Nepal kicks off tourism campaign with 'no strike' pledge

Sixteen major parties of Nepal, including the opposition Maoists who are seeking a change in the government, pledged not to enforce any general strikes or violent protests as Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal Friday kicked off a campaign that seeks to bring at least 1 million tourists in 2011.

A 'peace lamp' that was lit Sunday in Lumbini town in southern Nepal, the birthplace of the Buddha, the apostle of peace, was brought to Kathmandu by five marathon runners who have represented Nepal in the Olympic Games in the past, to kick off the campaign for Nepal Tourism Year 2011.

In an unprecedented show of solidarity since the pro-democracy march in 2006, hundreds of politicians, security personnel, film stars, business magnates, school children and athletes converged at the army parade grounds at the heart of the capital in five rallies taken out from five prominent areas of the capital, waving the flag of Nepal with its two triangles bearing the emblem of the sun and moon.

Nepal's tourism board hopes to get at least 40 percent of the visitors from India and China, Nepal's neighbouring countries.

Indians remain the highest spenders and visitors to Nepal.

However, the government has to grapple with several grave problems that can affect the campaign.

Nepal is scheduled to get a new constitution in May, which could either lead to lasting peace or trigger fresh violence by parties who feel their demands have not been addressed.

It is also beset by a crippling power crisis that has seen the government enforce nearly 16 hours of power outage daily.

There is also a spiralling deterioration in law and order.

Nepal’s demobbed Maoists face uncertain future

Nepali village children proudly talk of the bravery of Gurkha veterans who fought for the UK in the second world war, the Falklands and other conflicts – but few among the thousands of former Maoist rebels still in camps awaiting demobilisation expect a hero’s return.

Bhim Bahadur Rithameli is apprehensive about the welcome he will get when he returns home to Bhajang district. Mr Rithameli, 22, joined the Maoist rebel army six years ago as a teenager, rose to become a section commander and was wounded in clashes with Nepali security forces.

“I will have to think seriously about my future,” he said while preparing to leave a Maoist camp as part of a UN effort to weed out 4,008 fighters who joined the rebels as children or after 2006 when a peace agreement ended the insurgency.

Mr Rithameli and many of the others drummed out had hoped to stay, because the remaining 19,602 Maoist fighters are to be given positions in the national security forces under the 2006 truce, though their integration has been repeatedly delayed amid resistance by army leaders to taking former foes into the ranks.

“We were not ineligible while fighting the war for so many years for the party, so how come we have been labelled disqualified now?” asked Kalpana Upadhyay, who was preparing to leave camp with a toddler but without her husband, who was staying behind with the rest of the fighters.

The discharged fighters’ anxiety has been fuelled by their lack of job skills, poor domestic employment prospects and discrimination worries. To help their start, the discharged fighters were promised NRs20,000 ($270) each and vocational training or other schooling.

Ms Upadhyay married a fellow Maoist fighter four years ago. “Last night, we stayed together discussing our future,” she said struggling to control her tears.

The fighters have been living in seven camps around Nepal since the war’s end. Though the UN had identified soldiers for discharge two years ago, the Maoists held back, and young troops have pushed for more enticing support packages from the UN and Kathmandu.

This month UN and Nepali officials sweetened the package by extending an offer to send former fighters who had reached adulthood abroad as labourers. The country sends about 200,000 workers overseas each year to work primarily in the Gulf, India and Malaysia.

Lalit Bhandari, 20, said he could not understand why he was judged ineligible to join the security forces given that he fought for the Maoists for 10 years. He was worried that society would not welcome him back.

Nepal’s political parties have been deadlocked in discussions over the future of the government and the army for more than a year. The peace agreement set a deadline for the establishment of a constitution by May 27, but little headway has been made.

“The new constitution won’t be promulgated until the combatants are integrated. If not, the Maoists would steal the power and elections,” said Shankar Pokharel, minister for information and communications.

From Financial Times

China intensifies tug of war with India on Nepal

KATHMANDU, Nepal — For years, Nepal never bothered too much with policing its northern border with China. The Himalayas seemed a formidable-enough barrier, and Nepal’s political and economic attention was oriented south toward India. If Nepal was a mouse trapped between elephants, as the local saying went, the elephant that mattered most was India.

But last week a Nepalese government delegation visited Beijing on a trip that underscored, once again, how China’s newfound weight in the world is altering old geopolitical equations.

As Nepal’s home minister, Bhim Rawal, met with China’s top security officials, Chinese state media reported that the two countries had agreed to cooperate on border security, while Nepal restated its commitment to preventing any “anti-China” events on its side of the border.

Details of the meetings were not yet known, but the two countries were expected to finalize a program under which China would provide money, training and logistical support to help Nepal expand police checkpoints in isolated regions of its northern border.

The reason for the deal is simple: Tibet.

At a time when President Obama’s decision to meet with the Dalai Lama has infuriated China, Mr. Rawal’s meetings in Beijing could have greater practical effect on the lives of Tibetans. Prodded by China, Nepal is now moving to close the Himalayan passages through which Tibetans have long made secret trips in and out of China, often on pilgrimages to visit the Dalai Lama in his exile in India.

If it once regarded Nepal with intermittent interest, China is now exerting itself more broadly toward its small Himalayan neighbor, analysts say — partly because of its concern that Nepal could become a locus of Tibetan agitation, partly as another South Asian stage in its growing soft-power fencing match in the region with India.

“Nepal has become a very interesting space where the big players are playing at two levels,” said Ashok Gurung, director of the India China Institute at The New School. “One is their relationship with Nepal. And the second is the relationship between India and China.”

In the broadest sense, India and China share similar goals in Nepal. Each wants Nepal’s political situation to stabilize and is watching closely as the country’s Maoists negotiate with other political parties over a new constitution that would fundamentally reshape the government. Each is also worried about security, as India is concerned about political agitation on the Nepalese side of their shared border, as well as the possibility that terrorists trained in Pakistan could transit through Nepal.

But India is also paying close attention to what many India experts consider newfound Chinese activism in South Asia, whether by building ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, or signing new agreements with even the tiniest South Asian nations like the Maldives. An expanding Chinese presence in Nepal would be especially alarming to India, given that India and Nepal share a long and deliberately porous border.

“India has always been concerned about what access China might have in Nepal,” said Sridhar Khatri, executive director of the South Asia Center for Policy Studies in Katmandu. “India has always considered South Asia to be its backyard, like a Monroe Doctrine.”

From China’s perspective, Nepal’s geopolitical significance rose after Tibetan protests erupted in March 2008, five months before Beijing hosted the Olympic Games. Those protests began inside China, in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and other Tibetan regions, but also spread across the border to Katmandu, where an estimated 12,000 Tibetans live.

Even as Chinese officials were able to block international media coverage of the crackdown under way in Tibet, the protests in Nepal attracted global attention as photographs circulated of the Nepalese police subduing Tibetan protesters. In a few cases, media outlets mistakenly identified the photographs as coming from inside Tibet.

“There was a shift after March,” Mr. Gurung said. “The Chinese realized that Nepal is going to be an important site where they could potentially be embarrassed on Tibetan issues.”

V. R. Raghavan, a retired general in the Indian Army, said that China for years had tacitly allowed Tibetans to cross into Nepal, many of whom were making pilgrimages or attending universities in India. But the March protests made China realize that it had a “southern window” that needed to be closed, he said.

“Every movement of important personages and priests and others from Tibet has taken place through Nepal,” said General Raghavan, now director of the Delhi Policy Group, a research institute.

Chinese officials tightened security on their side of the border in the name of preventing pro-Tibet agitators from slipping into, or out of, the country. They also pushed Nepal to become more vigilant.

Last fall, Mr. Rawal announced that Nepal, for the first time, would station armed police officers in isolated regions like Mustang and Manang on the border with Tibet.

Meanwhile, Tibetan advocates say the tightening border security has already sharply slowed movement. Until 2008, roughly 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans annually slipped across the border, according to the office of the Dalai Lama. By last year, the number dropped to about 600, a change that Tibetan advocates attribute to closer ties between China and Nepal.

“As they get closer,” said Tenzin Taklha, secretary for the Dalai Lama, “it is becoming more difficult for Tibetans.”

In fact, many Nepalese believe that moving closer to China is in the best interests of the country.

For more than a half century, India has been deeply influential in Nepalese affairs and remains Nepal’s biggest trading partner and economic benefactor, even as some Nepalese resent India’s powerful presence in their country. Nepal’s currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, and citizens of the two countries are allowed to pass freely across the border. More than one million Nepalese work in India, sending back remittances.

But trade with China has quadrupled since 2003, according to government statistics, and Nepalese business leaders want to increase economic ties.

In recent years, Chinese airlines have opened routes into Nepal as the number of Chinese tourists has risen steadily, while Nepalese officials also want China to extend rail service through the Himalayas to the border as a means to increase trade. Nepalese government officials already have asked that China extend rail service into the Himalayas to the Nepal border. If that happens, Nepal would become a link on the same high-altitude line that connects Tibet to Beijing.

Kush Kumar Joshi, president of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said his group was trying to establish special economic zones to lure Chinese manufacturers to Nepal — and for Indian companies, too.

“We need to have both countries as our development partners,” he said.

Mr. Khatri, the analyst in Katmandu, said that India would remain Nepal’s most important neighbor, but that China’s growing presence in the world would inevitably make it a bigger player in South Asia and Nepal, too. To assume otherwise, he said, “would be to neglect the reality.”

From New York Times

India to sell more wheat to Nepal; may ship rice

By Mayank Bhardwaj

NEW DELHI, Feb 10 (Reuters) - India will sell an additional 200,000 tonnes of wheat to Nepal and may supply limited quantities of rice to Bangladesh, official sources said, indicating the government's confidence about food supplies and prices in the coming months.

India's food prices, rising since the worst monsoon in 37 years in 2009, were up over 17 percent in January, sparking protests, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last Saturday said that crop outlook had brightened and food prices would be controlled.

India, the world's second-biggest producer of wheat, banned overseas sales of the grain in February 2007, but lifted the restriction last July for a few days, but no export deals were struck. Exports of common grades of rice were banned in 2008.

A state-run firm would soon be allowed to export an additional 200,000 tonnes of the grain to Nepal, government sources told Reuters on Wednesday.

"Exports of 200,000 tonnes of wheat from government account to Nepal will take place soon," an official, who did not wish to be named, said.

The government allowed exports of 50,000 tonnes to neighbouring Nepal late Tuesday.

India is expecting a record output of 80-82 million tonnes in the two-month harvest that begins in March, government officials and analysts say, up from 80.6 million tonnes a year ago.

The country produces only one harvest in a year. The crop is planted in October and harvested from March.

"With harvests around the corner, the government needs to make room for the new crop. Government's godowns are chock-a-block," said Vinod Kapoor, former president and a member of the Wheat Products Promotion Council.

On Jan. 1, wheat stocks at government warehouses were at 23.0 million tonnes, nearly three times the targeted 8.2 million tonnes.

Overflowing grain bins encouraged Farm Minister Sharad Pawar to forecast wheat stocks at 14.7 million tonnes on Apr. 1, when the new marketing year begins, against a target of 4 million tonnes.

As the government grapples with storage concerns, traders say the country would allow some more government-to-government deals.

Kapoor said current global prices were too low for large wheat exports by private firms.

Benchmark wheat prices WH9 on the Chicago Board of Trade have fallen nearly 11 percent in 2010. On Tuesday, prices settled 64.3 percent lower at $4.82 a bushel from their peak of $13.495 in early 2008.

After Haiti, Nepal braces for big quake

By Claire Cozens (AFP)


KATHMANDU — As Haiti counts the cost of last month's devastating earthquake, experts are warning of the potential for an even greater disaster in another of the world's poorest countries, Nepal.


Geologists say it is only a matter of time before a major earthquake hits Nepal's densely populated capital Kathmandu, where 2.5 million people live in cramped, poorly-built housing with little or no awareness of the dangers.


Nepal sits on the border between two huge plates that have moved together over millions of years to form the Himalayas.


Geologists believe it is at risk from an earthquake with a magnitude of around eight -- 10 times as powerful as the Haiti shock that killed more than 212,000 people.


Nepal has not suffered a major quake for decades, and expert David Petley believes the troubled country is woefully unprepared.


"From a geological perspective the risk seems to be very large indeed," said Petley, Wilson professor of hazard and risk at Britain's Durham University.


"The area to the west of Kathmandu is undergoing the processes that drive earthquakes, and there has not been a quake on that section of the fault for hundreds of years.


"The larger the time gap (between quakes) the larger the quake is going to be."


Many other major cities in the region are vulnerable to large earthquakes.
But a 2001 study by GeoHazards International, a US research group set up to reduce the human impact of natural disasters, found Kathmandu would suffer the worst losses.


Very low building standards, weak infrastructure and the fact that Kathmandu is built on the soft sediment of a former lake bed all contribute to the high risk level.


Like Port au Prince, Kathmandu is served by just one single-runway airport, but unlike the Haitian capital it has no port, and experts believe the only three roads into the city would likely be destroyed in a major quake.


A decade-long civil war and years of political instability have also taken their toll on Nepal, whose capital Kathmandu has just eight working fire engines.
Experts warn that few of the hospitals and government buildings could withstand a major quake.


"What has been made clear in Haiti is that when a quake affects the capital and government infrastructure is destroyed, organising help becomes very difficult indeed," said Petley.


Geologist Amod Mani Dixit was working for the Nepal government on landslide prevention in 1988 when a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck the east of the country.
The high death toll and damage caused by the quake prompted him to set up the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) to raise public awareness of the dangers and help make schools and hospitals safer.


"It was a moderate earthquake, but the impact was huge. It killed 720 people and caused five billion rupees (67 million dollars) worth of damage, 25 percent of Nepal's GDP for that year," said Dixit.


"I was shocked. If even a moderate quake like that could cause such large amounts of damage, the question was what had we failed to do."


After discovering that none of Nepal's government schools had been built to withstand quakes, Dixit launched a programme to make school buildings more earthquake-resistant.


His organisation is retro-fitting around five schools a year to strengthen them against quake damage, and he also runs training for masons on constructing quake-resistant buildings.


But he says much more needs to be done in Nepal, where awareness of the risk remains very low.


"It's not just buildings, but also a lack of knowledge that kills. Mindsets and practices need to be changed," he said.


"Awareness levels have increased tremendously in the past 10 years, but it is not enough. Nepal is a fatalistic country and to bring people out of their slumber takes time."


In 2003 the government introduced building codes to try to improve standards in construction, and now runs training for masons.


But Amrit Man Tuladhar, head of the Nepal government's earthquake preparedness programme, admits the regulations are often ignored, and says the older buildings in Kathmandu are a cause for concern.


"We believe more than 80 percent of old buildings could collapse," he said.
"Many of the buildings in the Kathmandu Valley are very old. If a quake struck at night, people would not be able to escape their houses."


The last major earthquake to hit Nepal struck to the east of the capital in 1934. It measured 8.4 on the Richter scale and killed more than 8,500 people in Nepal and neighbouring India.


Mohan Bikram Thapa was living in Kathmandu with his parents when it hit and, 76 years on, he still remembers the massive devastation it caused.


"Suddenly everything began to shake and the houses started collapsing, filling the air with dust," recalls Thapa, 86. "All the tallest buildings fell into pieces.
"Later, at about five o'clock, people started bringing out the dead bodies to be burned.


"In those days, Kathmandu was like a small village. If the same thing happened now, it would be very dangerous."

The bad news in Nepal

As the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) is debating a ‘media policy’ clearly against a free media, there are signs that Nepali journalists might come under increased attack.

The draft policy not only talks of “neutralising” media critical to the Maoists, but also says “we must get the neutral ones into our fold”. In a context where more than two dozen journalists have lost their lives to Maoist as well as state violence, this news is chilling.

The national daily from Kathmandu that scooped the draft policy aptly commented that the Maoists would be using the media as a support rod, as a tool for defence as well as offense. The draft also says that it would use the Federation of Nepali Journalists (FNJ) — an umbrella organisation of working journalists — in its mission. It also plans to increase its proximity to journalists, particularly editors, so that the media does not oppose the party.

All these moves need to be seen with how pro-Maoist trade unions obstructed major publications in the past. The UCPN-M has stood firmly against the independence of the judiciary, and its top leaders, including Prachanda, used rallies and other platforms to warn the media that criticising the Maoists will not go unnoticed. Apart from issuing such threats, the party now owns print, radio as well as television channels which are used as ‘propaganda machinery’, as well as for the vilification and denouncement of its enemies and critics.

With the latest Maoist declaration that it would start a campaign asserting national independence and sovereignty, the party machinery is inventing more enemies and branding them as “local agents” of “hegemonic and foreign forces”. While the Maoist still say officially that they respect media freedom, their notorious youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL) has circulated an issue of its weekly bulletin Lalrakshak identifying ‘foreign agents’ and ‘enemies’ of the revolution.

The international community has vainly been asking the Maoists to have the YCL’s para-military composition transformed, like any other party’s youth wing. The circulation of these journalists’ names among the militant youth cadre is an indicator, going by the past, that they will be targeted physically.

Nepal’s media industry is only about two decades old. The private sector entered in a big way only after the constitution guaranteed full protection of freedom of speech and expression as fundamental rights.

Although the Nepali media was initially divided when King Gyanendra took over in 2005, they crusaded collectively to mobilise opinion against the takeover. The international community, which has a enhanced presence in the country after the king surrendered power in April 2006, often gives credit to the media for the restoration of democracy.

The UN and many non-governmental organisations have funded FNJ in a big way, and media rights NGOs have mushroomed in the country. But in the absence of a clear definition of who constitutes journalists, it has been a profession which anyone can claim. In the last few years, especially after the king’s surrender, the media has been as radical as most political parties in terms of denying space to the ‘other view’.

And the Maoists, as the key agent of political change that led Nepal from monarchy to republicanism, from a Hindu to a secular, from a a unitary to a federal identity — got the most favourable press. But the lost much goodwill after the law and order situation fell to new depths, and after ministers and Maoists emerged as a class above the reach of law.

The latest draft media policy and the threat unleashed by the YCL has only reinforced that fear. “For accomplishing the revolution, maybe you need to be a bit brazen (uncivilised)”, UCPN-M chief Prachanda said recently. The Maoists’ logic is understandable — it is, after all, some critical sections of the media, along with the international community, that have exposed the way they use the peace process and comprehensive peace agreement merely as a ‘tactic’.

Kathmandu, Nepal: A journey of faith and wonder, vast views and gentle people

By Christine Tibbetts

Yak cheese for breakfast while sitting in a garden of marigolds, greenery and immense pots of floating flower petals, conversations humming in many languages.

That was early morning in Kathmandu, Nepal for me, seven days in this capital city half a world away from my normal. Reading the Himalaya Times too, trying to understand the political energies of a country whose borders have only been open some 50 years.

Plenty has been happening here for 5,000 years without the rest of us or our ancestors coming in. Nepal is complicated, relevant, calm and startling all at the same time.

This is a vibrant country with 37 million people, no ocean borders and next door to “the top of the world,” as Tibet is known.

Mount Everest is here, and so are thousands of grand symbols and stories to rival even its peak and abundant inspiration.

My noontime blessing from a 9-year-old goddess in a Kathmandu neighborhood connected me directly to a 17th century Nepali tradition active today, and that’s how it is all over this land: ancient and modern side-by-side, interacting easily.

Little girls from nine families in Nepal are potential carriers of the Goddess Kumari. If discerned to be one, the child is selected by age 4 and a ritual places the goddess within her.

That and much more I learned from Binaya Rana, a Buddhist scholar with impeccable English language skills and the son of a Rinpoche. To Nepalis that is a title of great respect, earned only after years of concentrated study and meditation.

The Kumari goddess comes out into the city only 13 times a year, carried in a palanquin. The September Festival of the Chariot celebrates the Kumari and this tradition.

Back to her family she goes when puberty arrives, considered a goddess for one week longer and then no longer sacred.

Normal in Nepal is not the same as normal in my land.

This is a trip of the heart. Took me a while to get that flow right, to stop wondering why these gentle people didn’t do everything the way mother taught me. The more I kept my western world notions in my back pocket, the better I appreciated and admired their understandings.

Worship is a great delight, happening all the time. This is a land to release prayer in the air.

Flags in fresh vibrant colors and also as tattered threads flow overhead on yard after yard of cord, with the wind horse carrying the prayers they hold, Binaya said. Red, white, green, blue and yellow are their colours.

Hands turn prayer wheels as people walk clockwise around the many, many temples, releasing a mantra engraved or painted on it.

Once I learned that’s the purpose, the privilege of joining local residents and visiting pilgrims as they circled felt immense.

With so many Buddhist and Hindu holy places, Nepal attracts travelers making pilgrimages sacred to them.

Incarnation is a word heard over and over again with new forms of the many gods and goddesses and huge, grand, glorious stories to accompany them. They have lots of arms, hands and heads because they have so many functions and such complex personalities.

Incantation is the word for lovely sounds rising into those same prayer winds. The murmurings of families and individuals in the temples, the low-toned conversations with holy people as exchanges of rice, flowers, grains and nuts are made and chanting of the monks merge in the air, wafting across rice fields and up steep mountain sides.

I heard them as I trekked to altitude 6,000 in the Shivapuri National Park to visit the nunnery on top of a southern slope, overlooking the Kathmandu Valley.

My destination was the Nagi Gompa nunnery. Saw the prayer flags first, then young girls lugging baskets of gravel on their backs, taking them further up the mountain to construct a new building. Already they had completed a temple, residence, kitchen and rental rooms.

Really. You can stay up here. I’d recommend packing light.

Pilgrims, and pleasure hikers, choose a longer route to the headwaters of the sacred Bagmati River where a rock appears to be the face of a tiger. Binaya told me this is a place to encounter Hindu monks and Sadhus, men who have forsaken worldly goods and affairs for a life of separation and meditation.

The Bagmati River continues to be considered holy as it flows through Kathmandu and that’s why people choose to end their lives here if possible. A hospice stands on the bank and body-length stone slabs angled gently to the river allow drawing final breaths with feet in sacred water.

Should you die elsewhere, this is still the place for your cremation several hours later with the eldest son lighting the fire. Ashes go into the water three or so hours later.

Three cremations were taking place the day I walked along the opposite bank of the Bagmati River; a dozen could happen at the same time, with others scheduled later so chances are good this is an experience often available.

Respectful not gawking was automatic. Astonished when I realized what I was seeing, and a moment of thinking I had intruded, but that’s not the case.

Worship in Nepal is visible and everywhere—street corners, front yards, marketplaces, water gathering squares. Seeing families share these final hours in the open felt just right too when I got the whole picture of this place.

Visit Nepal with my heart, not my Western outlook. Worked for me over and over again.

Took some repetition to understand worship when I passed it by because at first it looked like farmer’s markets or odd leftovers on the sidewalk.