King should avoid further bloodshed - activists

Women beat cooking utensils, men played wooden drums, and young boys and girls clapped as tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators marched on Sunday along the Ring Road—the huge roundabout road that surrounds the capital—to protest against the absolute rule of the Nepalese monarch, King Gyanendra. Since 1 February, 2005, Gyanendra has been ruling the Himalayan kingdom directly after suspending the democratic government led by former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba for failing to curb the Maoists, who have been waging an armed rebellion against the state for the past 10 years. “Leave the country and long live democracy,” shouted the demonstrators who came out of their houses, defying the government’s shoot on sight curfew orders imposed over the last five days in Kathmandu. But serious concerns are growing among both local human rights groups and international community on the increasing human rights abuses against the peaceful demonstrators at the hands of the Nepali security forces. According to local human rights group Insec, 15 demonstrators have been killed and over 3,500 arrested over the past 19 days. The number of injured has crossed an estimated 5,000 due to the baton charges, firing and tear gas of the armed police, according to the monitoring committee of the Nepali Congress (NC), the country’s largest party. “As the [UN] Secretary General [Kofi Annan] has reiterated repeatedly, the king needs to take courageous steps to find a way out of this situation and to avoid further bloodshed,” Mathew Kahane, the UN’s country representative to Nepal, told IRIN. He also expressed serious concern over the fact that only a few ambulances were granted with curfew passes. “This has clearly obstructed the rescue and care efforts,” explained Kahane. During the curfew hours, imposed since Thursday, several humanitarian organisations and rights groups were refused travel permission passes by the government authorities. “The scale of violations and excessive use of force by imposing curfew is highly condemable,” said Rameshwar Nepal, director of Amnesty International (AI) in Nepal. He added that the king had been undermining the calls by the international community, including those by the governments of USA, UK, India and European Union (EU) to stop the violations. “In the way the state has been using violence against the peaceful rallies filled with children, women and youth, it has acted totally irresponsibly and undemocratically,” said Prabodh Debkota from ActionAid Nepal, an international development agency focusing on poverty alleviation work. With the political situation deteriorating, even the development workers have now started to directly voice their opposition to the king and have been joining the protestors on the streets as well. “Our concern is for the marginal and poorest communities and we have not been able to reach them with our projects due to the ongoing political crisis,” added Debkota. “Their right to mainstream development and politics had been suppressed all these years and the development community can no longer keep quiet but support them actively,” he further explained.