THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Editorial 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 be...

1974 AD A band named 1974 A.D might stump you the first time you hear about them, as they stumped me. But only for a moment. Nirakar, one of the founding members of Nepal’s most cutting edge band, has an explanation: 1974 was the benchmark before really good Seventies acoustic music started giving way to electronic mixes. Calling from Houston, Texas, where his band just finished a performance, he explains: 'We are all very influenced by 70s music, both Western and Nepali. There were a lot of guitar driven bands in the West, and Nepali musicians were also doing great acoustic music in the seventies as well.' Before it all abruptly stopped. Synthesizers started to take over in the mid-Seventies and Eighties, and electronic beats become the order of the day. Acoustics was relegated to the attic as a remnant of the past. And yet for this band of eight musicians, playing everything from bass, guitar, percussions, flutes and even a trumpet, acoustics is more than history - it is what...

Bonded to Labor The Contemporary Situation in Nepal By Sushma Joshi This piece originally appeared in Samar 16 Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is the least known form of slavery that exists today, yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people. At least 20 million people throughout the world are bonded laborers: whole families of agricultural laborers in India; Togolese girls sold as maids in Gabon; eastern European women tricked into prostitution in western Europe. A complete mixture of people who have one thing in common: a debt they are forced to repay with their labor. On January 13, 2000 the Nepali government, through the Local Self-Governance Act, established a minimum wage for agricultural laborers -- Rs. 74, or just over US$1 per 8-hour workday. On May 1, also International Labor Day, 19 Kamaiya (bonded labor) families filed a petition against their master, ex-minister Shiva Raj Pant, demanding minimum wages in compliance with the new regulation. Shiva Raj Pant paid h...