[news] NYTimes.com Article: Maoist Rebellion Shifts Balance of Power in Rural Nepal

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>Maoist Rebellion Shifts Balance of Power in Rural Nepal
>
>February 5, 2004
>  By AMY WALDMAN
>
>
>
>
>
>BARDIYA, Nepal - Until two-and-a-half years ago, Rachna
>Sharma and her husband lived as zamindars, or landlords, in
>this district in western Nepal, presiding over an ample
>estate just as their forebears had done.
>
>As members of a high caste, they did not dirty their hands
>working their land. That was left to the Tharus, a landless
>and powerless ethnic group indigenous to this plain area.
>Until 2000, when the government, under pressure, freed
>them, thousands of Tharus - including 15 families on Mrs.
>Sharma's estate - lived as bonded laborers, equal to
>slaves.
>
>But today Mrs. Sharma, an aristocratic beauty, lives as a
>refugee, if a cosseted one, in the town of Nepalganj.
>Maoist rebels are living in her former house and cooking in
>her kitchen. The Tharus are farming her lands - and keeping
>all of the crops.
>
>When they come to see her in town, she tries, futilely, to
>wheedle a share, making requests where she once issued
>commands.
>
>"Now we have to be polite to them," Mrs. Sharma, 36, said.
>
>
>The guerrilla insurgency that the Communist Party of Nepal
>(Maoist) began against the constitutional monarchy eight
>years ago has wreaked great damage in this country of
>Himalayan scenery and epic poverty. More than 8,500 people
>have died, including more than 1,500 since the end of
>August, when a cease-fire broke down.
>
>The insurgency has also, in parts of rural Nepal, wrought
>changes in the balance of power between the landed and the
>landless that multiparty democracy - ushered in with great
>expectations in the early 1990's - failed to bring.
>
>That dynamic helps explain why a rebellion that many say
>has become a criminal enterprise as much as a political
>movement still finds support among the Tharus and other
>disenfranchised ethnic groups and the country's low castes.
>
>
>In the villages of Bardiya, young Tharus talk happily about
>how the landlords have had to flee the Maoists' wrath. "All
>the zamindars are scared of us now," said Bal Krishna
>Chaudhary, an intense 18-year-old Tharu student from a
>family of former bonded laborers.
>
>His eldest sister, Sita, was a Maoist supporter taken by
>the army more than two years ago. They said she was
>carrying a bomb, a charge he denies, but he does not
>dispute her Maoist sympathies.
>
>"They speak for the people," he said, explaining why. "They
>speak for the Tharus."
>
>Like a creeper wrapping itself around a tree, the Maoist
>movement has used the entrenched poverty and discrimination
>of this Hindu kingdom's deeply feudal society to build its
>insurgency. Nepal has perhaps the most rigid caste
>hierarchy remaining today.
>
>This country has been, and still is, dominated by two high
>castes: the Brahmins - called Bahuns in Nepal - or priestly
>caste, of Mrs. Sharma; and Chhetris, or warrior caste, of
>her husband.
>
>The two castes hold the highest positions in government,
>politics and business. They control the army and the press.
>And perhaps most crucially in a society still reliant on
>agriculture, they own the land.
>
>Much of that land was once farmed by the Tharus, an
>aboriginal group in Nepal's lowlands. With a population of
>about 1.2 million, out of Nepal's 24 million, they are one
>of the country's largest ethnic groups.
>
>Once self-sufficient farmers, the Tharus were gradually
>dispossessed as the government granted land to high castes
>to secure their loyalty and expand its reach. Then, the
>eradication of malaria - to which Tharus are believed to be
>immune - drew in large numbers of hill migrants to claim
>Tharu lands.
>
>Tharus, little educated and ill-equipped to battle for
>their rights, went from being owners to landless tenants.
>For several generations, an estimated 20 percent or more of
>Tharus in western Nepal - some 20,000 families - were
>indentured, usually with no hope of escape.
>
>The Maoists did little or nothing to free the Tharus from
>bonded labor; the pressure on the government came from
>domestic and international organizations.
>
>But the Maoists have woven the uplifting of the Tharus -
>and of Nepal's other downtrodden groups - into their
>tapestry of slogans, and it has resonated among a people
>who believe that both royalist rule and multiparty
>democracy have failed them.
>
>"We work with them because we think they can help raise our
>issues and get us our rights as citizens," Bal Krishna
>Chaudhary, the student, said. He knew seven people who had
>joined the Maoists, he said. Most are dead or missing.
>
>Ekraj Chaudhary, a Tharu radio journalist based in
>Nepalganj, said he believed that most Tharus were involved
>with the Maoists, even if only passively. But even in the
>movement, he said, they were still relegated to low-level
>militants, and thus easy prey for the army.
>
>Col. Dipak Gurung, a spokesman for the Royal Nepal Army,
>said the Maoists were exploiting the Tharus. "Tharus are
>very meek people, they normally don't resist," he said. "By
>nature, by culture, they are submissive."
>
>No longer, as Mrs. Sharma could testify. At 45, Mrs.
>Sharma's husband is working in Nepalgunj as a computer
>instructor - the first job he has ever held - to support
>their family. "Zamindars never worked," she said. "It's
>very strange."
>
>But if the undoing of nobles like Mrs. Sharma has cheered
>some Tharu hearts, the cost of the insurgency has troubled
>many others. This is a war with no winners.
>
>As a result of the rebellion, the state is pulling out of
>many Maoist-controlled areas - generally the country's
>remote and desperately poor rural regions.
>
>The police have been pulled back to district headquarters.
>Teachers and doctors, often singling out the Maoists for
>extortion or worse, are in some cases refusing to serve in
>villages. The swollen military budget, required to sustain
>an army now close to 80,000-strong, has crowded out
>development spending.
>
>The government calls most of the dead Maoists, but human
>rights advocates, journalists and ordinary Nepalis say many
>are civilians caught in the crossfire or Maoist
>sympathizers mislabeled militants.
>
>Support for the Maoists by some Tharus has placed the
>entire community under suspicion. The army has come down
>hard on the Tharus - harassing, beating, detaining and
>sometimes killing them, often with little or no evidence.
>
>On a recent afternoon, four parents, faces wan and weary,
>sat on a bench in the front yard of a village home,
>clutching photographs - and in one case simply a negative -
>of their missing children.
>
>Thirty-seven Tharus have disappeared into army custody from
>this district alone, said Mr. Chaudhary, the journalist.
>Across the country, 709 Nepalis have disappeared in the
>last eight years, 200 into Maoist control and the rest into
>the custody of security forces, according to the National
>Human Rights Commission.
>
>Colonel Gurung disputed that the army had taken people
>without accounting for them. "We're not that
>irresponsible," he said. He said it was "very rare" that
>anyone would be killed in army custody.
>
>But Phool Kesari, a Tharu and a former bonded laborer,
>whose husband was taken by the army a year and a half ago,
>is almost certain that he is dead. The army came three days
>after he was taken to say that he was a Maoist, which she
>denies. There has been no word of him since.
>
>She has no relatives to rely on. She depends on a
>15-year-old daughter still working as a bonded laborer, for
>about 4,000 rupees, or $60, a year.
>
>She sat in her one-room house, the possessions inside
>countable on two hands. Three small children clung to her,
>their eyes watering from the thick, stinging smoke of a
>cooking fire, their noses running.
>
>"How am I going to survive?" she asked. She had no land, no
>property, no education, no husband, no income and three
>children to feed.
>
>Without waiting for an answer, she offered one. "Maybe I'll
>go back to the zamindar," she said.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/international/asia/05NEPA.html?ex=1077004602&ei=1&en=43a1dac50df00876
>
>
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