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Kathmandu: The conflict victims and the international community are getting antsy. They have been frustrated with the delay in the appointment of chairmen and members of the two transitional justice mechanisms, and with the federal government’s failure to amend a related Act in line with Supreme Court verdict.

This has put the government in a bind. The international community is putting pressure on the government to amend the Act as per the 2015 apex court verdict, in adherence with international standards, and on the basis of wider consultations with conflict victims and other domestic stakeholders.

The 2015 SC verdict had pointed to the failure of the ‘Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act-2014’ to comply with principles of transitional justice and international practices. The thrust of its argument is that there should be no amnesty in cases of serious human rights violations committed by both the security forces as well as the Maoist party. Former Maoist leaders, however, see this verdict as a breach of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the guiding document of the peace process.

It has been over four years since the court order and successive governments have failed to amend the Act. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) have done little in past four years save for collecting nearly 66,000 complaints from conflict victims. The commissions were paralyzed due to lack of clarity in their mandate, insufficient resources and overbearing political pressure.

The tenure of chairs and members of the two commissions expired on March 15 and they have since been without leadership, giving rise to a fear that the complaints filed by conflict victims could be lost or manipulated. In the first week of March, the government had formed a new leadership recommendation panel under former chief justice Om Prakash Mishra.

“The indecision on recommending chairs and members is indicative of the pressure the two commissions have faced in the past four years,” says former TRC member Manchala Jha. “There is a psychology that if those close to party leaders are appointed, the leaders will be protected from war-era cases. It is a national issue and parties should rise above petty interest if they want it sorted,” she says, adding that she suspected the hand of ‘unseen forces’ in delaying the process and in giving continuity to a sort of instability in Nepal.

Deliberate delay

The recommendation committee has been unable to decide due to lack of political consensus. Both the ruling Nepal Communist Party as well as the opposition Nepali Congress are claiming TRC leadership. But even more serious is the delay in amendment of the related Act, as the government seems unable to accommodate the conflicting concerns of the former Maoist leaders, the security forces, and the international community.

According to sources, the UN and representatives of various embassies in Kathmandu discussed the delay in appointments and Act amendment a couple of weeks ago. The meeting concluded that both ruling and opposition parties were deliberately delaying the transitional justice process.

As in the past, the international community was all set to issue another statement calling on the government to settle the process soon. The government said it was ready to address their concerns but that there should be no public statement. Thus prompted, the international community has since adopted a policy of reminding government representatives of their transitional justice obligations behind closed doors.

In a meeting earlier this month with Markus Potzel, the Commissioner for South Asia in the German Federal Foreign Office, Law Minister Bhanu Bhakta Dhakal had reiterated the government’s commitment to make the kind of amendments the international community wanted. The meeting highlighted Germany’s deep concern with the TRC process, and also the European Union’s fears over the protracted peace process.  

Foreign ambassadors based in Kathmandu are also repeatedly meeting Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali to express their concerns.

Consult us too

Then there are the conflict victims. Earlier this month, the Conflict Victim’s Common Platform submitted a memorandum to Minister Dhakal asking for a broader roadmap with a clear deadline for completion of the transitional justice process. The forum asked the government to consult all stakeholders in the peace process and to immediately halt the work of the recommendation committee.

“The process of amending the Act must begin instantly after meaningful consultation with the stakeholders including conflict victims, based on the spirit of the Constitution of Nepal, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the Supreme Court ruling, and human rights conventions and declarations Nepal government is a part of,” the body said.

As the previous office-bearers of the two transitional justice bodies failed to live up to the expectation, there are concerns that new appointments would meet with the same fate. Conflict victims and international community thus argue that the two commissions should be independent and autonomous, with fixed jurisdictions and adequate authority. “The incapability of the office-bearers, who were picked on a political basis… by sidelining the principle of conflict transformation, peace building and transitional justice contributed to our distrust,” the conflict victim platform said in a statement.

At the same time, former child soldiers who were discharged in 2010 by then Madhav Kumar Nepal government are piling on the pressure to address their demands. They say even though they were used as soldiers during the Maoist conflict, they were not accommodated in the peace process. The informal leader of former child soldiers Lenin Bista has started highlighting their plight at various international forums. In a recent interview with APEX, Bista warned that the ‘disqualified’ former Maoist fighters could at any time lodge a case against senior Maoist leaders at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The TRC is also a major bone of contention between Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and his fellow ruling NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal. Oli is reportedly reluctant to once and for all settle transitional justice cases as the incomplete peace process could be used as a tool of leverage against Dahal in all future power-sharing negotiations. Dahal, meanwhile, is pitching for near blanket amnesty in all war-era cases, and the settlement of the peace process at the earliest.

Former Maoist leaders also do not want to amend the laws in line with SC verdict, and yet in that case they also fear being arrested abroad on charges of grave rights violations. They also want all cases lodged with the regular courts against various Maoist leaders handed over to the two transitional justice bodies.

Pawan Paudel | Damauli

Under relentless pressure of the United Nations and western countries, the government has made it tough for the North Koreans working in Nepal, many of them illegally, to renew their visas. As a result, the visas of the North Korean nationals employed in various IT companies in Kathmandu have not been extended.

The United Nations had written to the government around a month ago, calling on Nepal to comply with the UN’s sanctions regime against North Korea.
A joint committee comprised of members from the Home Ministry, the Department of Immigration, and the Ministry of Industry has been formed to take stock of North Korean investments in Nepal.

The Home Ministry has also directed the Immigration Department not to renew the visas of over a dozen North Korean nationals who have been living in Nepal without valid permits. Among them are eight doctors of the North Korea-run hospital in Damauli.

Ne-Koryo Hospital in Damauli has stopped its operations as none of its eight doctors could get their work permits renewed. A hospital employee informed that operations had to be stopped following a Nepal Medical Council directive. (Doctors in Nepal require a license from Nepal Medical Council to examine patients.)
When the Tanahun district administration ran an investigation three weeks ago, they found that four doctors were working in the hospital even after their work permits had expired a month before. The four other doctors’ work permits were going to expire by the next month. When the permits of all the doctors expired, the hospital closed down.

Government officers inform that in previous investigations, too, the hospital, operated under the direct watch of the North Korean Embassy in Kathmandu, was found to be flouting many medical and visa regulations.

Nepali employees of the hospital are being given paid holidays until the matter is resolved. An employee, requesting anonymity, says that the hospital manager asked them to return to work only when they were called.

Meanwhile, the manager and eight doctors have come to Kathmandu. Says Assistant Chief District Officer of Tanahun Tulasi Ram Poudel, “We asked hospital officials to complete formalities, not to shut down operations.”

Kuk-Son Song, the ‘manager’ of the hospital says the hospital is not permanently closed and operations have been halted only for a few days. He says the eight doctors are taking a rest as their blood pressure had suddenly risen. “This is an internal matter. We will resolve it soon and the hospital will come back into operation,” he says.

Another hospital employee informed that doctors’ work permit renewal requests were sent much before the expiry of their permits. “There is still no sign of the applications being renewed though,” he says.

The framers of modern India had this pacifist streak. The foreign policy visions of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan were colored by Gandhi’s own brand of non-violence. Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister who also held the foreign affairs portfolio, and Gandhi’s mentee, frequently talked of the need for a ‘world government’. He believed the world’s division into competing military blocks, each with its own nuclear arsenal, was a herald to an apocalypse; only a global government could create conditions for peace, and save the planet. Peace and brotherhood were the answers to the global problems, not wars and arms.

As Dhruva Jaishankar of Brookings India points out, this kind of idealism of democratic India’s founding fathers was also self-serving. They were all too aware of the limitations of their dirt-poor country and knew that it was in no position to assert itself either economically or militarily. Preaching homegrown non-violence and morality-based foreign policy was comparably easier. In order to assert itself on the global state, India thus took the initiative to organize the 1955 Bangdung Conference that brought together 29 independent African and Asian countries. Nepal took part, too, in what was the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

The NAM was another handy tool for big countries like India and Indonesia to quietly pursue their economic and strategic objectives without coming afoul of the Americans or the Soviets. India’s role in the NAM was dubious from the start. It was supposedly neutral on all important global issues; but practically, it was all but aligned with the USSR. Under the cover of NAM and non-violence, it also quietly went about creating an ‘exclusive sphere of influence’ in South Asia. As Jaishankar hints, the stronger that India gets militarily and economically, the more comfortable it could feel in ditching its non-aligned and pacifist miens.
But NAM served not just India. On the face of an overbearing India, creeping communism from the north, and a hegemonic US, a small, underdeveloped country like Nepal found it useful too. Nepal’s leaders too expressed an undying faith in ‘non-violence’, ‘non-interference’ and ‘mutual coexistence’—even as they repeatedly sided with this or that big power to serve their interests. King Mahendra was an expert at leveraging the Americans and Chinese interests in Nepal to buttress his populist anti-India image. Much later, KP Oli could romp home to an unprecedented electoral victory by cozying up to China in his supposed bid to maintain the small country’s absolute sovereignty.

The Oli government still professes to abide by the Panchasheel, the NAM’s bedrock principle, as it looks to expand its global footprint. Again, from the start, a focus of NAM countries has been to maximize their geostrategic options, even as the platform gave them a convenient, pacifist cover. Big powers had their own calculus. India has never abandoned its goal of maintaining exclusivity in South Asia. China, a NAM observer state, meanwhile, wants to be the next superpower by pursuing its own, ‘unique’ political course. The US wants its old sway intact, including in South Asia. What better way for Nepal to pursue its interests in this crowded field than by continuing to parrot the sonorous non-alignment mantra?

The leaders and cadres of the Netra Bikram Chand Biplab-led Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, which has been labelled a criminal group and banned, are helping villagers with farming activities in different parts of Kalikot district. Members of the ‘underground’ party who were previosuly barely seen in the public have now started appearing in the fields of the villagers as a part of their ‘labor donation’ campaign.

The semi-underground members who have otherwise been active in strengthening their organization, claim they are helping the villagers to gain their trust and raise support for the party. The district secretary of CPN Kalikot, Manilal AD (Ranadeep), informs that it is only natural for the party to be helping the farmers and laborers, its main constituencies. “We are with the villagers and helping with all agriculture-related works that are done in a farmer’s household in the monsoon season,” says Manilal.

The campaign of contributing manual labor was started following the party’s central committee meeting. The meeting also decided on making the campaign more effective for the party’s growth. Party officials are busy helping villagers in the fields in remote areas of Palata, Pachaljharana, Raskot, Sanni Triveni and Narharinath rural municipalities of Kalikot district. “Following the party decision, we have been helping famers in these villages with corn and paddy plantation as well as with other farming-related tasks,” says Manilal.

‘Sahashi’, a central committee member of the Dalit Mukti Morcha close to CPN, also says it is natural for his party to help farmers in any way it can. He also dismisses claims that the Biplab-led CPN cadres are underground. “The people’s party cannot be too far from the people,” he adds.

People’s representatives under target
The CPN cadres have marked people’s representatives as their main target. This is confirmed by Shital Bista, the Bheri-Karnali organizer of the youth organization affiliated with the CPN. “Corrupt people’s representatives in the area are our target,” he says. “We will honor the representatives doing honest work but for those involved in bribery and corruption, the party will punish them. We are getting reports that corruption and irregularities are rampant in local bodies of Kalikot.”

He adds that the youth organization, with the party’s mediation, will investigate all irregularities. Bista alleges people’s representatives of swindling the budgets allocated for different projects. Many of these projects are dysfunctional and most of the money is transferred into their personal accounts, Bista claims. For this reason the party has locked down nine local level offices and 82 ward offices in the district.

Only this month, around 1,200 youth of the 10 districts under the Bheri-Karnali bureau vowed to be watchdogs for government work in the region. The party has also allocated funds to meet the basic expenses of its members who are actively involved in party growth.