Untold Miseries
The miseries of internally displaced persons are yet to be addressed despite the cessation of violence
By SANJAYA DHAKAL
Last week, the Maoist cadres kept a team of political leaders and human rights activists in captivity for four hours in Sukadeva of Hekuli VDC of Dang district.
The 25-member team including leaders of Nepali Congress (NC), People’s Front (PF), Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), human rights activists and journalists had gone to the area to probe allegations that Maoist cadres had looted food grains and wood from the houses of district-level Congress leaders Lokmani Giri and Devendra Giri. However, the team was stopped by local Maoist leaders including Jehendar, Bikas and Padam. The team found that in the past few days, the Maoists have felled wooden logs worth Rs 2 million from the orchard belonging to Dipak Giri, Shambhu Giri and Devendra Giri – all three of whom are currently displaced due to Maoist threat.
These displaced persons have not yet returned to their native because of continued fear of intimidation and physical attack.
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A hut in eastern Nepal village : Where are the owners?
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There are thousands of other people who are still not able to return to their place of choice despite peace agreements.
Two of the provisions in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed on November 21 between the government and the Maoists are directly linked with the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
The first provision expressed the commitment of both sides “to allow without any political prejudice the people displaced due to the armed conflict to return back voluntarily to their respective ancestral or former residence, reconstruct the infrastructure destroyed during the conflict and rehabilitate and socialize the displaced people into the society.” Likewise, another provision expresses their commitment “to respect and protect the individual’s freedom to move freely and right to choose a place to reside within the legal periphery and also expresses commitment to respect the right of the people who have been displaced to return home or to live in any other place they choose.”
Three weeks have already passed since the signing of the CPA and yet the plights of the IDPs remain unaddressed.
In fact, given their continued plight, the United Nation agencies have announced three-week-long media campaign recently with the objective of highlighting that all persons who have been displaced by the conflict should be able to voluntarily return home safely, in a dignified and sustainable way.
The UN agencies feel that the CPA has offered “an opportunity to resolve this hidden legacy of the conflict.” As such, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees) and OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) have joined hands in this campaign.
The campaign aims to appeal for ensuring conditions on the ground that ensure the conditions exist for displaced persons to return voluntarily to their homes. “We want to underscore two points in our campaign – that the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) come from all kinds of social and political background and all of the IDPs have the right to return voluntarily to their places,” said Kieran Dwyer, an official at the OHCHR-Nepal.
According to various estimates, there are between 200,000 to 250,000 IDPs in Nepal . “We don’t know how many of them have returned in the past eight months of ceasefire. In some districts, around 90 percent of them have returned while in others the figure is very low. Many of them continue to face threats of persecution and have lost all their moveable properties, which have stopped them from returning,” said Bjorn Pettersson, Internal Displacement Advisor at the OHCHR-Nepal.
Petterson said that the government should introduce concrete operational plan including packages of material assistance to help the IDPs.
On the other hand, Michele Manca di Nissa, official of the UNHCR, said that while it is the primary responsibility of the state to take care of IDPs, the UN was willing to assist the state in this. Hanne Melfald of OCHA said many of the IDPs have blended very well with the community leading to the difficulty in ascertaining their actual number.
The UN officials stated that at present it is the Maoist cadres rather than security forces who are obstructing the return of displaced persons. Whether the media campaign will help to change the mindset of Maoist cadres in the coming days remains to be seen.
