Were there celebrations among the leaders of Nepal’s bloody Maoist insurrection this week? They had just exploded a bomb beside a police post in the capital Katmandu. The blast had killed a passing schoolboy. Did the terrorists imagine that the tide of their final victory would be hastened by the addition of this luckless kid’s blood? Or did they shake their heads and say how sad and unfortunate it was that the boy had been killed?
If they did, if they regret this schoolboy’s murder, then they are open to being asked why they brought about his death in the first place. A terrorist who is clever enough to build a bomb is also bright enough to realize that if it is placed to explode in a public space, it is going to be indiscriminate in the destruction it causes. If the killers feel bad about causing an innocent death, they still have some basic humane instincts which tell them that the misery and death that they are causing is wrong.
If that feeling really exists among some of the Maoist leadership, then it ought to be possible to persuade them to bring about a decisive end to the slaughter, by sitting down and negotiating with the Nepalese government. Sadly, the evidence worldwide is that terrorism doesn’t work this way. Regret for slaughtered innocents like the Katmandu schoolboy, if it is expressed at all, is more to do with the adverse publicity that such a senseless murder draws, rather than a feeble demonstration of humanity.
Thus terrorists who say that they are sorry for killing innocent bystanders should choke on their words. Were that sorrow genuine, they would seek to avoid such slaughter. But of course they will do no such thing. The remote blast with its impartial destruction is their stock weapon. Plastic explosives and the timed detonator combine to produce the perfect weapon for the moral dwarf.
As has become clear from the behavior of terrorists worldwide, from Colombia to Northern Ireland, from Riyadh to Nepal, there comes a point where the cause, whatever it may be, becomes insignificant compared to the day-to-day bloodshed. Brutality and extortion from the local population, the running of narcotics and prostitution to raise cash for the purchase of arms and explosives, all become institutionalized. In Northern Ireland the IRA even pays pensions to retired killers. Young men can grow up and grow old committing brutal crimes. Violence is all they know. The lives of their leaders become so taken over by organizing destruction, that if the mayhem ends, so will their position of power.
Thus we must assume that Nepal’s Maoist rebels are complete strangers to dreams of peace and common humanity, and this week greeted the shattered corpse of a Katmandu schoolboy as yet another success in their glorious revolution.
