August 9, 2005
Nepal's Human Rights Record Threatens Military Aid By SOMINI SENGUPTA
KATMANDU, Nepal, Aug. 5 - When a firebrand student leader went to visit his friends in jail here last week, he, too, found himself arrested by the police and locked up on a charge of sedition.
When a political prisoner was freed by a court order in the town of Nepalganj in June, plainclothes police officers immediately plucked him from the courthouse steps.
And after two Nepalese newspaper journalists wrote last month about the army's deploying children as informers against suspected Maoist guerrillas, they were summoned to the army barracks for questioning.
Such incidents are not only measures of life and law in a country squeezed between its all-powerful Hindu king and the nine-year-long Maoist insurgency he has failed to quell. They are also of creeping importance to American lawmakers.
Before a new round of American military aid can start flowing to this troubled Himalayan kingdom, Congress has said it must be convinced that Nepal's ruler, King Gyanendra, can guarantee basic human rights. The Bush administration can override that condition if it determines that there is a national security imperative for Nepal to get the aid.
An administration decision is expected in the coming weeks, and whichever way the president goes is likely to be read throughout this region as an important barometer of White House priorities.
Nepal has functioned as an absolute monarchy since October 2002, when King Gyanendra dismissed the elected government on the ground that it had proved ineffective and corrupt. Last Feb. 1, he ratcheted his control up another notch, imposing emergency rule, arresting hundreds of political party members and suspending press and civil liberties.
Emergency rule has since been lifted, but many restrictions remain. This week, for instance, the government demanded to know why news broadcasts had resumed on a private FM radio station, in contravention of the Feb. 1 order.
The measures have proved increasingly unpopular. In Katmandu, the capital, what began as mild protests against the Feb. 1 royal decree have become more violent and outspoken. In recent weeks stone-throwing student demonstrators who call openly for the overthrow of the monarchy have tussled regularly with police officers wearing blue fatigues and carrying riot shields.
Chants during the protests have turned strikingly audacious. "Gyanay Chor, Desh Chhod," goes one popular cry. Using a diminutive form of his name, it calls the king a thief and urges him to leave.
Despite the Feb. 1 order, journalists frequently defy the curbs against independent reporting on the conflict. Political cartoons take pot shots at the king.
"People hoped and believed he had a plan," Kanak Mani Dixit, one of the country's most respected journalists, said in an interview here. "I said he has made a major mistake, but he will be forgiven if he has a plan. But nothing has happened." The king's latest steps were controversial even beyond Nepal and have been accompanied by what his critics see as a steady deterioration of civil liberties as the king struggles to turn back a widening insurgency that has fed off this country's poverty and caste divisions.
The American law threatening the loss of military aid, passed by the United States Congress last year, was prompted by Nepal's unenviable human rights distinction: during the past two years, the largest number of new cases of disappeared persons reported to the United Nations came from here.
Some of the missing reappear after courts take up habeas corpus petitions; those who are suspected of being Maoists or their sympathizers can be locked away without charges for up to a year under Nepal's antiterror laws.
The conditions for restoring full American military aid range from whether law enforcement authorities obey court orders on prisoner releases, to whether steps are taken to end torture by security forces, to whether the government allows the National Human Rights Commission to function freely.
Neither the United States Embassy here in Katmandu nor officials at the State Department in Washington agreed to comment on the record about whether Nepal had sufficiently complied with those conditions. In the past, American officials have urged the king to reconcile his differences with the political parties and take steps to return to democracy.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont and the author of the amendments that set conditions on military assistance to Nepal, however, has said that Nepal has so far failed the test. "Unfortunately, not only have those conditions not been met, the situation was made significantly worse on Feb. 1," he told Congress on July 28.
"The king has made a tragic blunder," he added, "and the Nepalese people are paying a heavy price."
Since Feb. 1, the Bush administration has continued providing some military training and supplies, but held off on others. Now, $2.5 million in aid is at stake, the big-ticket item being a consignment of roughly 3,500 M-16 rifles.
Discussions are continuing, meanwhile, over the possibility of Nepal's sending troops to the United States-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Local and international human rights monitors have reported what the United Nations' top human rights envoy in Nepal, Ian Martin, called "serious and recent" allegations of torture.
Meanwhile, the rule of law plays out in a bizarre tableau.
One afternoon in June, in the office of the National Human Rights Commission in the midwestern town of Nepalganj, a 19-year-old man named Buddhiman Karki sat on a sofa in a Spiderman T-shirt. The judge had ordered him released that afternoon after an unspecified time in Army and police custody. He said he had been beaten in custody. There was never an attempt, apparently, to try him in a court of law.
No sooner had Mr. Karki stepped out of the courthouse than two plainclothes officers grabbed him from one side. Immediately, two Human Rights Commission workers, Mohan Dev Joshi and Yasuda Banjade, grabbed him from the other side. "Rule of law, you can't do this," is what Ms. Banjade recalls saying to the officers. "There was a little bit of shouting," she said.
Eventually, the judge stepped out of the courthouse, and the police let go. Mr. Karki, a Maoist who said he was corralled into the movement eight years ago, at age 11, said he would slip across the border and into India as soon as he could.
