(Recasts with quotes from government official)
By Gopal Sharma
KATHMANDU, Dec 29 (Reuters) - A general strike called by Maoist rebels paralysed Nepal's capital Kathmandu on Sunday but was generally peaceful.
Most shops were closed and streets were deserted during the day, the first of a two-day strike called by the Maoists as part of a campaign to topple the constitutional monarchy.
"There was no untoward incident and normal life remained peaceful," Home (Interior) Ministry spokesman Gopendra Bahadur Pandey told Reuters. "Strict security measures had been in place."
Witnesses said few vehicles plied the streets while shops in the main business district remained shuttered.
"It is a complete closure," Keshab Prasad Poudel, a resident, told Reuters....
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP71433> *****
***** December 29, 2002
Insurgents Create Growing Instability in Nepal
By DAVID ROHDE
BHIMSEN NAGAR, Nepal - His former neighbors describe him as "kindhearted" and "generous." His junior high teacher changed his name to "Lotus Flower" because he was so gentle and handsome. His father still shows off pictures of him as a grown man tenderly placing his hand on his mother's forehead as she lay dying of leukemia.
"It was his habit to make people smile," said his father, Mukti Ram Dahal, in a rare interview with a foreign journalist. "He used to do it with everybody."
But to the rest of Nepal and to the outside world, the man now known by the nom de guerre Prachanda, or "the fierce one," is the leader of a violent Maoist insurgency that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 1996 in this mountain kingdom that sits as a buffer between India and China.
The United States has grown so concerned that it is providing $17 million in military equipment and sending American soldiers to train Nepal's army, a move that has Chinese officials worried about American meddling in their backyard.
A post-Mao, quasi-capitalist Beijing disowns the rebels and accuses them of "usurping the name of the leader of the Chinese people." Indian officials, meanwhile, fear a rising tide of refugees and what a Maoist victory could do to re-energize sputtering insurgencies in their own country.
The insurgents, who call themselves the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), modeled after Peru's own Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, have seized control of 40 percent of Nepal and paralyzed its economy and political system.
Their success has been led by Prachanda, 48, who has managed to deepen the support for his movement by portraying himself as a Nepalese Robin Hood facing down corrupt and ineffective governments.
Brilliant and charismatic to his followers, fanatical and opportunistic to his enemies, Prachanda, the son of a poor but upper-caste farmer, demands the eradication of chronic rural poverty and abolition of Nepal's constitutional monarchy, which he calls a "eunuch parliamentary monarchy." His war has exposed Nepal's vast inequalities, self-interested elite and, to the surprise of many longtime Western residents, potential for savagery.
"Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is undefeatable because it is a system based on truth," Prachanda said in an interview with a Nepalese newspaper in 1997, a year after he declared a "people's war" on "imperialists" and "reactionaries." "Marxism says the reactionaries continue to create problems until they are eliminated."
Since then, the Maoists stand accused of killing 800 civilians deemed "enemies of the revolution," kidnapping, extortion, forced conscription and the use of child soldiers. The Royal Nepalese Army, dispatched a year ago to crush the insurgents, has proven no kinder to its people, human rights groups say. Government troops are accused of secret detentions, torture and killing as many as 2,000 civilians and unarmed prisoners in the past year.
Since the army joined the fight a year ago, the number of deaths has increased from hundreds a year to 4,300 in the last year alone. A once peaceful tourist destination now stands as one of the world's bloodiest corners.
While their ideology may seem antiquated, the group's members have emerged as master tacticians and motivators who quickly surround government posts with 1,000 to 2,000 fighters before overwhelming them. They have also shown a keen, and in some ways curious, interest in how they are perceived.
The group sent an open letter last March to foreign tourists explaining that they would not be attacked in Nepal. It begins "warmest greetings from the materially poor but spiritually rich people of Nepal." A letter sent to world leaders blaming the government for the failure of peace talks last year concludes with the line "looking forward to cordial and mutually beneficial relations in the days to come."
Chhabi Lal Dahal, as Prachanda was known then, was born in a mountain village near the town of Pokhara in central Nepal in December 1954, the eldest of eight children. The timing of his birth was considered propitious; in Nepalese astrology, having an eldest son in December signals good things to come.
When Prachanda was 6 or 7, the family moved along with hundreds of thousand of others from the mountains of central and northern Nepal to the country's fertile southern plains after King Mahendra, the Hindu kingdom's ruler at the time, decreed democratic elections and large-scale land reform. A year later, the king reversed his decision, dissolved Parliament and arrested top political leaders. The family was left stranded in this village of 25 families, today a jumbled and impoverished mix of the country's many ethnic groups and castes just outside of Bharatpur.
Balaram Bishwakarma, a lower-caste Dalit, or "untouchable," recalled how Prachanda bounced him on his lap when they were both children. "He treated every other kid as one of his brothers," he said.
Umanath Lamichhane, a 60-year-old farmer, glowed when he spoke about him. "He was such a kind-hearted man," he said.
Neighbors recalled asking Prachanda to settle petty disputes and seeing him move dozens of landless families to vacant, government-owned grazing areas. His leadership abilities quickly emerged.
"Everyone who met him would be very quickly impressed, and would stand to listen to hear what he had to say," said a former Maoist activist who attended a local agriculture college with him.
By the time Prachanda graduated in 1978, he held a bachelor's degree and a radical Maoist perspective.
Chinkali Shrestha, headmaster of a high school where Prachanda later went to teach horticulture, recalled being struck by his absolute confidence that Maoism would triumph.
Prachanda and other Maoist leaders took their hard-line Communist faction underground in 1996, after winning only 9 of the 205 seats in Parliament in earlier elections. Government officials initially scoffed at the group. But within months, Prachanda and other leaders had created a highly organized insurgency.
They overran isolated police posts to obtain weapons. They robbed banks to obtain money. They banned drinking, gambling, trafficking in women and domestic violence. They staged plays that depicted caste and ethnic discrimination to recruit cadres. They soon became active in more than half of the country's 75 districts, forming shadow "people's governments" in 22 of them.
At first, civilian government officials countered the insurgents with brutal police sweeps. The corruption, ineffectiveness and harsh methods of successive governments also aided the insurgents' cause.
Over time, the Maoists' methods, too, grew more brutal. Villagers were forced at gunpoint to join their cause and pay a war "tax." Teachers and local activists were kidnapped and murdered. Mainstream politicians were beheaded.
A recent poll found that if the Maoists were to put down their arms today, they would win at best 10 percent of the seats in Parliament - double their showing before, but not enough to control the government.
While both Prachanda and government leaders frequently express a willingness to talk, negotiations have yet to materialize. Infighting between the country's king, Gyanendra, and its mainstream political parties has also hindered the peace effort.
A recent photo captured by the army shows Prachanda as a bearded, pot-bellied man who scarcely resembles the rail-thin figure who cared for his dying mother. Critics joke that his belly symbolizes his own corruption. Prachanda's son, Prakash Dahal, who is in his 20's and apparently part of the movement, stands a few feet away from him.
Asked about how he felt about his son, Prachanda's father said in the interview that he feared for his son's life but also that he was proud that "this great revolutionary leader is a son of mine." He also added a caveat that echoed the sentiment of many in Nepal as the death toll soars.
"I also would like some kind of settlement to this problem," he said. "I'd also like to see a situation where people from either side are not killed."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/international/asia/29NEPA.html> *****
Reuters, "Nepal Ready to Give Details About Jailed Rebels," December 30, 2002, Filed at 0:21 a.m. ET, <http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nepal.html>.
"A Communication from the Revolutionaries in Nepal on the Current (September 2002) Situation in the Civil War," <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0902bhattarai.htm>. -- Yoshie
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