Maoists now see Indian hand in Nepal's palace massacre

The Times of India




KATHMANDU: Nine years after he was gunned down in his own palace, allegedly by his son over a family dispute, the assassination of Nepal's king Birendra continues to haunt the nascent republic's politics with the former Maoists now claiming the involvement of neighbour India. 


Maoist supremo and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, who has begun making increasingly anti-Indian rhetoric in recent times, now alleges the Indian government played a role in Nepal's national tragedy that wiped out Birendra's entire family June 1, 2001. 


He is also claiming that New Delhi was behind the death of Nepal's charismatic communist leader Madan Bhandari in 1993. 


"Madan Bhandari and King Birendra were killed because they did not surrender to India," Maoist mouthpiece Janadisha daily said Sunday in a front-page report. 


The daily quoted from a speech by Prachanda Saturday during a programme to mark the fourth round of Maoist protests against the coalition government of Nepal that is scheduled to climax with an indefinite general strike from Jan 24. 


Prachanda said the government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal was a puppet that was being remote-controlled by the Indian government. 
"Former king Birendra and Madan Bhandari were killed because they supported national sovereignty," Prachanda said. 


The former revolutionary said king Birendra was killed because he favoured buying weapons for the state army from China instead of India and was making efforts to hold talks directly with the Maoists, who were then an underground party. 


Had Birendra not been killed, Prachanda said he would have held talks with the monarch within a month. 


Earlier, Prachanda had also said that king Birendra sent his youngest brother Dhirendra as a secret emissary to the Maoists to propose talks between the palace and the guerrillas. But the king was killed before the talks could start. 


Dhirendra and eight other royals, including the queen, Aishwarya, and the crown prince, Dipendra, died in the infamous massacre in the Narayanhity palace in Kathmandu. 


A commission formed by the government subsequently found the crown prince responsible for the carnage. The motive was apparently their threat to disinherit him as he wanted to marry a woman they did not consider suitable. 


Madan Bhandari, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist), died in a car crash outside Kathmandu in 1993. 


However, many people still believe there were deeper conspiracies behind the two deaths that deeply impacted Nepal's politics. 


During his short tenure as premier last year, Prachanda had promised to start a fresh investigation into the palace massacre but the pledge was never fulfilled. 


In the past, the Maoists had blamed Birendra's surviving brother Gyanendra, who ascended the throne after his death, for the massacre, an allegation denied by the king before he surrendered his crown.

Child soldiers leave Maoist camps in Nepal

SINDHULI, Nepal — Thousands of former child soldiers who fought for the Maoists in Nepal's decade-long civil war will Thursday begin leaving the UN-monitored camps where they have spent the past three years.

Around 250 young men and women are due to swap their blue People's Liberation Army (PLA) uniforms for civilian clothes and begin their journey home after an official ceremony at the Sindhuli camp in central Nepal.

They are the first of almost 24,000 former Maoist fighters living in camps around the country to be officially discharged as part of the 2006 peace agreement, a key step forward in Nepal's faltering peace process.

"After a lot of delays we are finally ready to discharge the disqualified Maoist combatants from the UN-monitored camps. It is a milestone for the country's peace process," a spokesman for the peace ministry told AFP.

"We hope it will pave the way for the crucial step of rehabilitating and reintegrating Maoist combatants."

Almost 24,000 former combatants were confined to UN-supervised camps as part of the 2006 accord that followed the end of the conflict between Maoist guerrillas and the state.

In December 2007 the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) completed a verification process and found that 2,973 former fighters were minors when the war ended and another 1,035 were not genuine combatants.

They had been slated for release soon afterwards, but the process was repeatedly delayed by disagreements between the Maoist party, now in opposition, and its political rivals.

Over the next month all 4,008 will leave the camps, a move PLA spokesman Chandra Prasad Khanal said would "send a message to the world that we are committed to peace."

"For us this is a sad moment because we are sending away our fellow fighters in the decade-long people's war," he told AFP. "But we are taking this step in order to bring the peace process to a logical conclusion."

The discharge of the former child soldiers will allow the Maoists to be removed from a UN list of organisations that use children in conflict.

Rights groups say the former rebels forcibly recruited child soldiers during the conflict, sometimes demanding one person from every home in areas under their control, although some signed up voluntarily.

Many became cooks or porters or did medical work, but they also received military training.

The Maoists want the remaining 20,000 PLA members to be integrated into the regular army, a key tenet of the peace agreement.

But the military's opposition to such a move has hampered progress, and last year a row between the then army chief Rukmangad Katawal and Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal over the issue brought down the Maoist-led government.

No one is even sure how many former fighters remain in the camps -- they are not being kept there by force and several thousand are believed to have walked out in the three years since the end of the war.

Those being officially discharged will receive a set of civilian clothes and identity papers, and each will be given 10,000 rupees (135 dollars) to travel back to their villages and begin setting up home.

There, they will be given access to vocational training and education, while UN observers will monitor their progress amid concerns they could be lured into Nepal's growing number of criminal gangs, many of which have political links.

"The release of these young people sends out a symbolic message for the new year," said Gillian Mellsop, Nepal representative of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

"Not only can these young people now finally get on with their lives, but this also marks a new beginning at the start of a new decade for Nepal, so that it can move forward to a more stable, peaceful future."

Church Bomber in Nepal Repents, Admits India Link

Disillusioned with Hindu nationalists, the leader of a militant Hindu extremist group says contact with Christians in prison led him to repent of bombing a Catholic church in Kathmandu, Nepal, in May 2008.

Ram Prasad Mainali, the 37-year-old chief of the Nepal Defense Army (NDA), was arrested on Sept. 5 for exploding a bomb in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, in the Lalitpur area of Kathmandu on May 23. The explosion killed a teenager and a newly married woman from India's Bihar state and injured more than a dozen others.

In Kathmandu's jail in the Nakkhu area, Mainali told Compass Direct News that he regretted bombing the church.

"I bombed the church so that I could help re-establish Nepal as a Hindu nation," he said. "There are Catholic nations, there are Protestant nations and there are also Islamic nations, but there is no Hindu nation. But I was wrong. Creating a religious war cannot solve anything, it will only harm people."

Mainali, who is married and has two small daughters, added that he wanted members of all religions to be friendly with one other.

Asked how the change in him came about, he said he had been attending a prison fellowship since he was transferred to Nakkhu Jail from Central Jail four months ago.

"I have been reading the Bible also, to know what it says," he said.

Of the 450 prisoners in the Nakkhu Jail, around 150 attend the Nakkhu Gospel Church inside the prison premises.

Mainali said he began reading the Bible after experiencing the graciousness of prison Christians.

"Although I bombed the church, Christians come to meet me everyday," he said. "No rightwing Hindu has come to meet me even once."

Jeevan Rai Majhi, leader of the inmates of Nakkhu Jail and also a leader of the church, confirmed that Mainali had been attending the church, praying and reading the Bible regularly. Union of Catholic Asian News reported on Nov. 30 that Mainali had sent a handwritten letter to a monthly Christian newsmagazine in Nepal, Hamro Ashish (Our Blessing), saying he had repented of his deeds in the prison.

Asked if Nepal should be a Hindu nation, Mainali said he just wanted the country to become a monarchy again, "but not with Gyanendra as the king." In 2006 a pro-democracy movement in Nepal led to the ouster of the army-backed regime of Hindu King Gyanendra, and Parliament proclaimed the Himalayan kingdom a secular, federal state.

Mainali said the NDA still exists but is not active. It was formed in New Delhi in 2007 at a meeting attended by a large number of Hindu nationalists from India, he said. Since bombing the church in Kathmandu, the group has threatened to drive all Christians from the country.

"The NDA was started in February or March 2007 at the Birla Mandir [a Hindu temple in central Delhi] at a meeting which was attended by many leaders from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad [World Hindu Council], the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena party," he said. Mainali declined to name the leaders of these Hindu extremist groups present at the meeting.

The NDA is also believed to be responsible for the killing of a Catholic priest, Father John Prakash Moyalan, principal of the Don Bosco educational institution in Dharan city in eastern Nepal, in June 2008.

Nepal was a Hindu monarchy until 1990, after which the king was forced to introduce political reforms mainly by Maoists (extreme Marxists). In 2006, Nepal adopted an interim constitution making it a secular nation, which infuriated Hindu nationalists in Nepal and India. In 2008 Nepal became a federal democratic republic.

Mainali said the NDA was receiving about 500,000 Nepalese rupees (US$6,590) every month from the organizations. He declined to divulge how the Hindu extremist groups in India funded the NDA. Mainali also said that the NDA bought arms from an Indian separatist militia in the northeastern state of Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom or ULFA. Although most of the ULFA members are nominally Christian, he said, "they sold arms to us as a purely business deal."

The ULFA is a banned organization in India and classified as a terrorist outfit since 1990. The U.S. Department of State has listed it under the "Other Groups of Concern" category.

Of the roughly 30 million people in Nepal, a meagre .5 percent are Christian, and more than 80 percent are Hindu, according to the 2001 census.

Nepal court halts promotion of tainted general

KATHMANDU: 


Nepal’s top court on Sunday ordered the government to halt the promotion of a tainted general accused of human rights violations by the UN rights watchdog. 


A single bench of Supreme Court issued a stay order on the government decision to promote Maj Gen Toran Jung Bahadur Singh to the post of Chief of the General Staff, the second-in-command of the Nepal Army. The apex court said it will conduct further hearing on January 10.