The Maoists of Nepal
By Gwynne Dyer
"If we have a Pol Pot scenario, this would be extremely
destabilising for the region," said a Western diplomat in Nepal when the
last ceasefire went into effect in early 2003. "India would probably come
in and that would upset the Chinese and Pakistan and who knows what would happen." Unfortunately, we may soon find out what would happen next, because the Maoist rebels in Nepal may be only a year or two away from victory.
The ceasefire of 2003 is long over, and the insurgents already
control almost half the country. On 18 August they declared a blockade of
the capital, and for a week almost nothing and nobody moved on the roads in or out of the Kathmandu valley (population 1.5 million). Then they lifted
the blockade and let the city have fresh food again -- but not because they
had to. They didn't even have to put road-blocks on the highways; they
closed them by threats alone. They can do it again whenever they want.
Nepal is one of the few countries where you are tempted to say that
reform is impossible and revolution is necessary. All but perhaps half a
million of its 24 million people lead lives of grinding poverty (per capita
income $220 a year), and nothing any government does changes the picture one bit. A Maoist-led peasant revolution sounds hopelessly out of date in the 21st century, but Nepalese peasants don't live in the 21st century. For the most part, they live in the Middle Ages, with feudalism defining their lives.
There have been attempts at reform from above in Nepal, but they
all quickly ran out of steam. Mass demonstrations in 1990 forced King
Birendra to allow multi-party democracy, but it never
really worked since
all the major parties were led by people from the old elite who saw them
simply as another opportunity to feather their nests. Then the king and
most of his family were massacred in 2001 by the crown prince, a young man called Dipendra who was high on drink and drugs and cross about being forbidden to marry the woman of his choice. He shot himself, too.
When the shooting stopped, the last man standing was Gyanendra,
brother to Birendra and now king in his stead. The trouble is that most
ordinary Nepalese were very fond of Birendra and suspect Gyanendra of
conspiring at his death. (It's almost certainly untrue, but it is a
measure of his unpopularity.)
Indeed, the only thing that inspires much loyalty to the
55-year-old Gyanendra is the fact that if he dies -- and male members of
the Nepali ruling family generall
y die of heart attacks before they turn 50
-- then he will be succeeded by his bratty son Paras, who shows no more
interest or concern for the real Nepal than his socialite friends.
King Gyanendra suspended Nepal's shoddy democracy two years ago,
and has since ruled through prime ministers appointed from the small
pro-monarchy party. He has also turned the Nepalese army loose on the
rebels, causing a steep rise in the killing. (Ten thousand have died since
the guerrilla war began in 1996, but at least half of those were killed in
the past two years.)
The Nepalese army once made a living by leasing itself out to the
UN for peacekeeping missions, but US military aid and advisers, attracted
to Nepal by the notion that it is part of a war against "terrorism," are
rapidly converting it into a duplicate of those Latin American armies that
suppress peasant revolts in the Andes. In its 2003 report, Amnesty
International said that "the security forces continued to carry out
unlawful killings. It was estimated that of the more than 4,000 'Maoists'
officially declared as killed since 2001, nearly half may have been
unlawfully killed." That is to say, shot while in custody, shot by
mistake, shot as an example to others, or just randomly shot to make the
army's numbers look better.
The Maoists could well win in Nepal -- but that would be a much
bigger disaster, for they belong to the same tradition of ultra-egalitarian
and anti-foreign extremism that animated the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Sendero Luminoso (the "Shining Path") in Peru. Mercifully, the latter
group never attained power, but between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge
murdered about a quarter of Cambodia's population in a drive to exterminate everybody who wa
s a "class enemy" or had been exposed to foreign influences.
"Comrade Prachandra," the 42-year-old ex-horticulture teacher who
is the Nepali Maoists' leader, never gives interviews, but deputy leader
Baburam Bhattarai (whose PhD thesis was a Marxist analysis of Nepal's
problems) was chilling when asked whether his movement's policies would
really be similar to those of the Khmer Rouge: "There is no independent and authentic account of events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge available so far. Whatever is emanating from the Western media appears to be highly exaggerated." In other words, yes, they are the same.
If the Maoists win, an early Indian intervention might spare the
Nepalese population the worst horrors of a Khmer Rouge-style genocide, but only at the cost to India of a long and thankless guerrilla war in Nepal
plus serious international c
omplications with China. Nepal is heading
straight for hell, and nobody in the country seems remotely capable of
stopping it.
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