Nepal is a largely mountainous--and rural--country wedged between regional superpowers China and India.
Nepal is a largely mountainous--and rural--country wedged between regional superpowers China and India. © New Internationalist
Nepal's Maoists have announced a 20-day blockade of the country's urban centers beginning Tuesday. They say it is part of a new, more intensive phase of their long-standing struggle to overthrow the country's monarchy and return political power to the Nepali people.

If successful, it could prove a pivotal moment for the ten-year-old rebellion that, until recently, has been waged largely in the country's rural areas and has undergone a significant evolution over the past year.

Thirteen months ago on February 1, Nepal's King Gyanendra fired his appointed prime minister and placed himself
King Gyanendra
King Gyanendra © Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep
back in control of the country. His reasoning: the country's political parties had failed to take meaningful action to quell the long-standing insurgency led by ideologues promoting what they say are communist governing principles updated to account for 21st Century realities.

Gyanendra unilaterally declared a state of emergency, which he lifted three months later, but according to a report from Inter Press Service's Kathmandu reporter Marty Logan, the king and a handpicked council of ministers have since governed by decree, tightening laws over the media, non-governmental organizations, and labor unions. (For field updates from the Collective Campaign for Peace, the International Nepal Solidarity Network, and others, see the Advocacy Project's Web site.)
Krishna Pahadi, the founding chairman of Nepal's Human Rights and Peace Society, was arrested at the organization’s office in Kathmandu on February 9, 2005.
Krishna Pahadi, the founding chairman of Nepal's Human Rights and Peace Society, was arrested at the organization’s office in Kathmandu on February 9, 2005. © Amnesty International USA
King Gyanendra claimed at the time of his takeover that his heavy-handed actions were necessary to restore order and begin to move the country toward peace and development. He promised to put the apparatuses of government back under the control of the people within three years, but has done little in the ensuing period to garner the confidence of his subjects or the international community.

India, Britain, and the United States have suspended military aid to the country, and even traditionally silent-backers of the monarch, China and Japan, have voiced their growing impatience with the situation. Within the country, coalitions of varying sizes representing civil society, students, and the press have regularly agitated against the monarch's absolute control.
Nepalese children.
Nepalese children. © Refugees International
The king's Maoist adversaries, in the meantime, have been moving their cause forward through a series of deft political maneuvers and shown a willingness to shift their struggle--at least to some extent--from the military to the political battlefield. In September they announced: "With a deep sense of responsibility towards the democratic political way out and aspiration of peace of the Nepalese people and with an aim of doing away with doubts remaining in some circles about our movement, our party declares a unilateral ceasefire for three months." (For an overview of the ceasefire's affects on Nepal's population, see the report from the country's human rights Web site, INSEC.)

During that time of relative calm, the Maoists brokered a deal with the country's seven main political parties, who had been completely marginalized by the king's power-grab. The deal centered around a 12-point pact that, if enacted, would lead to elections for a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution for Nepal's young democracy and finally, multi-party parliamentary elections would be held--the country's first since 1999.
Dinesh Prasain, Coordinator of Nepal's civil society network Collective Campaign for Peace.
Dinesh Prasain, Coordinator of Nepal's civil society network Collective Campaign for Peace. © Advocacy Project
Shortly after the pact was announced, the Maoists extended the unilateral ceasefire for a fourth month into early January, ostensibly to "provide a new momentum to the process of finding a political way out through constituent assembly." The king has largely ignored the peace pact and pushed his own plan for municipal and parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2007--the first of which were generally branded a failure when most Nepalis stayed away from the polls last month.

But with the end of the ceasefire, the bloodletting began again, including a series of attacks in and around Nepal's capital orchestrated by an apparently emboldened insurgency.

In an extremely rare move, the top Maoist leader, best known by his nom-de-guerre of Prachanda ("The Fierce One"), gave an interview to the BBC in mid-February. The man who, until then, had only been recognizable through a single photograph, taken in rural Nepal in 2001, expounded on his movement's ideals, which he said had evolved significantly from the authoritarian brands of communism practiced throughout the 20th Century.

"Our opponents have understood us in a dogmatic way. We are not dogmatic," he said. "They are looking at us with 20th Century glasses. But we are already
"We are not dogmatic"
moving into the 21st Century. [We are looking at] the kind of state that is possible in the 21st Century, how to give people the maximum possible rights; how to organize competition; and how to guarantee that this competition does not lead to oppression and suppression. In short, democracy and dictatorship....How to make use of this conflict between them--we are developing on this."

He expanded on the roots of his democratic rhetoric: "People think that our commitment to the multi-party competition is purely a tactic and that we are trying to cheat someone. But in reality we have taken the experience of an entire century, discussed it, analyzed it in our party, and we've come to a conclusion that the development of democracy is necessary in the 21st Century. That's why we take multi-party competition very seriously....we want to move to a new plane in terms of leadership--where one person doesn't remain the party leader or the head of state....Those who see us with 20th
"We've come to a conclusion that the development of democracy is necessary in the 21st Century. That's why we take multi-party competition very seriously"
Century eyes would not understand us because we are talking about democracy."

If the Maoist leader can be taken at his word, then the man who has commanded a ten-year bloody insurgency that has drawn child soldiers into its ranks and cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, seems to be doing it all in hopes of generating a representative multi-party democracy that expresses the will of the country's people, regardless of what that will turns out to be--as long, he says, as the authoritarian monarchy is abolished. The parallels to the anti-monarchy ideals that launched the United States' war for independence some 230 years ago, as well as to the pro-democracy and anti-totalitarianism rhetoric of the current U.S. president George W. Bush, are hard to miss.

Throughout the interview, the Maoist leader impressed that his group's primary goal is to return power to the country's people--and to do so through political channels as well as military ones, and with as little loss of life as possible.

But can the Maoists be taken at their word? According to Charles Haviland, the BBC journalist who conducted the interview, Nepalis have been killed by the Maoists for allegedly supporting the king's army, even though the Maoists know full well that regular civilians have no choice but to help soldiers on either side of the conflict when it is demanded of them.

After a Maoist bomb killed 40 civilians and just a few soldiers on a bus last June, Prachanda said he was "sad and hurt" by the incident, but the UN office in Nepal says it never got evidence that he punished the perpetrators of the act--or others like it.

Amnesty International has condemned atrocities on both sides of the conflict.

"Sometimes you seem to say one thing and do another," Haviland charged during the interview. "For instance, you told the UN that you would not attack candidates from [February's] municipal elections, but you did. Two of them got killed. How can people believe you?"

It seems a fair--and open--question.
A Nepalese woman leads her child past Kathmandu's riot police.
A Nepalese woman leads her child past Kathmandu's riot police. © Amnesty International USA
So where does Nepal go from here? Whose vision for the country will most improve life for the country's 27 million people, the vast majority of whom are farmers living below the international poverty line and unconnected with any of the competing ideologues who, in many ways, hold their futures in their hands?

And will the voices of Nepal's average citizens be heard as the country's new political system emerges in the coming months and years?

Indeed, a recent Inter Press Service article portrays a Nepalese society largely frustrated and embittered by years of corruption on all sides of the political spectrum.

"Today, the people on the street are warning the political parties: 'No more leaders like in the past'...They're saying, 'what did we get from democracy? Nothing,'" explains a member of one of Nepal's former ruling parties, referring to a period in the 1990s when Nepalis last took to the streets to force their monarch to drastically curtail his powers.
"I still have energy for democracy [but] I'm not as blind as in that time"
"It is universally acknowledged...that the political parties that governed, squabbled, and in many cases splintered after 1990 were corrupt and did little to entrench democracy in what should have been fertile soil," the article goes on. "I still have energy for democracy,'' explains an activist who seems to have gained a large measure of skepticism since the 1990s, adding, ''I'm not as blind as in that time."
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For a broader look at Nepal's health, economic, political, and environmental situation, check out OneWorld's country guide, written by Kathmandu-based development professional Pradipna Raj Panta.