Emergency : Right mission and wrong vision

By DR GOPAL KRISHNA SIWAKOTI

The 1949 Geneva Conventions (also known as humanitarian law) to which Nepal is a state party do not encourage war but advocate for the compliance of the rules of war - both internal and international. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the high contracting parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, humanitarian provisions under the common Article 3 of all four Conventions. Contrary to the rights categorised as "non-derogable" under any circumstances by the Constitution of Nepal and the spirit and intention of the Geneva Conventions both the warring parties of high contracting nature in Nepal have been engaged in blatant breach of fundamental principles of human rights and humanitarian standards.

Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction based on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. Total prohibition is prescribed on violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, and the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. These humanitarian provisions are ensured at any time and place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons.

According to the rules of war, the wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for. An impartial humanitarian body, such as the ICRC, may offer its services to the parties to the conflict. The parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Conventions. The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the parties to the conflict.

Another important international instrument that has circuitous relevance in the state of internal armed conflict in Nepal is the Convention against Genocide which bans acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It declares genocide a crime under international law whether committed during war or peacetime, and binds all signatories of the Convention to take measures to prevent and punish any acts of genocide committed within the jurisdiction. The act bans killing of members of any racial, ethnic, national or religious group because of their membership in that group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, inflicting on members of the group conditions of life intended to destroy them, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and taking group members’ children away from them and giving them to members of another group.

The Convention declares genocide itself, conspiracy or incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit or complicity in the commission of genocide all to be illegal. Individuals are to be held responsible for these acts whether they were acting in their official capacities or as private individuals. Signatories to the Convention are bound to enact appropriate legislation to make the acts named in Article 3 illegal under their national law and provide appropriate penalties for violators.

People suspected of acts of genocide may be tried by a national tribunal in the territory where the acts were committed or by a properly constituted international tribunal whose jurisdiction is recognized by the state or states involved. For purposes of extradition, an allegation of genocide is not to be considered a political crime, and states are bound to extradite suspects in accordance with national laws and treaties. Any state party to the Convention may also call upon the UN to act to prevent or punish acts of genocide like in Rwanda during 1994 genocide in which 1,000,000 people were killed in 100 days-five time faster than the Jewish holocaust.

The Convention against Torture (CAT) is another vital instrument which bans torture under all circumstances, including the state of emergency. The Convention defines torture, requires states to take effective legal and other measures to prevent torture, declares that no state of emergency, other external threats, nor orders from a superior officer or authority may be invoked to justify torture. CAT requires states to make torture illegal and provide appropriate punishment for those who commit torture. It requires states to assert jurisdiction when torture is committed within their jurisdiction, either investigate and prosecute themselves, or upon proper request extradite suspects to face trial before another competent court. It also requires states to cooperate with any civil proceedings against accused torturers.

Nepal, as a party to the treaty, is obliged to provide training to law enforcement and military on torture prevention, keep its interrogation methods under review, and promptly investigate any allegations that its officials have committed torture in the course of their official duties. The state of emergency must not be an excuse to inflict torture upon the members of the hostile groups. It must ensure that individuals who allege that someone has committed torture against them are permitted to make an official complaint and have it investigated, and, if the complaint is proven, receive compensation, including full medical treatment and payments to survivors if the victim dies as a result of torture. It forbids states to admit into evidence during a trial any confession or statement made during or as a result of torture. It also forbids activities which do not rise to the level of torture, but which constitute cruel or degrading treatment.

In Nepal, the increasing number of organizations and individuals, who defend human rights, has opened up new possibilities for action and considerably strengthen the influence of human rights defenders at national and international levels even during the state of emergency. Human rights defenders - the only hope for thousands of survivors, victims and potential victims during emergency must gear up the campaign to halt attempts by both the government and the rebels to justify or excuse atrocities against unarmed civilians in the name of ‘encounter’ and ‘retaliation’ against the backdrop of state of emergency or national security interests. It is the principal obligation of the rights defenders to closely watch and offensively defend, any misleadingly propagated information by both the warring factions or media that may harm the innocent civilians.

The prolonged and unmonitored state of emergency demands siphoning off more budget for defence and security thus aggravating economic and social insecurity, which in the long-run in its most serious and persistent forms leads to extreme poverty and exclusion, and constitutes an atmosphere where the fabric of civil society gets completely ruptured. And those who are subject to conditions of extreme poverty are among the principal victims of the full range of human rights abuses and that the efforts they spend in their daily struggle to stay alive place them among human rights defenders.

The failure of the high contracting parties to address impunity constitutes one of the main obstacles to the full respect of human rights and which continues to obstruct the work of human rights defenders. Human rights defenders and other civil society interest groups now must intensify the campaign for the immediate ratification of the Statute of the International Criminal Court by Nepal with an aim to minimise the grave problem of impunity.

It is deplorable that the increase in the number and influence of human rights defenders has been accompanied by a development and systematisation of repressive measures and practices used against them. This is high time the human rights community revamped themselves to denounce the fact that the champions of human rights have also become the target of the warring parties as they continue to condemn and expose anti-human rights practices. They are among the victims of summary executions, enforced disappearances, torture, killings and arbitrary detentions. As the freedom of opinion, expression, association, assembly, demonstration, movement and the right to privacy are continuously infringed (of course, in conjunction with the state of emergency), the human rights community must oppose the proliferation of systematic measures and practices used by the state and the rebel group to prevent or impede the legitimate work of human rights activists. This includes censorship and seizure or publications, defamation, administrative and harassment, intimidation and implication in criminal cases, their identification with ‘terrorist’ groups, restrictions imposed on reporting in the pretext of emergency.

Despite all adversaries, the constitutional right to dissemination of information on non-derogable human rights, as a minimum, must not be infringed. Grave breach of human rights and humanitarian values — be it at Sanphe Bagar or Sakranti Bazaar — must be resisted without trade-off.

Religion versus religiousness

By KHAGENDRA BIKRAM

Religion is opium. This was  how the great German thinker, Karl Marx, commented on religion. Although there are many who disagree to this, the bloody riot that erupted in the name of religion in India throws some light on this. The altercations between the Hindus and the Muslims, who are fighting with each other for their vested interests, came to a deadly turn few days ago when the Hindus came up with the decision of constructing Ram-Janaki Temple in Ayodhya which has been an apple of discord between the Hindus and the Muslims for a long while. The religious (?) butchery then followed has already taken the lives in hundreds.

Religion is supposed to be the vehicle through which people reach God. Religion is responsible to train people to be moral, altruist and disciplined. Religion should develop the feelings of love and harmony. But one can say that this is all incorrect when one sees barbarous killings where those who suffer and those who make others suffer are the followers of one religion or another. What a shame !

Do you know one thing? The people who don’t follow religions are far better than those who follow them. Non-followers do not go to hurl stones at mosques, temples or churches. They do not discriminate people in the name of religions. Moreover, they do not massacre people just because they are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists or Jews.

There are many gruesome incidents in the annals of history when people of one religion were humiliated, threatened, beaten, manhandled, executed or even mass murdered by the people of other religions. The Hindus and Muslims, the Muslims and Jews, the Jews and Christians and the Christians and Buddhists have acted like enemies many times in history. Religions have fragmented God into many pieces and they befool themselves that their fragmented piece is the mightiest.

More than anything else, a human being should learn to become religious, instead of blindly following a religion which teaches its followers to humiliate and hurt people of other religions. Religiousness is the quality of being religious without following a religion. Religiousness trains everyone to love, love and love. No violence, no destruction and no war. Religiousness can be possessed by any human being even without following any religion.

I don’t know what Lord Ram and Prophet Mohammed would think if they were present now to see the tragedy in India. Probably they would feel sad and cry, looking at their men fighting each other.

Who gives one the right to kill others because their views and philosophies are different from what one has ? When one puts on the spectacles of religion, he/she thinks himself as the supreme being. But, be sure of one thing, if one cannot be the creator of life, one can never have the right to destroy it.

If everyone ponders over this matter and tries to be good, a world full of love and peace would come into existence.

Degree boom and fake certificates

By SHIKHAR SHRESTHA

The proliferation of universities is no passport to pursuit of excellence. If  anything, the unimaginative and indiscriminate growth of colleges and universities has resulted in steady dilution and deterioration of educational standards. Campus unrest, indolent and incompetent professors, lackadaisical attitude of management, increasing politicisation of student activities, research racket - problems confronting our educational reformers and academics are far too many and too complex to have a rough-and-steady solution.

An undesirable fallout of this "education explosion" has been a dichotomy between the educated elite of society and the less privileged deprived of access to the portals of university, which is why educationalists complain of unjustified disproportionate outlay, with the benefits of higher education accruing to a minority and not to the people who foot the bill. The constraints of institutionalised structures in education, clubbed with the enormous possibilities of non-formal pedagogy, have given basis and justification for non-traditional ways of learning like the concept of ‘learning with activity’, where individuals are associated with and indulged in participating with the surroundings; learning with observation, listening to comprehension and pragmatic thematic exercises, besides continuing adult education, correspondence courses, part-time teaching and so on.

To be sure, a university’s primary and essential function is to acquire, to possess and to transmit scholarship. Universities and colleges, whether elite, practical or socially responsive, have common interest in sustaining the kind of society in which the spirit of scientific enquiry and intellectual or artistic independence is protected.

Today we have a few institutions of learning unevenly distributed over different districts to meet the special needs from the standpoint of excellence, while the majority of them are of teaching-cum-affiliating universities, which by their very nature do not have a built-in mechanism to provide incentives for continued improvement of standards or to facilitate flexibility. Most of our learning institutes hardly have the freedom to function without being fettered by political pressure or paucity of funds. The autonomous institutions like the IITs, the institutes of management studies, the institutes of medical sciences, etc enjoy prestige, but then they are pockets of excellence amid general sloth. The scenario is far from reassuring.

There is a widespread criticism that the courses offered in our colleges and universities are outdated, that talented young students usually go abroad in search of greener pastures, that merit is the first casualty in matters of appointment, that diverse pulls of expansion and quality take the inevitable toll of intellectual vitality and academic obligations, and that research in Nepal is not tailored to the country’s needs and is largely imitative and repetitive. While all this and more is true, there is no demonstrable evidence of concerted efforts to pull us up from the quagmire of confusion.

Some cynics even maintain that a doctorate degree is for sale today. A friend of mine doing his higher education in India, mockingly puts forward a joke, that has been doing the rounds in the corridors of academia: A wealthy man riding on his horse goes to a vice-chancellor of a university to acquire a ‘doctorate’ for 10,000 bucks. He promptly pays the amount at the counter and gets the Ph D degree. A little later while returning, the man thinks, why not buy one more Ph D degree for my horse? He goes back to the vice-chancellor and requests him for a doctorate for his dear horse. The vice-chancellor snaps back: ‘Our Ph D is meant only for donkeys and not for horses.’

Be that as it may, purposeful and original research in every field of education is lacking. Most of the pedestrian research workers engage themselves in ‘nothing but the transfer of bones from one graveyard to another.’ Priorities must be given to comprehensive critical approach, to expression and articulation, and to the action-oriented training. While we moan about falling academic standards, we must also pay attention to the generally poor salary structure of our teachers, to protect them against victimisation, and to make the atmosphere in a college more conducive for intellectual pursuits.

Broadcasting, television and other audio-visual means are used for dissemination of information and knowledge. "Mature" learning coupled with the abandonment of any requirement for entry qualifications and employing integrated multi-media courses for distance learning is on the rise.

The recent violent attacks in the various educational institutions across the country carried out by the Maoist rebels have not only impeded and impaired the educational proceedings but have also severely instilled a sense of fear, frustration and anxiety among the people who depend upon these colleges and universities as a means of acquiring knowledge and intellect. The country, rapidly declining in economy and social status, cannot afford to lose and damage the only factor that is emitting hope and aspirations among the younger generation.

Education and current volatile politics should not and cannot be dealt with simultaneously. Now, the personnel of the educational institutions should focus mainly on the enhancement and development of educational standards rather than on anything else.