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The Royal Nepalese
Army and the Imperialist Agency
By PRATYUSH CHANDRA
After King Mahendra (Gyanendra's father)
and his Royal Nepalese Army (RNA), overthrew his government in
1960, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Nepal
BP Koirala asked himself in his jail diary - "Is the democratic
system in Nepal compatible with the preponderance of the Nepalese
Army?" After five decades of the democracy movement in Nepal,
this question still haunts the Nepalis. Mesmerised by the royal
proximity, the Nepalese 'democrats' have time and again lapsed
into amnesia, comfortably and willingly. But by one or another
way the question has found expression and has been answered negatively
in the popular upsurges and daily struggles of the downtrodden.
As Nepal's foremost revolutionary
leader Prachanda stated, just after the 'royal coup' last year,
"Ultimately, the so-called royal proclamation of February
1 has not only exposed the irrelevance of reformism in the Nepalese
politics, but also shattered the collective lethargy of the parliamentary
political politics".
Although the reinstatement
of the old parliament once again poses the danger of the relapse
of the "collective lethargy", the politically charged
Nepalese masses are ever watchful of the parliamentarist deviations.
Along with the issue of forming the Constituent Assembly, the
question of controlling the RNA is going to be one of the decisive
(and divisive) elements in the course of the Nepalese democratic
revolution.
This army has been the major
force behind enforcing the betrayal of the democratic aspirations
of the Nepalese people for more than five decades. Nevertheless,
as Marxist-Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai rightly notes, "any
common student of military science would know, the victory or
defeat of a particular army ultimately depends more on its social
class base and the political goal". And, "the feudal
reactionary nature of the royal army and its complete hegemonization
by the ruling Shah-Rana families may be gauged from the fact
that of the thirty commander-in-chiefs since 1835, twenty-six
belonged to the ruling Shah-Ranas and four to their close courtiers,
Thapa-Basnets. Hence, there should be no doubt, at least to the
progressive and modern-minded, that the current fight in Nepal
is précised for ending this age-old feudal tyranny and
to usher in a real democracy suited to the 21st century."
The RNA has been the major
"saboteur", "with the prompting of some foreign
powers" (whom we are all familiar with) in every peace talk
in Nepal. Its time-tested principal method of sabotage is senseless
massacres of the civilians in the name of defending its soldiers
against the revolutionaries while the peace process is going
on. In 2003, "the most serious and provocative incident
was the massacre of nineteen unarmed political activists by the
RNA in Doramba (Eastern Nepal) on the very day of start of third
round of talks on August 17".
Again, a few days back on April
29, on the eve of GP Koirala's swearing in ceremony as a result
of the mass upsurge that we saw recently, "Royal Nepalese
Army (RNA) launched an aerial attack on a peaceful mass meet
called by the CPN (Maoist) An RNA chopper rained bullets on the
mass meet organized in the jungle adjoining a human settlement",
where around 10,000 civilians were gathered for the program".
The RNA is definitely a major
concern, as it gets more and more desperate about its own future
with the debilitating royalty. International powers that have
been arming the reactionary RNA are already having meetings with
its chief and other officials, enquiring about their Will.
The recent visit of US Assistant
Secretary for South Asia, Richard Boucher is a pointer in this
regard. He did not meet with the beleaguered Monarch, rather
chose to remain satisfied with his direct meeting with the Army
chief Pyar Jung Thapa. On April 3, in a press conference after
the meeting, Boucher said in his reply to a question whether
he thinks "the Royal Nepalese Army is going to be one of
the decision makers in future instead of parliament":
"I don't think I quite
used the word decision maker, but I said something like that.
I think that the army is going to have a very important role
to play. The army has to help defend the nation; it has to help
defend the nation against threats. They also have to be able
to implement the ceasefire, and carry it out. So I wanted to
check with the army and see, first of all, that they were supporting
the political process, that they were supporting the civilian
leaders in Nepal, and second of all talk to them about how they
saw their job in the days ahead, and how, when a civilian leadership
wanted us to, we could support them in the future."
What a mode of professing a
civilian control over the RNA! A US official makes an official
visit to find the will of the Army chief directly, whether he
supports the political process or not, instead of asking the
government to ensure the submission of the RNA to the civilian
control.
However this incident is not
at all surprising, since US Ambassador James Moriarty's chief
job after the 12-point agreement between the parliamentary forces
and the Maoists last year has been to defend the RNA's existence
in every significant statement. He has been trying hard to mobilise
the moderate and wavering democrats, like GP Koirala and Deuba
who were the main exponents of using the army to crush People's
War till recently. Replicating Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty
- a Supervillain or the "Napoleon of Crime", the US
Ambassador time and again has been tying to make the democrats,
who lack Moriarty's "common sense", understand the
virtue of not weakening the RNA, which he calls, in one of his
nauseating self-proclaimed "provocative" speeches,
"the parties' one logical source of defense", despite
the well-known fact that it has never respected the 'democratic'
leadership.
If we can learn something from
the US' history of imperialist intervention and of nurturing
military juntas, we can at least be sure of the US' desperation
in Nepal to preclude the Nicaragua-type situation, where the
revolutionaries disbanded Somoza's army, and even after the Sandinistas'
defeat in 1990, the Sandinista Army remained as the popular national
army and the prime vehicle of democratisation (notwithstanding
a considerable dilution of the army's revolutionary character).
As an ex-Nicaraguan Army chief Joaquín Cuadra Lacayo said
in the year 2000 - "despite everything the Sandinista revolution
eventually led to free elections and democracy, and ...the Sandinista
People's Army became the National Army of Nicaragua.
For the first time in the history
of Latin America, an army that was born as a guerrilla force
and matured as part of a government became an army for the nation
without political overtones". In spite of the fact that
the ruling elite of Nicaragua has reversed the major gains of
the Sandinista Revolution, and the military is completely integrated
with the State, the popular revolutionary past of the Army officials
and Sandino's portraits in military headquarters and offices
still haunt the US and the local elites. An obvious question
for the global hegemony today is - where will the army be once
new radicalism that is gripping Latin America affects Nicaragua?
Obviously, the Nicaraguan arrangement can never keep paranoiac
imperialists at ease. Therefore ensuring a premature disarming
of the Maoists, without crushing the R(oyalty) of the RNA, is
the prime game plan of the international hegemonies and their
local cahoots in Nepal.
Only such design will ensure
the demobilisation of the revolutionary intent of the Nepalese
downtrodden that has been heightened during the decade-long People's
War, politically rejuvenating every section of the society. The
"imperialist network" fears that this rise of the red
scourge in this supposed "backwater" of global capitalism
will blow away the mirage of the new Asian "miracles"
in the region, who have been long fishing their booty in these
same "backwaters".
With the struggle of democratisation
at every level succeeding in Nepal, and the possibility of an
open mobilisation, by the "Maoism in the 21st century",
of the proletarians, semi-proletarians and poor peasantry, there
is a danger that the class conflict will spread throughout the
region, providing "plenty of recruits for Maoist armies
and other forms of resistance to global capitalism", as
Alex Callinicos puts it.
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