June 23, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1423

KATHMANDU: China last week reiterated that it has nothing to do with Nepal’s Maoists, who call themselves followers of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the long-deceased Chinese communist ruler. Indeed, China’s leaders told Nepal’s former prime minister who was visiting Beijing that China will help Nepal fight the insurgents.

Modelled on Peru’s outlawed Shining Path Movement, Nepal’s rebels, 7,000 to 8,000 strong, are trying to overthrow a constitutional monarchy and establish a totalitarian republic. Should Nepal join the ranks of failed democracies, it would not only be a slap across the face of the West, it would also pose enormous security risks to the already-volatile South Asian region.

On May 7, Bush met Nepal’s visiting Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and pledged America’s military support to help fight the Maoist insurgency, now six years old, which has taken thousands of lives. Nepal’s fragile government, still reeling from the assassination of the king and queen last year, is on a precipice.

Though Nepal, a Hindu-majority state, is less likely to fall prey to the charms of Muslim fundamentalism — unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India — intelligence sources report that they have evidence that al-Qaeda networks may have had links with Kashmiri businessmen in Katmandu.

Bush has asked Congress to approve $20 million in military aid to the Himalayan kingdom. More importantly, the Bush administration has announced $38 million in bilateral aid, a 300-percent increase, which will go into job creation and development projects in one of the poorest countries in the world. It is a notable foreign policy foresight. Nepal has seen its economy, never in good shape, take a nose dive in recent years as major foreign exchange earners — exports of ready-made garments and woollen carpets and tourism — plummet.

But it would be an exaggeration to put the blame squarely on the Maoists and to believe that expensive military hardware offers an easy exit from the current quagmire. Illiteracy, untouchability, casteism, feudalism and poverty have plagued the country for centuries. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, the infighting among, and within, political parties has shoved the nation’s priorities to the sidelines.

No sooner had Deuba arrived home after successfully rallying Washington and London in Nepal’s anti-Maoist battle, than he dissolved parliament and called for fresh elections, more than 40 months ahead of schedule. As expected, the Maoists pointed out that it is not they, but the mainstream political parties that are driving the country to the brink. Maoists have been quick to cash in on the public’s disenchantment, and early on they were perceived by the restive intelligentsia as a moral counterweight to warring politicians.

China has renounced the Maoists as terrorists, but that hasn’t stopped the rebels from invoking Mao’s name — they call themselves the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) — and following the communist leader’s classic insurgency theory: Overrun police outposts and far-flung military barracks; let the state overreact with human rights abuses; cash in on the resulting public anger over the abuses to give a new momentum to the insurgency.

Sadly, the American public has not paid much attention to this deadly civil war, which threatens this region’s stability. And for that apathy I primarily blame the American media.

The American mass media seem to be transfixed by events in the Mideast, and the American scholarship on South Asia seems to be India-centric. They failed to notice that hundreds of Nepalese soldiers and civilians were getting killed just as Bush was meeting Deuba in the White House.

Second, there is the thinking here that Nepal will never pose a security risk to the West in the scale of other countries in the region, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Third, and this one is more understandable than the first two, Nepal has been meted out with the same customary indifference that the American media treat most small countries, unless they are endowed with rich oil fields and diamond mines. And Nepal certainly is no Israel. But therein lies the danger. No one noticed the penetration of al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan, backward and rugged much like Nepal, until Sept. 11. Poverty and lawlessness breed all kinds of vices.

The United Nations warns that mountainous areas are the flash points of conflicts in the world today. Let me add the Himalayas to the list. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday