[From The Worker, #5, October 1999.]
NEWS & VIEWS
NATIONAL
'DISAPPEARANCE': A NEW FORM OF GENOCIDE?
'Fake encounter' has been the principal form of genocide resorted to against the revolutionaries by the reactionary state since the initiation of the great People's War [PW]. In the first three and a half years of the PW about one thousand revolutionaries have been martyred, an overwhelming majority of them in the so-called 'encounter'. The encounter killing took a drastic turn for the worse with the launching of the notorious operation kilo-sera-two since end-May, 1998. Mass killing by dozens at a time took place particularly in the advanced red districts of Gorkha, Jajarkot, Rolpa, Kalikot, Rukum, Sindhuli and Kavre. There macabre genocides were carried out most of the times against unarmed cultural activists or peasants, but every time the reactionary butchers sought to cover up their cowardice under the garb of fake encounter.
When this white lie was increasingly exposed by the national and international human rights organisations and activists, the reactionaries of late seem to have invented 'disappearances' from police custodies as the new form of elimination of revolutionaries. Particularly since the beginning of 1999 this mode of repression and terror has been intensified and so far more than fifty prisoners (of them seven women) have 'disappeared'. Prominent among them have been Dandapani Neupane, Deena Nath Gautam, Naveen Guatam, Milan Nepali, Kamala Sharma and others, who were captured by the reactionary police force in broad daylight from the capital city of Kathmandu and subsequently 'disappeared'. Similarly a dozen each have been 'disappeared' from Gorkha and Tanahun districts in the Central Region.
The utter shamelessness of the reactionaries was exposed when the police repeatedly denied having captured any of them in their own 'Supreme Court' in response to a number of petitions filed by the human rights activists or the relatives of the captured detainees. In the case of Rajendra Dhakal, an advocate and Secretary of Bar Association of Gorkha, when the Amnesty International Headquarters in London took up the case with the Prime Minister he is said to have repeatedly lied with the international body. A political hornets nest was touched off recently when the current Prime Minister, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, confided to a delegation of senior citizens including the ex-Prime Minister, Kirti Nidhi Bista, ex-Foreign Minister, Rishikesh Shah, ex-Labour Minister, Padma Ratna Tuladhar, and others, saying 'they are already killed' by the previous regime (of the same Nepali Congress Party in coalition with the neo-reactionary UML clique).
Currently, more than a dozen human rights organisations are spearheading an agitation against the fake encounter killings and 'disappearances' among other human rights issues in the country. A strong resistance movement is warranted against this gross violation of the international (Geneva) convention on the treatment of prisoners of war by the fascist Nepalese state.
THE FARCICAL PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
The fascist and anti-national ruling classes of Nepal staged their five-yearly ritual of 'parliamentary elections' on May 3rd and May 17th (1999) in the most farcical manner. Stung to their death in many areas by the prairie fire of PW in the local elections two years back, the ruling classes were dead scared of PW this time too, and sought to make the PW as their 'principal opposition' throughout their 'elections'. The staging of the elections in two phases for the first time was itself a manifestation of this. For months preceding the 'elections' national and international media were agog with speculations whether the electoral drama would be possible to be staged at all in the light of the ever growing PW. Indeed, during the entire 'election' campaign the Prime Minister and all the major parliamentary Parties openly equated their parliamentary 'elections' with a national 'referendum' for or against the PW and protected it as a 'last chance to save democracy', etc.
The most comical scenes of the farcical drama were enacted when all the competing parliamentary Parties, including the ruling Nepali Congress, the neo-reactionary UML clique and a number of other revisionist groups, were forced to 'campaign collectively' from the same platform under the patronage of the heavily armed police guards in most of the areas affected by the PW. However, in most of the advanced revolutionary zones no traces of 'election' campaigns were to be seen throughout.
Where as there were merely four or ten votes polled on some of the booths, in total only about ten to fifteen percent of the voters were seen to venture out to the polling stations in the advanced revolutionary zones. Nevertheless, the shameless custodians of 'democracy' had the temerity to proclaim to the outside world that 'about 30 to 35 percent of voters had exercised their franchise! Of course, the empty or near empty, ballot boxes were stuffed with fake papers stamped by their own 'security' personnel, or by some of the hapless peasants forcibly dragged from their hutments by the armed police. The farce of the reactionary 'elections' was once more thoroughly exposed amongst the revolutionary masses, who actively supported or responded to the 'election boycott' call issued by the Party.
In the light of the deep national and international conspiracy to draw the Party into decisive armed confrontation with the reactionary state during the 'election' time and the openly visible military mobilisation for the same purpose, the Party logically and very wisely refused to fall in the military trap and instead concentrated on political exposure through mass mobilisation and propaganda actions. This was a big surprise for the reactionaries and their imperialist masters. However, immediately after the 'elections' a spate of high level and brilliant guerrilla actions were carried out starting from Takukot in Gorkha on May 22 and culminating in the highest quality and the most successful guerrilla raid so-far in Jarjarkot at the end of June. This has decisively deflated the false claim of 'stability' by the majority Nepali Congress government formed after the 'elections' and given rise to sharper contradictions within the ruling classes.
THE 'MASAL' GROUP SPLITS AGAIN
After its final expulsion from the RIM and its total isolation from the international revolutionary fraternity, the 'Masal' group has further slid into parliamentary cretinism and is heading towards total extinction beset with internal rebellion and splits. The clique headed by unrepentant revisionist M.B. Singh received a severe jolt when the revolutionary faction headed by Deena Nath Sharma split from the group and announced the formation of a rival 'Masal' group on April 6, 1999. The new 'Masal' immediately called for the boycott of the parliamentary elections and extended support to the ongoing PW. It has also made a detailed critique and exposure of the revisionist line pursued by M. B. Singh and Co. and vowed to work for polarisation of genuine revolutionary forces upholding Marxism-Leninism-Maoism ('Mao thought') in the country.
True to his opportunist character and method, M. B. Singh has now sought to shift the blame for the split to the RIM and the CPN (Maoist), instead of looking into his own degeneration into arch revisionism. M. B. Singh's total plunge into parliamentary cesspool and gradual move towards the camp of neo-reaction is confirmed by his bargaining with the neo-reactionary UML for a few parliamentary seats and his utmost antagonistic postures towards the great PW. This self-styled 'opponent of Trotskyism' has in fact done a great service to Trotsky seeking to play Com. Stalin against comm. [sic] and branding all Maoists, including the RIM and the associated Parties and organisations, as 'Trotskyites'. His recent outbursts against the great contributions of Com. Mao tend to indicate his fast drift towards Hoxhaism, too. Anyway, as in the case with all the revisionists of the world, this is merely a last flicker before the final extinction.