Displaced families live in fear despite peace process

Many internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nepal still feel threatened by Maoist insurgents and have not been able to return to their homes despite the peace process.

Dor Bahadur Karki, an IDP who fled his remote village in Sindhuli district, 200 km west of the capital, Kathmandu, after Maoists threatened to kill him unless he paid them a large sum of money, said the government was not doing enough.

“We will have no choice but to take up violence in the streets to make our voices heard if our problems are not solved soon,” Karki said.

A group of IDPs have been protesting peacefully in Kathmandu for the past month to pressure the interim government and the Maoists to provide them safe passage and financial security while returning to their homes.

On Monday, more than 100 IDPs also staged a demonstration in front of the United Nations Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) to get international recognition of their plight.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the leading international body on IDP issues, said the decade-long armed conflict between the Maoists and government had displaced between 100,000 and 200,000 Nepalese people.

More than 12,000 people have died in the decade-long conflict between Maoist rebels and the government

A ceasefire was agreed in April when the new interim government, a coalition of the seven national parties, was formed following mass protests that ended King Gyanendra's direct rule on 24 April.

The Maoists have already called on the IDPs to return home, assuring them safe passage and the return of their seized properties.

But the IDPs claim that the Maoists have not kept their promises.

The Association of Sufferers of the Maoists, Nepal (ASMAN), a group formed by 20,000 IDPs, said that cadres in the villages had refused to return the lands and houses seized when people refused to join, pay donations or support them.

“The Maoists are still doing injustices to a lot of poor villagers. They still intimidate us, ask for donations, torture and even kill people who don’t support their party or do as they ask,” Dharma Raj Neupane, ASMAN's president, maintained.

A large number of IDPs had not been able to return home, with the government and Maoists failing to do anything to reintegrate them into their village communities, Neupane added.

Less than 1,000 IDPs had returned home with the help of human rights organisations, and a large number were still living in difficult conditions in the country’s towns and cities, Insec, a prominent rights group, said.

“We are afraid that the Maoists will kill or hurt us if we approach their leaders to plead for help. We don’t have the courage to face them,” Sita Pariyar, a 16-year-old married mother-of-one, said.

She and her family fled their village in Kanchanpur, 700 km west of Kathmandu, after the rebels shot Sita’s mother for refusing to let them take her to be a Maoist soldier. Her mother died a few months later because they had no money to buy treatment for her wounds.

Maoist leaders in the capital said that they were studying how many people had been displaced, stating efforts were under way to return properties to "genuinely displaced families".

NN/JL/GS/DS