Managing conflict with humane touch

By DR JAGADISH C POKHAREL 

The ceasefire and the decision to resolve the conflict through talks (barta) by the Maoists and the Government in the country is a welcome event. To use this opportunity for lasting peace is in the nation’s best interest. Following the ceasefire, an increased number of political pundits and mediators are providing sweeping recommendations and technical advices to the government, political parties and Maoists. Some suggest that we should be moving faster on all fronts as this might be short lived. Others have come up with an elaborate academic framework and clinical recommendations. They have made good arguments to show what the best alternative is to non-negotiation. Some hardcore political ideologues are still busy sharpening their political concepts for settlement.

These are commendable efforts and demonstrate how everyone is interested in lasting peace in the country. Yet there are certain aspects of this conflict that cannot be ignored while pursuing for settlement. The purely academic and detached recommendation for immediate settlement focusing more on political bargaining and posturing at the highest political level misses the point that the victim’s relatives are still mourning for their dead, the children still crying and broken legs of some teachers are yet to be cured. Many children and students have seen too brutal scenes to live normally for some time to come. The blood is too fresh and the feelings are too strong to allow immediate settlements through hardcore political dealings to be acceptable.

The scale of pain and suffering and the nature of this conflict also ask for more healing time. This is the first time in Nepal’s history that over 7,000 people have been killed within such a short time. This is also the first time that the victims of conflicts goes beyond the warring army and includes a large number of civilians and ordinary people as well. Also this is the first time that Nepali people have seen such brutal killings and so many dead bodies and gruesome scenes that have seriously affected normal minds particularly the youth and young children.

For the first time, a large number of youth have participated in brutality and killings. Though we are not as yet quite sure about the number of girls and women being sexually abused, the stories of young girls and female cadres in the Maoist camp have revealed that there have been serious sexual abuses. This is also first time that so many Nepali people have been physically displaced from their homes. Of course, the loss of public property and individual identity and records is yet to be assessed. Against this background, the push for quick resolution, no matter how transparent, is bound to create very strong feelings against any settlement. The common people who suffered too deeply but are unable to politically bargain will not be able to digest these cut and dry political deals. They, justifiably, will feel betrayed by the political parties and the system.

These human aspects of the debate cannot be disregarded as weaknesses by the political players. As many in the Maoist affected areas were killed because of their ideological differences with the Maoists, they will be asking their political party leaders, if all this blood and pain was to facilitate the same political leaders to shake hands and share power then why should they trust them in the future? Since they were neither soldiers, nor well-equipped to fight with either side, why should two groups of soldiers decide on their behalf? Who gave them the right to do so? Why then the political parties kept on building their difference on ideological grounds? Since they were killed for their belief why should their belief be negotiated? The mass meetings and mass rituals (kiriya and mundane) are only a few of the expressions that will follow. They cannot be ignored.

This also applies to the Maoists side. The young boys and girls who did not have much choice and time to understand complex politics other than participate in the war will be asking equally or even more pertinent and difficult questions. How will the girl who has been challenging the many social values through her revolutionary acts be able to get resettled and be rehabilitated in this society? Can we expect the young boys and girls engaged in most brutal killings to behave normally—go to school or colleges and become a normal adult? Will they not be asking what they achieved? Will the leadership be able to convince the cadre that they have delivered what they expected when they took up arms? Can this be justified only on the political strategic grounds?

One might try to brush aside these questions as too sentimental, but the messages one gets from those who suffered at the hands of the Maoist and the Maoist cadres at the village level, suggest that these questions cannot be downplayed. What the players should be cautioned is that these very feeling should not become the cause for another rebellion; the rebellion against the established political parties on either side and eventually against the very resolution that the political powers will eventually come up with.

This implies that healing process should precede the formal political bargaining and the formal give and take. The issues of employment, rehabilitation, reintegration, demonstration of compassion to the sufferers on both sides, some certainty to those families who have lost most in the conflict, addressing the possible rebellion within the different camps, and others should be taken up immediately and more aggressively. The process should address small but valuable humane side, to gain time and let the feelings and blood to cool down. The political give and take can take a back seat and both sides should move in a more discrete manner while the following activities should be given priority and be further enhanced:

· Some form of confession or apology on the part of victimizers to the victims

· Assurance for the people to go back to their places

· Assurance that once in their places there is some availability of food and basic services until the next harvesting such as food for work

· Immediate arrangements for schooling of the youth and children

· Counseling for the traumatized women, children and youth

· Some rehabilitation programmes for the victims

· Encouragement for joint engagement between local people and Maoist rebels in collective works such as school buildings, health services and local level works

· Programmes that provide opportunity for reintegration at the local level

The ceasefire provides an opportunity to work for lasting peace. Too fast a pace and skewed focus on the political give and take, disregards the feelings of the victims and sufferers. Priority should be given to the humanitarian aspect. This helps build confidence and increases mutual acceptance by both the victims and victimizers, and in the process heal wounds. The government should come up with decentralized and flexible programme package that can be adapted to specific situation at the local level. Only broader guidelines for reintegration and reconciliation should be provided by the center.

Making informal and formal talks and negotiations more humane gives us time and creates environment to work upwards to achieve more complex and abstract political settlements possible. They also make the settlements more acceptable. Experience from similar situations elsewhere shows that political negotiations that ignore the basic human feelings and needs can only breed discontent and lead to reemergence of conflict much sooner than expected, often more violently than before. We should work discretely on the political front and more aggressively on the humanitarian front to succeed in establishing lasting peace.

(The author is former member of National Planning Commission)

Hopesaver

By Salil Subedi 

Buddha’s eyes look in four directions from Swoyambhu heights. But, where is the fifth pair? The ‘ether consciousness’, the flame of hope, the carrier of divine sound, the resonance of compassionate vibrations… Ah, the clichés all right. But I did get blown-up by an epiphany along the stone stairs leading to Swoyambhu - 6 February, 7 AM-ish. Time and place is not important here, but, the situation is. Well for those of us yawning and chewing the tip of the day after the sun has fully grown every late morning, time-shift could be significant like ‘why up so early?’. But for the moment let us ‘uplink’ the flow of this thought to the second sentence in this paragraph - Where is the fifth pair?

In this country torn and tattered by the misdeeds of the many senile, cynical and hopeless policy makers and politicians and infected by pessimism and darker mistrust in the society, to see such a joyful ‘glide of youth’ floating hand-in-hand around this symbolic height of knowledge, compassion and truthfulness to celebrate the day of Saraswati was far too wonderful an event to see and feel good about.

Swoyambhu illumined for a moment like a garden of beautiful eyes glazed golden from the shining Stupa guilds in the early morning sun. Teenage-crackles echoing in a slight overtone of mischievous scales resonating minor notes of kiddish vulgarity played the ambient music. On the other hand, the monkeys seeing such flamboyance of the crowd had pitch-bended their misfit-shrieks to a pretentious cooing as if a thin bamboo flute played shyly. Perhaps they were dazed by the human smell and sound, that’s a different folder to double click. But what clicked open in god’s own desktop was the vision of a ‘hopesaver’ – a collective construction of friendly, talented, intense, dreamy, rationale, articulate, skilled… ah! all the good adjectives – the youth.

"Wow! " Double "Wow!". Sorry I can’t keep my colloquial and written structures intact at this point. After years, each of these youth seemed to dissolve with one another at comfort. It was a ‘love affair’ between them and the symbolic Saraswati. They were all united by one single quest - the knowledge. And one single reason activated this very quest – the faith in knowledge. What more can the future ask for but this very harmony of the head and the heart, rational and the irrational, the art of pottery-making meets the editing of sound in computers.

The bricks in the walls were extra-painted by chalks this year. The traditional rule, to write letters only on the ceiling and walls of the small pati opposite the Saraswoti shrine, was overruled by the excited youths. Letters were everywhere. Mothers were lifting the small ones to the highest point achieved. Chalks sold in leaf bota seemed a good business. But even the filthy chalk dusts seemed friendly in the air. If they had a life, the stone-beasts guarding the temples would have fled the scene, wildly tickled, as hundreds of chalks grazed their bellies, spine and even tail-tips. The Bhajan Mandali were chanting brightly while the pigeons flapped signals of attention as they flew away from the men on the white mound who were splashing paints of lime and saffron as offerings. The aroma of gaily burning incense sticks, butter lamps, Lalupate Ful, wet chamal-kanika ran through the atmosphere which these days is getting ready to cheer the winter to its final lap here in Kathmandu. It was an absolute joy. Felt like thanking the person or whatever the force, who is seeking to give this powerful energy, a continuity. Really, who or what could that be - Sensible politicians? Learned scholars? Writers? Journalists?

Now let us not pile up mysteries. We still haven’t answered the elemental fifth-eye question yet. I’m sorry I can’t. But let me attempt. I feel this very force of the youth – their intensity, the intensely fresh teen crackles, their harmless mischief, playfulness, simple songs and honest query into the nature and society could be the fifth pair of eye that can perceive beyond what all the four-pairs gather. Simply put, this very youthful force is the fifth eye, so I see.

And the epiphany ? Sure, I have kept it for the parting shot. The epiphany is to refresh the youth in me. Wake up early every morning and glide with this magical force called the hope of the youthfulness. Regardless of your age, if you are youth in the heart and action, you are free to download from the second paragraph, the word – "Hopesaver". You could be one.

Songs of the Kirati psyche 

By YUYUTSU R D SHARMA

Raising a scarecrow
one can light traffic lights
One can also arrange
A demonstration of scarecrows
(Rajan Mukarung. Trans.mine)

In the above quoted poem W.B. Yeat’s favorite scarecrow image is being used by a Nepali poet in an altogether different context and for different purpose. Rajan Mukarung’s "Jikkir ko Gaddi" (Throne. of Past Reference) is a tantalizing anthology stirring a whirlwind of not-so-pleasant questions. From its inception I have been closely watching Movement of "Creative Anarchy" (Srijansheel Arajakta) that Rajan launched along with his fellow poet Hangyug Agyat a few years ago. ‘Creative Anarchy’ is a mask, even a scarecrow to scare the orthodox puritanical custodians of Nepali poetry. I remember releasing Hangyug Agyat’s first poetry collection "Rangeen Avishkar" (Colorful Discovery) at a Kimchi Restaurant’s regular monthly roadside reading, as protest against formal book launch practice in Nepal. Since the early days of the Movement in those dimly lit cabins of Kimchi I have for hours discussed the basic thrust that these young poets’ works’ possess.

That’s why an invitation to speak on Rajan’s new book the other day seemed an invitation to a forgotten past. Despite my request to call me to dais after a speaker or two these ‘lovely’ anarchists made me first speaker in the colloquium. That’s why right in the beginning I very candidly pointed out two important words— Sanskrit and Brahmin, Being a Brahmin myself, I made it a point to explain how these poems react to Sanskritization and are intrinsically opposed to the Brahminical norms of Nepali literature.

And these red flags
of the former days
our tea garden laborers
would tear up
to make little hankies
to wipe tears
of their tumultuous youth
(Rajan Mukarung. Trans. mine)

I also pointed out how in the Indian Subcontinent and elsewhere, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Leftists writers have found refuge in the tribal aesthetics to soothe their wounded psyches and enigmatically even tribals seem to have accepted them. The tribal and the Left have become synonymous. In India tribal /Janabad seems to have intellectually formed a nexus; it has become a shared platform. I recall listening to Mahasweta Devi’s hair-raising account of her experiences with the tribals of Northeast. Her recitals of tribal songs and narration of eating ‘delicious’ mouse-chops after the Day’s field labor made several of Delhi’s elite poetry lovers/poets clutch their sleek cell phones queasily or rush to the bathrooms to throw up secretly.

In Nepalese literary scene, things are different. In Nepal literary figures do not align themselves with tribal identity the way Kishor Shantabai Kale, Laxman Mane, Atmaram Kaniram, Rathod or Laxman Gaikwad do or the way Rajendra Yadav does in his editorials to the literary magazine, Hans or Dilip Chitre does in his poems. Nor have tribals shared a common platform with moderate Leftist groups here in creative fields. Talking of Tagadhari and Matawali, Nepali poet Bairagi Kainla that day made a distinction between social injustice and ethical discrimination. He appreciated Rajan Mukarung focus on ethnic identity instead of social injustice. "We have to see man in sheer anthropological terms. This is post-modernism", he declared.

This newly found interest in tribal identity is not just the result of the advent of multi- party democracy as Nepali writer Khagendra Sangrola pointed out. Rather it has to do, I feel, with new world order and rise of Anthropology as discipline to dislodge certain platforms. In a recent Issue of Pratik, Indian critic E.V. Ramakrishnan discusses anthropological and psychological studies as a alternative stratagem to shift focus from real life economic issues and tyranny of corporate house. "Several modern disciplines such as anthropology and psychology which were born in the economics of capitalism and politics of imperialism pride themselves in taking an ethically neutral attitude to life and society in interest of scientific precision and empirical knowledge."

Poet Iswore Ballab rightly advocated a holistic viewpoint. To me, what Rajan’s poetry seems to be doing is to invert Gopal Prasad Rimal’s rhetoric to shift focus from center to the ignored margin. But how much of that margin is ‘tribal’ in its true sense could be subject of debate. He repeatedly makes references to the lost glory of a throne of Kirati identity. His attempts to create a fresh narrative, a tribal persona in shape of Yalamber seem ingenious. He constantly employs images that have become clichés in Nepali poetry in a startlingly fresh light to depict the turbulence of a tribal psyche. He uses red flag, old rusted statues, horses, doors. But ironically Rajan is not a tribal poet in its traditional sense. He is a poet who has been brought up in tribal, marginalized community and now like any other Nepali poet is trying his luck in the city centers. At some places his anarchy seems ethnic and at others it looks just a modern man’s distrust, a shattered individual getting gradually alienated in a south Asian cyber city centers;

This is a gathering of decrepit blockheads—
On the huge neon-hoarding
having hung an advertisement
of a nude goddess —
or having bent beneath
her naval, one can
possess a pose of prosperity.
(Rajan Mukarung, Trans. Mine)

Khagendra Sangrola pointed out; "In order to understand Bhupi Sherchan, we have to read Rimal; in order to understand Rajan, we have to read Bairagi Kainla." But I can only hope Rajan can hold the center. Kagendra Sangrola asked – Would Rajan’s poem he read today be remembered after thirty years? I know Bairagi Kainla because of just one poem written thirty years ago. Biragi is a one-poem poet, he added.

But unfortunately, Rajan is very prolific poet, and has already published three poetry collections. I can only hope he would rise above the ethnic mire without sounding didactic or communal. I can hope he would use the treasure of his tribal memory to assimilate himself into the vast body of Nepali poetry. So far as Kagendra Sangrola’s question is concerned- I think it’s Bairagi Kainla and those who haven’t written a line for decades should learn from young poets like Rajan Makarung. Because one may ask another question to Mr. Sangrola’s question, and a more intriguing one—Is being a one- poem poet a compliment?

Enhancing local competence in tourism

 By Kalyan Bhandari 

Nepal is doing well in tourism, except in recent times. Although the tourism activities are confined to a certain specific area, the overall perception of tourists in Nepal is pretty good. Tourists are satisfied, to a great extent, with the services and the destination offered. A significant number of visitors are repeat visitors. Still, most of the tourists express their desire to revisit the country. This is, despite the fact that the image of the country, tourists make is entirely based on the general perception they get in the major, or rather limited, tourists areas they visit.

There are plenty of places with promising future of tourism that are unexplored or underdeveloped for the purpose of increasing tourism. Probably, Nepal’s best tourist places are still to be visited. There might be problems, in some cases, with accessibility, resources, sanitation, health, water and awareness. But there are places, which are equally resourceful, or even more, in terms of their competency on the above parameters but are still lagging in attracting the tourists to their place. But why is it remaining under-visited?

Perhaps, one of the reasons may be because of the ignorance on the local agencies’ part to realize their potential in tourism. Second, tourism is still not the considered mainstream of local development in most areas where tourists are yet to reach. Third, those areas expect the state to bring in tourists for them and don’t strive to promote their place on their own. Fourth, inadequate level of sensitisation on tourism. Fifth, the local agencies hardly think that tourism is their domain as well and, sixth, the absence of strong private sector entrepreneurship.

One of the most astounding aspects in this is: Why the destinations themselves don’t compete among themselves? Why is it always the state that has to bring in tourists for them? Why doesn’t Palpa compete with Pokhara in alluring tourists? Why don’t Janakpur and Barahachetra themselves strive for getting tourists? There has been a tremendous increase in travelling in the domestic sphere, though still remains unaccounted in national account, in recent times, but no other significant destinations except Pokhara and some of the other pilgrimage sites, have been able to capture a significant portion of that domestic market. Why don’t other destinations deem it necessary to promote themselves to get a portion of the increasing domestic pie?

The recent launching of the Jaun Hain Pokhara campaign is an exception in the current trend of tourism in Nepal. This is an example of local level initiation for the promotion of tourism. This also shows that the destination itself can identify their sources of tourists and strive for attaining the maximum out of them. Other potential destinations, like Palpa, Janakpurdham or even the prevailing Chitwan can initiate similar campaigns to allure the domestic or the nearby regional tourists for this matter. If Janakpurdham realizes their prime tourists generating market to be the domestic clients and the nearby adjoining Indian cities, what is it waiting for instead of getting started through a promotional campaign with its own available local resources?

But it is well understood that without a strong private sector led aggressiveness and commitment, there can be no fruitful outcome. For this, the private entrepreneurs have to identify their immediate short-term concern and try to integrate their services to make tourists realize it worthwhile.

The most important part in the development of any region is the region or the areas themselves should realize its comparative advantage and make effort towards excelling in that area of their speciality. The local government should also compete with its counterpart in delivering services for the people. In our case, it is hardly witnessed. We have sub-metropolitan cities but they have never been compared in terms of excellence in providing good governance or else. We have never heard of any competition between Pokhara and Palpa in terms of delivering goods to their people nor in increasing the opportunities for their masses neither in attracting tourists. Take for example, Birgunj and Biratnagar, which have identical terrain, common comparative advantage and adequate, or though limited, revenue resources. But at the internal level, they are hardly competing with each other. This has led to the underutilization and underrealization of local resources.

A good and healthy competition would help realize their potential. It would also help keep economic stagnation away. This can reinvigorate the much-needed vibrancy for the development and help economy spread its activity.

The state, no doubt, has the responsibility of creating congenial atmosphere for bringing in more tourists to the country. The broader marketing of a country, as a whole, is, definitely, the domain of national tourism organization. But local agencies should also play their part in bringing tourism at their doorstep through local level initiative. This will benefit the local communities realize their potential. This would also help increase the local sensitization and help start the engine of tourism started with their own. This would, in the long run, also create and establish a definite brand image of themselves irrespective of other destination. Thus, if Janakpurdham establishes itself as a pilgrimage destination in the adjoining Indian cities, any disturbances in the countryside like Rukum, Rolpa or elsewhere would not affect the inflow of tourists to Janakpurdham. It remains undeterred as an established destination. This helps destinations establish their own niche market.