ICYMI
Yesterday in the Terai, the hot flat populous area of Nepal that borders India, seven policemen along with the infant son of their leader, were killed during a demonstration.
Some details about the incident:
Seven police killed, about 60 more treated at nearby district hospital. Not clear as to total number of police present but it seems a hundred or more.
Estimated crowd size: 4,000 people. Vastly outnumbering the law enforcement. For months, peaceful demonstrations in the form of parades, have been happening in the Terai. There are videos that give you an idea of the numbers.
Location: Kailili in western Terai.
Purpose of demonstration: to go to government buildings and replace all signs that said 'Nepal' with new signs that said 'Tharuhat independent zone' (as had been done peacefully by activists in Karnali zone also in western Nepal).
Law enforcement present included police (lightly armed with lathis, i.e., sticks. These are riot police.) and Armed Police Force (armed).
This is a looooong diary, but I hope it gives you some background for future events. Step over the orange barricade, below the fold, into the territory now held by the "Maideshi' - the people of the Terai.
Tear gas was used. Photos of the wounded police at the hospital showed them lying on the floor of a reception area on top of blue tarps; this would only have been done if the hospital was expecting to treat numbers of tear gas victims.
People in the crowd were carrying 'homemade weapons' - axes, kukri knives, sticks, etc.
A faction of Maoists that boycotted the elections, is blamed for sending their 'cadre' to initiate the killing. It seems to me that each guy that was dragged off got an old-fashioned 'thrashing' by a group. In other words, seven simultaneous thrashings, resulting in death. It was reported, though, that the two-yewar-old boy was shot in the head.
Eyewitness reports said that the District SSP ( who was killed) was negotiating with the demonstrators when somebody lunged at him with a spear to begin things. Just prior to that, The District SSP had asked the Armed Police Force not to fire on the crowd. In other words, he was doing exactly what the senior police guy is expected to do - de-escalating. (it didn't work. The other side was too volatile.)
The Nepal Army has now been dispatched to the region. They will be dramatically outnumbered but they will have the advantage of weaponry.
It should be noted that many other locations in Terai have also hosted demonstrations, and that yes, police have used live ammo, killing poeple, in other locations.
The UN High Commission on Refugees has included a paragraph about Nepalin it's daily Briefing August 25th.
2) Nepal
We are concerned by reports from Nepal of continuing political violence. Seven members of the security forces and three protestors were reportedly killed yesterday. The two year-old son of one deceased police officer was also killed. This is in addition to the deaths of five protestors during widespread demonstrations since an 8 August agreement by political parties on redrawing internal state boundaries. The agreement was the product of extended negotiations to draw up a new constitution further to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the ten-year internal conflict in 2006. Since the political agreement was reached, increasingly violent protests and strikes against the proposed delineation have taken place throughout the country.
There is a clear risk that the protests and violence will continue to feed off each other in the coming days unless all sides change their approach. The rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly are essential elements in the promotion of democracy and human rights. Likewise, protests should be carried out in a peaceful manner. We urge the Government of Nepal to create a climate where minority or dissenting views or beliefs are respected, and security forces only employ force as a last resort and in full accordance with the standards laid out under international law for maintaining public order, including detailed guidelines governing the use of live ammunition.* Moreover, protestors should not pursue violent confrontations with the security services.
We urge political leaders and protestors to sit down together to find a peaceful solution to the current situation before the rising violence spirals out of control.
We fully support the call of the Nepal National Human Rights Commission for an independent, thorough and impartial investigation into all deaths and injuries resulting from the alleged use of disproportionate force by security personnel, as well as into the deaths of the seven security personnel killed on Monday.
The conduct of law enforcement officials is addressed by a number of specific international standards and codes, including the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, and the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials.
- See more at: http://www.ohchr.org/...
Escalate?
There are many calls for the Government of Nepal not to escalate. (I am among those who think there is no military solution. Peace can not be 'imposed'). Some leaders of Terai factions have refused to rule out future demonstrations. Many people now say that fast-tracking the new constitution is a mistake and the process needs to be much more inclusive (see below).
India involvement?
It was reported that the Indian Prime Minister phone the Nepal PM and said a) negotiate; b) five or ten men in a room in Kathmandu can't impose a constitution on thirty million people; and c) India resents being dragged in to an internal affair of Nepal (the home minister has insinuated that provocateurs had crossed the border in to Nepal and created this). Here is a report of the India PM.
The Nepal PM denied that this conversation had taken place; his activists on social media have lashed out at the India-based Nepali journalist who reported the story; and the reporter is sticking with it despite threats.
The Terai?
To explain this to a non-Nepali audience requires some history and a geography lesson. Manjushree Thapa is a journalist and author now based in Toronto who advised today that the following piece from 1953 is still relevant in these times. It goes hand in hand with an editorial yesterday from Tsering Dolker Gurung, a Kathmandu-based journalist, titled Disconnect and Discontent, describing the current attitude of Kathmandu residents toward the Terai (hint: it's a mystery to most of them. People from Kathmandu don't think about Terai much).
For me?
I'm in USA at present, after having just spent the 2014-2015 school year in South Asia ( mostly Nepal). I started teaching there in 2007. I work for a small NGO that teaches critical care skills to nurses and docs. I'm based in Kathmandu but I spent about five months total in the Terai. You can browse my blog at www.joeniemczura.wordpress.com
No, I haven't climbed Mount Everest.
No, I don't hang around with a lot other westerners when I am there. The Terai is essentially, the part of Nepal where tourists don't go. About fifteen million people live there.
Whether it's in or out of Kathmandu, my work involves seeing the ugly side of life. Like any nurse that works in an ER or ICU in USA for that matter. We get to see the victims of crime, the victims of domestic abuse, people in car accidents, drunk people - the whole nine yards. So - that's my frame of reference. If you need more detailed descriptions of the kind of patients that walk through the ER door in Nepal, buy one or both of my books.
One vignette of how the police operate in Nepal.
Below is an event that informs a lot of my thinking. It was a pain in the ass at the time. I realized later how much I learned. It's longwinded but it tells a lot, I think.
In summer 2014 I'd been teaching in Bharatpur and I needed to go to Biratnagar to teach sixty students there for a week or so. I was ready to take a long-distance 'local' bus to Biratnager, Jewel of the eastern Terai. :-). My friends asked around and found a doc who would be driving to Itahari that day ( most of the way) instead, so I got in the back seat.
It wasn't til I got there that I learned Biratnagar was having a Hepatitis E epidemic, but that is the subject of another light-hearted blog. ('we were afraid if we told you, you might not come.')
I was dozing as we went through a small city (name withheld). I was awakened by a thump and the car screeching to a halt. I saw nothing, but the driver soon told me we'd been following another car closely. The other car swerved to avoid hitting an old lady crossing the highway with a bundle on her head but my driver was not able to do so.
Immediately there was shouting and hundreds of people gathered. Uh-oh. I'd heard that if a pedestrian is killed, the driver gets thrashed immediately. Fortunately the old lady got to her feet ( we hadn't been going too fast) but she was scuffed up and crying. (I think it would have been very ugly for my driver if she'd been killed).
Next thing I know, she's in the back seat next to me along with another guy from the town and we're headed to a hospital 10 km away. I thought 'okay, what assessments do I make?' and checked her mental status and pulse and looked at her scrapes and injured areas.
We got her into a hospital bed and I took her B/P using their equipment while the driver (who was an MD and a Brahmin) went to find the doctor of the place.
After awhile we needed to go to the Police Office. I was instructed to sit in the open lobby (covered by an awning) while the Police Captain and the driver went to look for her son. They offered me a Coke. Later I realized that because I was a videshi (foreigner) the twenty-odd other persons who might have also enjoyed shade were told to wait elsewhere ( in the sun). I was there for four hours or so.
The son was found, he and the driver and the Police Captain stood in the lobby and negotiated what would happen next (the driver would pay all costs including leaving a large deposit right there to pay for hospital expenses.) what struck me at the time was the role of the senior police guy as being a negotiator, judge and enforcer all rolled up in one. Also, the son and the police guy seemed clearly deferential to the driver on what seemed to be the basis of him being Brahmin. (lighter skinned than the other two).
Now, while I was waiting, something else happened that's noteworthy. As in other locations, the police owned a sort of pickup truck to transport personnel. Some kind of message came in, somebody went and got the truck, and about a dozen or so police guys now grabbed rifles and went tear-assing off somewhere.
They returned ninety minutes later. I asked what happened and they told 'two groups of villagers were having a dispute and we needed to separate them and calm them down.'
It left me wondering how often this happened - their response seemed kind of routine. Justice and peacekeeping in the Terai has a sort of Wild West quality to it.....
I think that the hallmark of justice in the Terai involves reliance on the local police captain and his skills; display of force; and the use of thrashing as a means of getting revenge unless the cops intervene. So - SSP Neupane who was killed In Kailali was doing something that is emphatically part of the expectation - using his authority to get between the parties before there was trouble. He himself was unarmed, as was the police in-charge I saw that day in 2014. Most of the time it works.
At police posts in Kathmandu you often see one patrolman with a rifle ( they still use Lee-Enfield rifles, the model first pioneered by the Brits during the Boer War) but I don't think the average Kathmandu resident actually has much of any idea as do what the police do when they are in action.
The Terai is not the only 'Wild West' in Nepal.
That is not to say that everything is peaceful in Kathmandu. As I said above, I work with docs and nurses in ERs and ICUs. I mainly teach skills such as ecg, airway management, CPR, and the like. But there is a pervasive problem in Nepal regarding family expectations of health care. It boils down to the idea that if the doctor can't save your relative somehow, it's okay to physically punish the doctor and 'thrash' them. In response to that issue, we always discuss <a href="https://joeniemczura.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/campaign-to-teach-situational-awareness-to-mbbs-docs-in-nepal-jul-21-2015/">'situational awareness' and 'de-escalation.' It's always been part of the training, since 2011. Seventy sessions. More than two thousand nurses and doctors.
In this topic, we role-play and class members take the role of the doctor, the victim, the family, the security guards - the whole cast of characters. Then we debrief. In the debriefing , the participants in the class always seem to share stories of times when the situation escalated and their lives were in danger. I guess the point of telling you this is, there is always an undercurrent of violence in Nepal that belies the PR image of the Land of Buddha. This became a major theme of my second book. One reviewer wrote that it 'wasn't the Nepal he knew' - I ignored that comment on Amazon but I laughed - it was clear he didn't get ourt much! He was seeing only the Nepal the tour operators wanted him to see. (which is not a bad thing. I wish that I too only saw the beautiful parts all the time). There is one hospital in Terai where they reported to me that threatening behavior happened *four times a day year round. At another manjor hospital in Terai, they post seven security guards at a time in the ER, round the clock, and - they need them. Visible presence of uniformed guards serves to keep the peace. And yes, urban hospitals in USA are also often in a state of semi-permanent lockdown....
I know that many other health personnel visit Nepal to volunteer and they don't have this same experience as me. Having said all the above, my Nepali hosts are wonderful to me and people ate fun to be around. Tourists who come here are not under threat - this is carefully kept Nepali-to-Nepali. Even during the eleven year civil war, not one tourist was ever targeted by the various combatants.
Summary
The constitution-writing process in Nepal has been criticized for other things beside drawing the province boundaries under federalism. For example, deeply regressive regarding the rights of women; unequal allocation of seats in Parliament; whether to make Nepal an official Hindu country. None of those have caused blood in the streets yet.
This is long enough for one post. I'll keep writing these as news develops. I am amazed by how much is coming in over Twitter. Stay tuned!