KATHMANDU: Nepal’s strongman King Gyanendra named dates for elections earlier this month—and then enacted a law that hamstrings journalists’ reporting of politics. After he axed his appointed government and began ruling with a handpicked council on Feb. 1, the monarch pledged to hand back power in three years.
Slated for 2007, one year earlier than stipulated, the parliamentary polls announced just before the biggest annual festival, Dasain, could have been read as a positive sign in this nation whose people are desperately searching for hope. Nepalese politics has been polarised between the palace and protesting political parties since February and for almost 10 years the population has been tormented by a bloody Maoist uprising that has left 12,000, mostly innocent villagers, dead.
But any hope that the election news would be a step toward reconciliation was killed by an ordinance the king ordered to reform media laws. Besides banning negative news about political parties, the ordinance:
— broadens the prohibition on negative reporting of the king to include the entire royal family;
— prohibits one company from operating the three types of media —newspapers, radio and television — a move seen here as aimed at the outspoken pro-democracy Kantipur media group;
— legislates a ban on news broadcasts on FM radio;
— gives the government appointed Press Council authority to cancel the accreditation of journalists who violate ‘media guidelines’, and;
— criminalises all press offences, hiking penalties for violations ten-fold.
“It’s very difficult to see anything positive that this regime has done, including the announcement of the elections… You cannot talk about elections and enact the press ordinance at the same time,” says Devendra Raj Panday, coordinator of the Citizen’s Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP).
In recent months his group has held numerous peaceful gatherings in Kathmandu and beyond that have attracted thousands of people to protest King Gyanendra’s takeover. Like many people here, Panday, a former bureaucrat in the pre-democratic Panchayat system, believes the king’s recent moves have deep roots.
“This was coming, not only Feb. 1 but October 2002 (when the king dismissed the elected government). Many of us felt then that he was trying to move along the Musharraf path,” Panday told IPS, referring to Pakistan’s army chief Pervez Musharraf who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 and named himself president two years later.
The lifting of the emergency unlocked the prison doors for many detainees, lighting another candle of hope that the monarch was poised to return power to the people but since then his council has passed or proposed other ordinances steeling the government’s grip on society. The Social Welfare Council, previously empowered to “extend support” to NGOs only is now authorised to supervise their activities and has developed a code to do that.
Nepal’s representative in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a news release Oct. 5 the code “would introduce constraints on the membership, objectives, programming, functioning access to funding and affiliations of national and international organisations…incompatible with international human rights standards”. —Dawn/Inter-Press News Service
