Youth Ensnared in Nepal's War With Maoists
By DAVID ROHDE
Published: December 9, 2004
OKHARI CHAURI, Nepal - On a frigid night last February, Nepalese soldiers rousted 17-year-old Reena Rasaili from the warm bed where she lay curled beside her Aunt Devi and accused her of being a Maoist guerrilla.
They smashed her feet with rifle butts and dragged her out behind the house, past a lemon tree and the stone watering bowl used by the family ducks. There, they tied her to a tree, stripped off most of her clothes and shot her in the head, her family recounted in interviews.
"If they shot her from the front, how scared would my daughter have been?" her father still wonders aloud.
Family members say Reena had relatives tied to the Maoists but denied that she was in the movement herself. The incident in this otherwise pastoral village in eastern Nepal is just one in a country where, families say, they are increasingly caught in the middle of an eight-year civil war that, after claiming 10,600 lives, is now devouring Nepal's children.
Human rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of children younger than 18 have been abducted - many in the last year - and forced to attend indoctrination camps, or have been sent into exile by frightened parents.
Reena Rasaili's killing was apparently the work of government soldiers. But elsewhere, to the west, parents rise each morning dreading to find a shoe hanging outside their home, a symbol that the guerrillas demand a young recruit.
The forced recruitment drive by Maoist leaders, who successfully blockaded the capital, Katmandu, for a week in August, is part of a "strategic offensive" they announced on Sept. 1. They say it is the final phase of their struggle.
To safeguard their children, parents are sending growing numbers to monasteries in neighboring India. Some 17,000 children migrated to India between June and October, according to a recent study by the aid group Save the Children. Few appear to be returning; most are from hill areas where the conflict, forced Maoist recruitment and food shortages are intensifying.
Maoist officials strongly deny that they press children to be soldiers. But so far this year, human rights groups say, Maoist forces have abducted at least 8,000 children, often from schools, and forced them to attend one- to three-day "democratic people's education" camps.
The London-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says some children are made to work for the Maoists as porters and political workers. The coalition also says there are reports that the Nepalese Army uses children as spies and messengers, something Nepalese military officials deny.
A recent infusion of $22 million in military assistance from the United States has helped double the Royal Nepalese Army, from roughly 45,000 soldiers to 78,000, leading to a shortage of some 1,000 trained officers and subsequent disciplinary problems, Nepalese military officials say.
They say they are working to curb abuses, but the number of disappearances is climbing, with roughly 700 reported in 2003 and 800 this year, according to the government's National Human Rights Commission. About 75 percent of the disappearances are attributed to the army.
On the night soldiers killed Karna Rasaili's daughter, they also executed an 18-year-old woman working as a Maoist political organizer, according to villagers and human rights groups. Several days later soldiers abducted Reena's cousin, Maina, a 16-year-old girl from another village, who is still missing.
The strength of the Maoists is evident at every turn in the village where Reena died. Maoist patrols, small groups of young men and women dressed in civilian clothes, march up and down the area's lone dirt road. A red banner hung across the road in one village welcomes visitors to Maoist-controlled territory. A second urges people to "take the revolution to a new height."
After democracy was introduced in 1990 and quickly devolved into bitter political infighting, a Maoist political party took up arms in 1996. At first the insurgency was not taken seriously. But it grew by storming isolated police stations, seizing abandoned weapons and extorting "contributions" from villages and business people.
Today Maoist attacks have forced the government to withdraw police from roughly two-thirds of the country, leaving hundreds of square miles of no man's land where Maoist and army patrols are free to prey on isolated villagers.
Conditions in Reena's village illustrate why the movement continues to draw strength. Only 40 miles from the capital, about 5,000 villagers endure a serf's existence. The nearest paved road, electricity and hospital are a three-hour, bone-jarring ride down an old dirt track. Most land is owned by upper-caste Brahmins. Natural springs are the only source of water. The vast majority of women give birth in their homes, some sacrificing their lives in the effort. There are no cars, no televisions and no flush toilets for dozens of miles.
Since Maoists drove the police out four years ago, there has been virtually no government presence. But villagers also say little has changed since the Maoist insurgency began.
For centuries, the elite in Katmandu has done virtually nothing to develop Nepal's countryside. Villagers and Western diplomats agree that this remains essentially true.
"This place was never a nation state up until the 1950's," James F. Moriarty, the new American ambassador to Nepal, said in an interview in Katmandu. "It was a bunch of subjects of the Nepali king."
He said that Nepal was working to curb the human rights abuses by its forces and that the military aid from the United States, India and other countries had prevented the Maoists from seizing control of the country.
"I think the outside world ignores this at their peril," he said. "There is a real possibility that there will be a Maoist government here."
That possibility is amply displayed in the high-altitude garrison town of Simikot, perched in a barren mountain valley in the far northwest. In Simikot, and in most of Nepal's 75 districts, army soldiers control small headquarters towns and move out of them only in heavily guarded convoys or by helicopter. All food, fuel and supplies are airlifted into Simikot, a town of 3,500 people that is surrounded by miles of territory controlled by neither the army nor the Maoists. The nearest asphalt road is 70 miles away.
Today, the modern world has intruded in the form of the Maoists. During a visit in mid-November, a local government official said the town was on high alert after receiving reports that Maoists had massed several thousand villagers for a political meeting. They feared that the Maoists could be gathering for a "human wave" attack on the district headquarters, a tactic they have not employed since 2002.
"There are not many killings," said the government official, who appeared visibly frightened as he sat in a bunker-like office ringed by concertina wire and poorly equipped policemen. "But mental torture, there is a lot of mental torture."
A handful of parents from nearby villages that lie outside government control said they had moved to Simikot to save their children from forced Maoist recruitment. All asked not to be identified out of fear of Maoist retaliation.
Maoists often block villagers from entering Simikot, and give those who do "visas" that demand they return within a fixed number of days. One woman said her 19-year-old son was one of eight or nine young men forcibly recruited by the Maoists on Nov. 16 from a nearby village. She said the youngest of those abducted were 13 or 14 years old.
There was little the government forces cloistered here could do. Through an intermediary, the villagers contacted a local shaman and asked him to pray to jhebdak, a god known as a "protector deity."
"The ceremony took place," she said. "The god, the shaman said, promised to protect our children."
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