shaDEz Report This Comment Date: April 28, 2008 09:09PM
Nepal: Expectations for profound change soar to the sky
April 14, 2008. A World to Win News Service. On April 10 elections were
held in Nepal for the first time in nine years. Final results are not yet
available, but initial returns show that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
is doing very well, with a real possibility of winning a majority in the
Constituent Assembly (CA) that is being elected. There is widespread jubilation
at the victory of the CPN(M) in many corners of the country among the people who
are hoping that this election victory will open the door to a “new Nepal”
and a way out of poverty and oppression. The voters clearly rejected the main
political parties of the ruling classes in Nepal, especially the Nepal Congress
Party, which headed most of the governments that fought viciously against the
people’s war in that country, and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified
Marxist-Leninist), a party which, despite its name, long ago gave up on
communism and also participated in fighting against the revolution. The few
forces openly supporting the continuation of the monarchy also did very
poorly.
The role of the Constituent Assembly is to begin a process of drafting a new
constitution for a republic, a process which is expected to last one or two
years.
This was not an ordinary election. For ten years, beginning in 1996, the CPN(M)
waged a people’s war centered in the countryside of Nepal whose goal was to
carry out a New Democratic Revolution and free the country from imperialism,
feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. Two years ago a massive movement swept the
urban areas of the country as well, forcing the widely hated King Gyanendra to
step back from absolute power and reconvene parliament into which a significant
representation of CPN(M) was co-opted.
International observers from many countries, including former U.S. president
Jimmy Carter and Ian Martin, head of the UN mission to Nepal, were fulsome in
their praise for the electoral process, particularly that it was more
“peaceful” than expected. First reactions to the elections from the
“international community” hailed them as the definitive end of the
people’s war. How they will react to a resounding electoral victory of the
CPN(M) is not yet clear.
In fact, there were quite a few killings in the period leading up to the
elections and on election day itself. Maoists and their supporters were almost
always the victims. The most outrageous incident took place in Dang in western
Nepal, where police killed seven unarmed Maoist supporters and wounded more than
25 others. [See accompanying article.]
The question on everyone’s mind now is what will happen next. Pre-election
agreements called for a joint government by the three main political parties in
the country, the CPN(M), the NCP and the UML. The CPN(M), which has played only
a minor role in the present government, is now expected to play the leading role
in the new government to be formed following the Constituent Assembly
elections.
A new government will be formed, but the underlying question facing the country
is not which parties are in government but what the nature of the state power
itself will be. As pointed out in an earlier AWTWNS article [Revolution #121,
February 24, 2008], the basic question facing the country in the aftermath of
ten years of people’s war is what regime will be consolidated on a nationwide
level. The old state has been fighting to preserve the interests of the
exploiting class and enforce Nepalese subordination to foreign imperialism and
India. On whose power will rest the Nepal state that emerges from the
Constituent Assembly process? What will be the future of the Nepal Army and the
militarized police force that has done nothing but hunt down and murder
revolutionaries and rape, terrorize and rob the masses? What will happen to the
People’s Liberation Army that earned the love and respect of the poor peasants
making up the majority of the country? Will Nepal be a base area for world
revolution or will it continue to be locked into the spider-web of imperialist
and foreign domination?
The king is almost certain to be sent packing, but will the state that emerges
from the Constituent Assembly process be free from the feudalism the king
represented? During the people’s war, the caste system with its horrific
“untouchability” and other outrages was severely battered in the areas where
the PLA had power. The same is true of child marriage, wife beating and other
anti-women practices. Will the Constituent Assembly process be able to
institutionalize these and many other such advances throughout the country?
In the countryside the revolution had ushered in a new system of “people’s
courts” that enforced revolutionary order, and a different type of political
power had been established. Will such institutions have a place in the new
regime? What will be the role of the court system and government bureaucracy
that served the old state?
It is certainly clear that there are powerful forces, and most especially the
imperialist powers and the Indian ruling classes, as well as the exploiters in
Nepal itself, who will be doing everything they can to make sure that no real
revolution takes place in Nepal.
During the ten years of people’s war the CPN(M) called for distributing
“land to the tiller” and the thorough destruction of the reactionary system
led by the king, which kept the working class and the peasantry exploited and
impoverished and enforced all sorts of medieval oppression on women, national
minorities and the oppressed castes. The masses in Nepal have been demanding
revolutionary transformation, and this is one of the main reasons for the
massive electoral victory of the CPN(M). The burning desire for a “new
Nepal” is vividly etched in the exuberant faces of the thousands of youth and
others who have been taking to the streets across the land in all-day
celebration rallies. As many of those who for years were the public face of the
old state have resigned in humiliation, expectations of profound change soar to
the sky.
The most important question is what type of social system the new republic in
Nepal will represent and enforce. In Nepal and around the world, supporters and
friends of the revolution will be closely observing the coming weeks and months
as the new republic is formed.
***
From A World to Win News Service
Nepal: the Dang massacre of Maoist supporters
Apri 14, 2008. A World to Win News Service. On the evening of April 7, the
Nepali press initially reported that Maoist members of the Young Communist
league (YCL) ambushed Nepali Congress Party candidate Khum Bahadur Khadka in the
city of Dang, surrounding his car and opening fire. Seven YCLers were killed and
25 wounded. According to the Kathmandu Post, Khadka “somehow dodged
bullets,” and one media report described a “15 minute long exchange of
fire” between the two sides. A “government source” told the Kathmandu
Postthat “police fired over 80 rounds as Maoist cadres fired at them
indiscriminately.”
Dang is located in the southwest of Nepal, a historic hotspot during the years
of the people’s war. It is the city closest to the historic base areas of
Rolpa and Rukum. Emotions were running particularly high in the election
campaign, as the area was the scene of repeated intense clashes between the
Maoist guerrillas and Royal Nepal Army in 2003. The city itself was the last
outpost of the old state before reaching the liberated area, and was a
concentration point for military special forces, secret police and foreign
intelligence.
The news reports of these killings took place in the midst of a storm of
denunciations of the Maoists for violence, even though the Maoists were the
party that suffered the most deaths by far during the course of the election
campaign (seven Maoists and one UML member were killed before the Dang
massacre), mainly at the hands of the police. Nepal’s newspapers waged a
relentless campaign to associate the Maoists with violence against peaceful
democratic candidates, portraying them as little more than thugs and
gangsters—creating public opinion to justify police action against them. The
Kathmandu Post headlined its front page only four days before the election,
“Young Communist League rampage unrelenting” and “Maoists lead in attacks
on rival parties.”
The media didn’t talk about the gangsters who were guarding the candidates and
protecting the election process throughout the country – the Nepal police
forces, who, under the leadership of Congress Party and UML-led governments, had
year after year racked up one of the worst human rights records in the world,
according to international human rights groups like Amnesty International. More,
they had carried out their bloody crimes in defense of a social system that has
condemned the great majority of the people of Nepal to a life of endless toil,
poverty and hunger.
Nor was anything said about what the YCL represented: youth who had been active
fighters or supporters of the war for liberation that rocked Nepal for ten
years, who had been pioneers in fighting for women’s liberation – the ranks
of the Maoists were about the only place where young men and women could breathe
free of the stultifying atmosphere of arranged marriages and patriarchal
authority that smothered them. They were fierce fighters against every type of
discrimination. For instance, when YCLers meet for the first time, they ask only
each other’s first names. In Nepalese, the last name is often indicative of
caste, and they don’t want to be influenced by that.
But the press accounts of the killings in Dang just didn’t fit the facts. If a
15-minute firefight occurred, why were the Maoists the only dead and wounded,
and not a single policemen or the Nepali Congress activist? Also conveniently
ignored by these accounts was the fact that the police never even claimed to
have found any weapons on the dead and wounded Maoists. After the investigation
reports came to light, even Jimmy Carter had to label the killings
“assassinations” of the Maoist youth.
Investigation results revealed that at about 8 pm on the road near Lamahi, a
group of 40 or 50 YCL members intercepted a group of Nepal Congress youth who
had come in from the cities of Kathmandu and Pokhara. One account says that they
were engaging in one of the long-established practices of the Congress Party
(the main ruling party, close to India’s Congress Party), paying people to
vote for them – only this time they had tried to pay off some Maoist
supporters, who promptly turned them in. A few days earlier a candidate from
another right-wing party (RJP) had been similarly apprehended by the YCL while
handing out bribes. He had the enormous sum in Nepal of 40,000 rupees ($6,500
U.S. dollars) in cash on him. The night of April 7, the YCL apprehended the 33
Nepali Congress youth and tried to turn them over to the police, as they had
done on several other occasions. The Congress Party candidate Khadka seems to
have come to their rescue, accompanied by a large contingent of plainclothes
police, and the police once again decided to release the Congress youth. This
led to protests by the Maoist youth, and the police promptly opened fire on
them. Not a single policeman or Congress activist was treated for any injuries.
One eyewitness, Keshav Pandey, told the Himalayan newspaper that there was no
exchange of fire, and that the police had “opened fire
indiscriminately.”
The comrades who sacrificed their lives in this cold-blooded massacre are Min
Bahadur Pun, Labaru Chaudhary, Jiulal Chaudary, Purnajung Sen, Chet Bahadur
Budhathoki, Sital Chaudary and Prakash GM.