THE TRAGEDY that has overtaken the Nepalese people with the massacre of King Birendra and ten members of his immediate family by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra, is one that affects the entire people of the Himalayan kingdom. What is crucial now is that tragedy must not become disaster for a country that the late king had led into the delicate waters of constitutional change. Nepal is a poor state sandwiched between Tibet and India.
King Birenda became the autocratic ruler in 1972 upon the unexpected death of his father King Mahendra. The new monarch realized that the lack of consultative processes represented a danger to his country of 24 million people, as it struggled to cope with the dilution of its traditional culture in the face of outside pressures. From the 1980s he began to introduce a participative system which culminated in 1992 with the establishment of multiparty politics.
Unfortunately from the very beginning, the Nepalese party system was characterized by extreme factionalism. Governments came and went as their members proved incapable of working together. His Majesty’s vision of a modernizing state in which all groups would strive for the common good never took wings. Instead violence and discord took root, most menacingly in the form of a Maoist revolt that began in February 1996. Against Nepal’s underfunded and poorly trained police and army, the Maoist terrorists made rapid headway, employing the brutal tactics of Peru’s Shining Path.
It is now estimated that the Maoists terror campaign has given them a hold over half of the country, while their political agitators have brought the economy to its knees by organizing widespread strikes. Having ceded much of his power to elected politicians, King Birendra could only sit back and watch in horror as these individuals failed spectacularly to forge any sort of last consensus among themselves, let alone among the people at large. Popular disillusion with multiparty politics had polarized society, so that some even hoped that the Maoist terrorists would come to power.
First reports however suggest that the entire Nepalese nation has been mortified by the death of their king. Among the many thousands of distraught mourners who crowded the streets of the capital Katmandu were people of all political persuasions, for whom the monarchy represented the last critical piece of stability in a dissolving society. One street seller who readily admitted to sympathy with the Maoists nevertheless said that he felt that he and Nepal had been “orphaned” by the slaying of their king. There is still disbelief, coupled with horror and much fear at what the future will now bring this Himalayan kingdom. It is in this dangerous confusion that Prince Gyanedra takes on the role of regent, because his brother Prince Dipendra, who is now technically the new king, lies critically ill, having apparently shot himself in the head after killing his mother and father and nine other close relatives.
The last time we wrote about Nepal, after Maoist terrorists had attacked a rural police station and murdered 24 people, we warned that the international community must support the legitimate government in its struggle against the Maoists and the rural poverty on which their movement has fed. This remains a priority but what is even more important now is that outside states must not seek to interfere further in Nepal’s internal affairs. This means principally China, which is suspected of having given support to the Maoist thugs, and India, which has supported politicians prepared to take a pro-Indian line. In some ways India and China have been conducting a proxy struggle for power and influence in a small and vulnerable third country. The temptation, now that an awful vacuum has been created, will be to intervene further. This must not happen. The Nepalese should be supported in their own efforts to reachieve stability, defeat terrorism and overcome the trauma to which the whole nation has been exposed.
