[lit-ideas] Re: Nepal: an old-fashioned revolution
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:12:54 -0700 (PDT)
Nepalese politics would be funny if it weren't so sad.
For instance, back when they still had elections, the
left won one. Right wingers organized a shut down of
garbage collection to show that the rule of the left
leads to disarray... Kathmandu is dirty at best of
times and that went on for months.
Or take the Maoist insurgency and tourism. To this
date, of the millions of visitors to the country, to
my knowledge exactly one visitor has been physically
attacked (a young woman was drugged and raped by his
tour guide, a huge scandal locally). People trekking
in Himalayas are occasionally stopped by the Maoists,
give a few rupees and you can have your picture taken
with AK-47 wielding guerrilla.
When I visited back in mid-90's, the mood was
optimistic. Yes, it was a desperately poor country.
Too many people and too little land basically, leading
to slums in Kathmandu and poverty in the mountains.
But Nepal had something going for it absent in other
such nations: peace.
There were lot of aid projects, and quite a few of
them actually worked including education, health care
and conservation projects in the mountains (due lack
of land and need for fuel, farmers cut forests, which
leads to soil erosion and thus less land...) More than
million of tourists visited, and the number was
growing rapidly. We hired a Sherpa guide to keep us
from falling off a cliff (literally!), a seventeen
year old kid earning money while learning English at
the same time in order to go to a business school. He
wanted to start a travel company.
There were talks of building hydro power with Indians,
generating both more electricity than all the Nepalese
needed while providing steady income from export of
electricity. One of the German auto companies,
Wolkswagen I think, had plans to do alternative urban
vehicle development and manufacturing in Kathmandu, a
sensible place for such operations.
They had multi-party democracy, in many ways still at
its infancy, but it looked like the king (the one
eventually gunned down by his son) was turning into an
European style monarch. The Maoist insurgency was a
minor revolt in the remote western parts of country. I
remember saying to a friend that if they start a civil
war in a terrain like this, it will never end.
It seems that the king may step down and seek refuge
in India, thus removing one main obstacle in
negotiations with Maoists, the abolition of monarchy.
Still, the political parties demonstrating in
Kathmandu are in war with the Maoists too, who are no
angels anyway. One can hope.
--- Andreas Ramos <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> That's pretty funny. India under assault by Maoist
> guerillas?
India is a continent, not a country. There are
uprisings and separatist movements, particularly up
North.
> The US doesn't care about this; Bush doesn't even
> know where Nepal is, and most of all, it
> doesn't have any oil. End of interest.
>
The US Ambassador to Nepal explained the decision to
arm the Nepalese military with M-16s couple years back
as part of War on Terror designed to escalate the
conflict to its natural conclusion. I am not making
this up.
Or for something not just plain stupid, but plain
evil. A doctor (an American I think) running a clinic
in rural Nepal funded partly by US Aid, invited Jesse
Helms or George Bush, preferably both, to come over.
He needs someone to explain to his patient with nine
more kids than she can feed and pregnant again, why
the doctor can not even mention abortion, never mind
perform one.
Yours,
Teemu
Helsinki, Filand
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
