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Showing posts from July, 2002

Editorial: War in Nepal

War in Nepal By Sushma Joshi This piece originally appeared in Samar 15: Summer/Fall, 2002 Nepal, since the start of the People's War in 1996, has seen an unprecedented deterioration of human rights in the civil conflict between the Maoists and the Army. King Birendra's "Zone of Peace" sobriquet for Nepal, while fanciful, had reflected the relative peace it enjoyed within its borders just a short decade ago in comparison to the communal, ethnic and national strife of its neighbours. This image, however, has quickly been washed away in the flood of arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances, execution style killings and bodily mutilation practiced by both the Maoists and the Army as they fight a bloody civil war -- the Maoists for a idealistic one party state modeled on communist China, and the Army for a restoration of order and stability in a nation already wracked by economic recession, political corruption and massive poverty. The worst backlash has been to the