June 23, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-us-Sani 07, 1428

KATHMANDU, June 22: Sitaram Prasai, a rich Nepali businessman wanted by police for massive bank fraud, used to think he was above the law. He would hobnob with Kathmandu's political elite and throw lavish parties, calm in the belief that his wealth meant he was untouchable.

But that was before the Young Communist League, a group attached to Nepal's Maoists, rolled up.

The modern day Robin Hoods -- as they portray themselves -- snatched Prasai earlier this month, held him overnight and then paraded him in an open air theatre in Kathmandu before delivering him to justice.

“There is widespread corruption in the country,” Ganesh Man Pun, the president of the YCL said, bemoaning government inaction against crime and corruption.

“Our aim is just to help the police administration in maintaining peace, law and order.” But the YCL, which is believed to have 300,000 members, is also seen as a serious threat yet to Nepal's fragile peace process, under which the Maoists are supposed to lock up their arms and end a decade of insurgency.

Critics have accused it of terrorising communities and acting as vigilantes in a simple change of guise, despite a November peace deal.

Political parties should not be “permitted to carry out, with impunity, crimes of extortion, abduction and intimidation,” the US ambassador to Kathmandu, James Morarity, said last week.

“This is what the Maoists continue to do, particularly through their YCL,”he said, outlining one reason why Washington continues to class the former rebels as a foreign “terrorist” organisation.

The Americans argue that the YCL is not a band of boy scouts but a front for hardened jungle fighters who should have been confined to United Nations-monitored camps after the peace accord.

Diplomats have also voiced fears that the Maoists, who as a result of the peace deal have gained influential seats in parliament and government, are using the YCL to swing upcoming elections in their favour.

Polls, scheduled for November, will elect leaders tasked with rewriting the constitution -- and therefore deciding on embattled King Gyanendra and his 238-year-old dynasty's future.

The Maoists, who fought to transform Nepal into a communist state, are determined to see the Himalayan kingdom at least be declared a Republic.

“The worry about the YCL is that they will have so much influence over the election that the results won't be accepted, and other political parties will dispute the results,” one Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The YCL leader, himself a former fighter who led one of the first ever Maoist attacks in the west of the country in 1996, admitted there are former soldiers in the YCL.

“We do have some members who have worked as political commissars during the insurgency, but we do not represent the PLA and we are not armed,” Pun told AFP, insisting that they were “committed to carry out activities in a peaceful way.” “It's propaganda of anti-democratic forces, supporters of the King and military rule, who are spreading this negative information about us,” he said.

The YCL is attempting to gain support by constructing roads, organising clean-up campaigns and directing traffic in Nepal's congested capital, but a defiant Pun signalled that the group's vigilante-like actions were likely to continue.

“Only corrupt people, smugglers and those who are against democracy are scared of us,” he said.—AFP