A Maoist victory could result in genocide, writes 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 early last year. "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 last year is long over, and the insurgents already
>control almost half the country. On August 18 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 roadblocks on the highways; they closed them by threats alone.
>They can do it again whenever they want.
>
>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 in 2001 a drunken Crown Prince Dipendra murdered his parents,
>King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, along with several other members
>of the royal family in a shooting rampage. Dipendra, who had been
>forbidden to marry the woman of his choice, then shot himself.
>
>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 having some part in 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 generally 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 guerilla war began in 1996, but at least half of
>those were killed in the past two years.
>
>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 was a "class enemy" or had been
>exposed to foreign influences.
>
>"Comrade Prachandra", the 42-year-old former horticulture teacher
>who is the Nepali Maoists' leader, never gives interviews, but the
>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 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,
>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
>guerilla war in Nepal. Nepal is heading straight for hell, and
>nobody in the country seems remotely capable of stopping it.
>
>Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.
>
