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Add an EventNepal's Parliamentary Parties Back Maoist Demand for Constituent Assembly
The Maoists immediately launched a non-violent "siege" of Katmandu, called a bandh, that stopped all traffic throughout most of the country without even blockading the roads. The wildcard in Nepal's civil war has been the marginalized parliamentary parties centered in the capital city. Up until today, they have respected the legitimacy of the monarchy and refused to recognize facts on the ground, including the censorship of their press, and the killing and jailing of their leaders by the isolated monarchy.
The Congress Party, UML and the other main "legal" parties have declared in a New Delhi meeting that "This will be our last fight with the king. There will be no more compromise." The parliamentary parties were banned during the coup, and with no where left to turn have accepted the Community Party of Nepal's main demand, the convening of a constituent assembly to decide the fate of the Hindu monarchy.
The People's War in Nepal is surging from one success to another. Since "King" Gyanendra's Feb. 1 decree of emergency rule, any claim to being the sovereign of the Nepalese people has been shown for the fantasy it is. The Maoists immediately launched a non-violent "siege" of Katmandu, called a bandh, that stopped all traffic throughout most of the country without even blockading the roads. Western "human rights" groups made outrageous accusations of Maoists "threatening" to cut off people's hands, while failing to report that nobody's hands were actually cut off. Amnesty International sent a high-profile delegation to meet with the king and victims of the army's rapes and abuse, but couldn't bring themselves to meet with the rebels, or to present their story. Reports in the capitalist and communist press agree that the Maoists have galvanized the lower classes, particularly the desperately poor peasants, into a cohesive fighting force that cannot be defeated by the monarchy.
The wildcard in Nepal's civil war has been the marginalized parliamentary parties centered in the capital city. Up until today, they have respected the legitimacy of the monarchy and refused to recognize facts on the ground, including the censorship of their press, and the killing and jailing of their leaders by the isolated monarchy. U.S. ambassador James Moriarty told the BBC that failure to bring the "mainstream" parties back into alliance with the monarchy could result in victory for the Maoist rebels. He mean that would be a bad thing, unlike having a king.
The Congress Party, UML and the other main "legal" parties have declared in a New Delhi meeting that "This will be our last fight with the king. There will be no more compromise." The parliamentary parties were banned during the coup, and with no where left to turn have accepted the Community Party of Nepal's main demand, the convening of a constituent assembly to decide the fate of the Hindu monarchy. The days of the monarchy grow shorter by the minute. How these parties respond to the fight for communism remains to be seen, but if democratic respectability is their measure -- then the way points towards at least neutrality towards the People's War.
Meanwhile, the non-Maoist American and Western European left continue to ignore the People's War in Nepal and the atrocities the monarchy, and it's backers in the US/UK and India, inflicts on the population. Considering how much political capital social democrats, liberals and anti-authoritarians have invested in the "death of communism," it's hardly surprising. Another world is possible, they say while ignoring it's birth in the mountains of Asia.
Li Onesto, a journalist with the Chicago-based Revolutionary Worker, trekked into the heights of the Himalayas to meet with the rebels in their base areas, mass organizations and scored a unique interview with the CPN's leader Prachanda. Her recent book Dispatches From the People's War in Nepal is a necessary read on the early growth of the communist movement. Her portraits of common people in struggle and their inspiring belief that they can remake the world against centuries of oppression is a tonic to the lowered expectations and defeatism afflicting much of the post-everything left.
For those interested in how the liberal party line is being articulated, and what much of the anti-radical left will undoubtedly start parroting once they can no longer ignore the insurgency, check out this cut-and-paste job from Human Rights Watch. It deploys the standard line that the people are caught between the King and the Maoists. They've said the exact same thing about every insurgency since the 1980s when this meme was deployed with stunning effectiveness against the guerillas of the Communist Party of Peru/Shining Path. They just switch the party names and local color and call it an analysis. At least now they openly admit that their goal is not simply "democracy," but a "strong civil society and a vibrant middle class." Tell that to the peasants who've had enough of those lies.
just like the sendero luminoso used to execute queers and whores in peru, i'm sure that the 'people's war' in nepal would result in the wonderful freedoms that china has enjoyed since 1949.
Did I hear Lead Breakfast?
As for the Shining Path, they never executed any civilians. Many of the rural population lived better under them then in the government controlled areas. There were many incidents where the US would train right-wing reactionary paramilitary forces to commit atrocities so later they could put the blame on the Maoists. You people need to start using your brains for a change instead of going by what the bourgeoisie want you all to believe.
For the peanut gallery, good luck purging me buddy boy. I included a phone number and contact information, so knock yourself out.
It figures that you have little to say about the content of the article, or my inclusion of a wide range of opinion and sources.
Regarding the RCP's once-upon-a-time homophobia: No shit, old news and I think they went through some good old-fashioned "criticism/self-criticism" when they jettisoned their backwards position. I criticized them for years, as did quite a few other people of principle, including many of their own members -- of which I am not among their number.
Here's their self-criticism:
http://rwor.org/margorp/homosexuality.htm
And here's an article from the anthropologist Ardea Skybreak about their methods of figuring out what they believe:
http://rwor.org/a/v23/1140-1147/1144/skybreak.htm
If you can bother to read before you run your yap, you might find it's a little better than anonymously shit-talking people on the internet.
Please, get real. They've murdered thousands of civilians.
Li Onesto claims to be the only foreign journalist who has travelled behind the battle lines established by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
She is nothing of the sort. Li Onesto is not a journalist, nor is she the first on the patch.
A starry-eyed American Maoist scribbling for a propaganda sheet based in Chicago, during her three month trek through Nepal in 1999 Onesto was given the kind of treatment that fellow-travellers and Stalin-worshippers used to receive in the Soviet Union seventy years ago.
She is the banqueted, flower-bedecked and credulous foreign guest of honour at the five hour ideological variety shows which are compulsory for villagers in the Maoist zones. Unlike Onesto, the peasant audiences understand only too well that failure to attend would be considered counter-revolutionary. A blood-stained red carpet was rolled out on the mountainside to welcome and impress her. It wasn’t necessary. She has neither the brains nor the inclination to see the evidence of Maoist coercion which is right under her nose.
Instead she transcribes Prachanda-approved accounts of abuse by the police and landlords, and celebrates, uncritically, the heroic retaliation of the Armed People. It is beyond dispute that the Nepalese Police have raped, tortured and murdered civilians. Many of the brutal incidents reported to Onesto are likely to be true. But she fails to put the right questions to the hand-picked villagers she meets. What would happen if they didn’t feed the guerrillas? Or if they objected to the conscription of their children? Remote peasant villages have been coerced, as is usual in these situations, into supporting the guerrillas with food and accommodation. Onesto lacks the honesty and peripheral vision which might have picked up evidence of this. Reports that the guerrillas have abducted children to fight need to be checked out, not tersely dismissed as disinformation.
The party leadership is willing to ditch its economic programme in exchange for an end to the monarchy and a constitutional convention. Will that satisfy villagers who have taken up arms or lost members of their families? Nepal’s ethnic minorities have been mobilised by promises of self-rule which the Maoists clearly don’t intend to honour. What do the minorities think about that? Onesto meets people who admit that members of other left wing parties have been killed. She accepts the necessary murder without misgivings.
Distrustful of fact, analysis and dissent, Onesto pursues the fantasy of an international Maoist renaissance. “I was excited and heartened to see Maoist guerrillas reading the works of Bob Avakian,” she reports. Chairman Avakian is the inconsequential Helmsman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA, a diminutive Maoist groupuscule with, I believe, no direct experience of hand to hand fighting against the shock troops of an absolutist Hindu divine monarch. Onesto’s declaration that Prachanda’s insurgents are “raising once again the question of the relevance of communist revolution to today’s turbulent world” is both inaccurate and absurd.
Onesto is far from the first to go behind the lines. Many authentic journalists have taken the risk and returned to tell a less dogmatic tale, including the BBC’s Daniel Lak, Australia’s Mark Corcoran, Patrick Symes of Outside magazine (who met some of Onesto’s contacts and saw them in a very different light) and Peter Popham of the Independent on Sunday.
Perhaps more surprisingly, a number of academics have also been behind the lines, and some of them are contributors to Michael Hutt’s highly informative collection of essays, Himalayan People’s War. Although there is clearly some sympathy for the Maoist insurrection among these commentators, there are no dizzy-headed disciples like Onesto. Instead there is an understanding that the peasants are caught between the hammer of the Maoists and the anvil of the army, and that the insurrection has a powerful ethnic dynamic, drawing as it does on the aspiration for autonomy of the Magar minority.
Rural life has certainly changed under the Maoists. Party-led Peoples Courts have replaced landowner-dispensed injustice. The rate of interest charged by moneylenders has been capped. The cost and content of education has been transformed. But as Hutt sensibly observes, “It really was a case of two regimes, in which villagers had to choose between support, acquiescence, opposition, or flight – and none supported the government as wholeheartedly as some supported the Maoists.”
Li Onesto has written a tawdry and hugely disappointing book, which attempts to revive and combine dictator adulation and revolutionary tourism, two of the shabbiest genres in socialist literature. By contrast, Hutt’s collection deals with the issues that any real journalist would have investigated, given her opportunities.
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