi’s brother decided to leave her at a home for the mentally challenged, a location that he hoped would shelter her until his return.

“It was a hard decision, but neither of us was strong enough to take care of her, (when we ourselves) were barely surviving from minute to minute,” he told IPS.

The elderly couple did manage to survive the last bout of fighting between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which claimed between 7,000-40,000 lives according to conflicting sources.

They eventually returned to their old home in the village of Tharmapuram, in Sri Lanka’s northern Kilinochchi district, sometime in early 2010.

But long before their return, while still living in a government-sponsored welfare camp, the couple began looking for Thangamathi.

For the last three years they have been searching for her in vain. An acquaintance once told the couple that she had been spotted among the nearly 280,000 who escaped the last battle in April 2009 but, unsurprisingly, the information yielded no results.

“We are still looking, but we know that it’s over,” her brother said.

For those hailing from areas like  Kilinochchi – the town that, for over a decade, was the showpiece administrative centre of the LTTE’s proposed separate state of Tamil Eelam until it fell to government forces in early 2009 – Thangamathi’s story is not rare.

In this former warzone, which witnessed some of the worst excesses of the war, thousands are still looking for missing loved ones.

Santhirakumar, a resident of the Mullaitivu district, which adjoins Kilinochchi, has been looking for three family members since the war ended but has had no news regarding the whereabouts of his cousin’s husband, or his two nephews.

He, too, heard that at least one of his missing relatives was spotted on May 17, 2009, just 48 hours before the government declared victory. Nothing more came from that morsel of information.

The endless search goes on, and three long years later there is scarcely more than a faint flicker of hope.

“We have gone to each and every prison, as well as camps in Colombo, Boossa (in the south) and several other places. But we could not find them. It has been three years. But we have not given up. We are still looking for them,” Santhirakumar told IPS.

“We have also informed the police. We do not know where else to go. My brother-in-law’s family has to depend on us and other family members for survival.”

The Department of Census and Statistics carried out an enumeration survey of the northern province between June and August last year, the first of its kind to be conducted in the region in over two decades.

It found that between January and May of 2009 2,635 people were reported as being “untraceable”. This is the figure that the Sri Lankan government agrees on, though rights organisations and other advocacy groups believe the number is even higher.

In Vavuniya, the district located at the southern-most corner of Sri Lanka’s former war theatre, government officials and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) set up a unit to trace missing children in 2010.

Piencia Charles, the top government official for the district, was instrumental in setting up the unit. She said she was motivated to do so after interacting with dozens of distraught women on a daily basis, all of them looking for their missing family members.

Though the unit was initially set up to look for missing children, it has received more cases on missing adults, which it passes on to other organisations.

In a recent address to Sri Lankan diplomats, the country’s defence secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, said that the Vavuniya Family Tracing and Reunification Unit had received 2,564 applications by July 2011.

Of those, “1,888 were about missing adults, and 676 about missing children. According to the parents who made the tracing applications, 64 percent of the missing children had been recruited by the Tamil Tigers,” he said.

UNICEF officials in Colombo said that the Unit was handling 747 cases of missing children. So far, 40 had been reunited with their families, while another 30 cases have been ‘cleared’ for reunion with relatives. Officials said that 70 more cases were being processed.

However, the thousands of missing do not only represent those who fled during the last stages of the war. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is carrying an active five-figure caseload reaching back over two decades, to a period when the country was beset by twin insurgencies: the protracted insurrection of the Tamil separatists in the north and another, short-lived uprising of mostly Sinhala communist youth in the south.

“The ICRC’s Annual Report for 2011 states the ICRC in Sri Lanka was handling 15,780 tracing (including missing) cases as at Dec. 31, 2011. This figure, which reflects the number of cases reported to the ICRC since 1990, is the current (active) caseload of persons who remain unaccounted for,” ICRC Spokesperson, Sarasi Wijerathne, told IPS.

The ICRC added that it had received 1,382 new cases, including 369 cases involving minors, during 2011. Of the total figure, the humanitarian organisation has only been able to trace a mere 136 people, which paints a grim picture for the majority of anxious families desperately searching for their lost loved ones.

(END)