OPEN LETTER TO THE U.S. AMBASSADOR ( MICHAEL E. M ALINOWSKI )
Mr. Ambassador,
It is quite sad that the Nepalese politics is
now repeating the well-known fable of two quarreling cats and a clever monkey.
The hectic activities of some foreign missions and open and loud remarks of
some ambassadors leave one in no doubt as to who calls the ultimate shot in the
corridors of power in Kathmandu. As the head of the mission of the sole super
power in the world and with a known McCarthyian ideological disposition for
long you have been the most visible and vocal in this enterprise. Hence without
any intention of pricking and instigating your super-power ego we would like to
put forth our point of view on some of the points you have raised against us in
public forum and media. We would here mostly confine ourselves to your address
to the Foundation of Nepalese in America, Nepal branch, on September 12, 2003 (
The Telegraph, Kathmandu, September 17, 2003 ) and your interview to Spotlight
Weekly ( September 19-25, 2003).
First of all, your infamous slandering us as
Hittler’s propaganda secretary, Goebbels, has been in utter public distaste and
well thrashed by Dr.Sunder Mani Dixit ( “Goebbel’s Style”, Kathmandu Post,
September 15 ). We only hope that you won’t put the good old Doctor in your
endless ‘terrorists’ list and target a Cruise missile at his popular clinic.
No, we have not made any false
propaganda against you and not pinpointed you as one of the chief wreckers of
the recent peace talks without sufficient reason and proof. Isn’t it true that
when the first round of peace talks were scheduled to start on April 27 last
you put us in the so-called “other terrorists” list on April 25 and
simultaneously signed a five-year “anti-insurgency” agreement with the royalist
regime ? This was accompanied by announcement of increase in annual military
and non-military aid from $ 24 million to $38 million, and pumping in of
undisclosed amount of sophisticated weapons and hundreds of military advisors
and trainers for the Royal Nepal Army (RNA). Was this timing just coincidental
? If you really wanted to encourage the success of the peace talks, as you
formally claim, couldn’t you have waited a bit longer for all that ? As they
say, one action speaks more louder than hundred words. And your words and deeds
don’t match.
In your ‘Address’ and ‘Interview’ you have
talked of “the lack of the Maoist’s credibility” and “deceitful return to
violence” and put all the blame on us for the breakdown of the peace talks. At
the same time you have heaped unabashed eulogy on the regressive royalist
regime and said, “I believed the package of reform proposals that they
presented during the third round of negotiations offered a solid foundation on
which to begin discussions on how to help the most vulnerable members of
Nepal’s population”.
Of course, you are free to choose your side. But this
way you have completely betrayed your professed commitment to democracy. The
so-called “reform proposals” by the royalist regime was nothing but a thinly veiled
ploy to legitimize and perpetuate the royal take- over last October 4. The
proposal did not address even the moderate 18-point demands of the five
agitating parliamentary parties, and hence was rightly rejected by them. Then
now could it meet our basic demands for structural changes to full-fledged
democracy ? And you think it “offered a
solid foundation”!! But ‘foundation’ for
what ? Democracy or royal
autocracy?
Any serious student of current political conflict in Nepal knows that the basic fight is between monarchy versus democracy. The whole thrust of the democratic movement since 1950 through 1990 to the present is the ultimate transfer of sovereignty and state authority usurped by the monarchy through its hold over the RNA to the sovereign people once for all. That is why we proposed the election to a constituent assembly, which is said to be the highest form of bourgeois democracy. You very well know constituent assembly is no ‘communist’ slogan. Then how can you say we lacked ‘credibility’ and were ‘deceitful ’ ? We are still prepared to stop the war and go for a free and fair election to a constituent assembly under an interim government. But is the monarchy prepared for that ?
You say in your interview,
“Resorting to armed struggle to force your views on the government and/or
general population is called terrorism, and that’s exactly what the Maoists are
engaged in.” No, Mr. Ambassador, your definition of
‘terrorism’ is not only completely off the mark but may put yourself in big
embarrassment. By this definition of yours, the father of your nation, George
Washington, would be the biggest ‘terrorist’, because he led Continental Army
in ‘armed struggle’ against the then colonial British ‘government’ in America.
Similarly your current boss George. W. Bush also can’t escape the tag of
‘terrorism’, as he too is resorting to
‘armed struggle’ to force his views on the ‘government’ of Saddam Hussein and
‘general population’ in Iraq.
Armed struggle per se is not called
terrorism. Perhaps it would serve you better if you read Prof. Paul Wilkinson,
a known authority on ‘terrorism’ and no Marxist by any chance. He says
“Terrorism is not a philosophy or a movement. It is a method.” ( Terrorism
Versus Democracy ). He further says, “….it is grossly misleading to
treat terrorism as a synonym for insurgency, guerilla warfare or political
violence in general. It can be objectively defined as a special method of armed struggle.” He
further damns persons of your ilk, “The tendency of modern governments to apply
the terms terror and terrorism exclusively to substate groups is blatantly dishonest and
self-serving.”
You should also know that Marxist-Leninists-Maoists
have always discarded and denounced ‘terrorism’ as a particular method of war,
but do not rule out selective ‘red terror’ as a counter to ‘white terror’. You
should also remember that the term ‘reign of terror’ was the product of the great
French Revolution after the deeds of the famous Jacobins.
You have tried to demonize us on the
basis of some isolated incidents of unintended loss of life during some
sabotage actions. Hence you very gleefully say, “My God, we saw a school child
killed the other day. This shows that the Maoists do not have any compunction
against taking life.” We know you are referring to the case of Deepak Gurung.
Our Party has already expressed deep regret for the tragic incident. But such
isolated cases do not make us terrorist , as Prof. Wilkinson rightly says, “it
sometimes happens that acts of sabotage do result in loss of life, but in such
cases this is no terrorism as the loss of life was not intended by the saboteurs.”
What an irony that the perpetrators of worst genocide in Iraq and
elsewhere are shedding crocodile tears over the accidental death of a school
child in Kathmandu ? Isn’t it the perfect case of devil reciting the
scriptures?
And you very conveniently push under the carpet the cases of daily massacre of dozens of unarmed persons by the RNA, like the cold blooded murder of 20 persons in Doramba (eastern Nepal) on August 17, which has been corroborated even by the official National Human Rights Commission. Isn’t it hypocritical that those who try to demonize us for selected execution of informers and criminals under different professional or political garbs, keep mum when dozens are gunned down by the RNA in fake encounters ? How can it be an ‘encounter’, when dozens are killed but the RNA manages to capture only some vague ‘socket bombs’ or just ‘a lot of logistics’ ? When the Maoists kill somebody they are, ‘ social workers’, ‘journalists’, ‘teachers’ etc., but when the RNA kills somebody they are just ‘Maoists’!! What a double standard and travesty of justice/ morality!!
We don’t know whom
you are trying to fool when you say, “I think when they came above
ground during this last ceasefire they were
unpleasantly surprised by how little support they
were able to garner from the Nepalis themselves, from civil society, or from the international community.” Do you really think so, Mr. Ambassador ? Then we must really pity your poor information and intelligence services, if you are not deliberately fooling yourself. It is not we but you must have been “unpleasantly surprised” by the unprecedented and overwhelming support enjoyed by us among the masses both in rural and urban areas, intelligentsia, media and the international community during our seven-month overground period. Have you so conveniently forgotten the massive turn-out of the people ranging from 50 to 100 thousand in every mass meeting we organized in Kathmandu (April 2), Dhangadi (April 22), Janakpur (April 26), Dang ( May 1), Gorkha ( June 8 ) and elsewhere ? Could any other political party, or the King, for that matter, demonstrate such massive public support anywhere during the period ? What about a host of cartoons published in leading national dailies those days lampooning the poor attendance in public meetings where our talk-team members were not attending as chief guests ? And you still think we had ‘little support’ among the people!! You are free to live in a fool’s paradise. As per the support of international community, everybody knows that we had positive response from everybody except your embassy. Rather you should be ‘unpleasantly surprised’ that most of the foreign missions were eager to meet with us despite your overt or covert warning against that. Don’t you feel rather embarrassed that your country, USA, could garner the support of only three other countries, that too same old puppet Israel and two nonentities, Micronesia and Marshall Islands, in the recent UN General Assembly vote on Palestine, and you have the cheeks to question our international support?
Very good!! With this funny logic,
‘democracy’ is also a ‘foreign ideology’. That is why you must have been
promoting all ‘homegrown’ and ‘native’ military dictatorships, monarchies and
Sultanates in most of the third world countries. But what about the preacher
himself; is he a ‘native’ or a ‘foreigner’ to Nepal ? We don’t want to enter
into a futile polemic with you whether the philosophy of communism is
discredited, or the philosophy of imperialism is discredited. But we very much
understand how the imperialist world works!! Thanks to good old American
scholars like Paul Sweezy, William Hinton, Noam Chomsky and others, and
newspapers and magazines like Monthly Review, Revolutionary Worker
and others published from the USA. We don’t hate everything ‘foreign’, as you
very hypocritically seem to preach to your puppets in Nepal. We see everything
in a class perspective, and find a lot of friends even in the USA.
You have revealed your super-power
arrogance and imperialist designs in the interview thus: “We …will step in when
we see freedom violated and our interests threatened. We have our interest and
the interest of our friends in mind so where we can help out and we are asked
to help out then we will.”
But whose ‘freedom’ you are talking
about ? There are different ‘freedoms’ for different classes of people in a
class-divided society. If you step in to defend the ‘freedom’ of the monarchy
and its genocidal RNA, then we are obliged to resist it to establish and defend
the freedom of overwhelming majority of the people reeling under class,
national, gender and caste oppression under the autocratic monarchical regime. The
real essence of our People’s War lies in this.
As, per your unabashed super-power arrogance, we would just like to
remind you what the late George Bernard Shaw said: ‘Rome fell; Babylon fell;
Scarsdale’s turn will come’. And also it may be useful for you to read Prof.
Paul Kennedy’s emphatic conclusion in his monumental work The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, where he says, “In the largest sense of all,
therefore, the only answer to the question increasingly debated by the public
of whether the United States can preserve its existing position is ‘no’- for it
simply has not been given to any one society to remain permanently ahead
of all the others, because that would imply a freezing of the differentiated
pattern of growth rates, technological advance, and military developments which
has existed since time immemorial.’’
In the end, Mr. Ambassador, we would
like to stress what we have time and again made it clear that the current fight
in Nepal is between an obscurantist feudal monarchy and a broad democracy,
ranging from the bourgeois to the proletarian. Our immediate agenda has been to
complete a bourgeois democratic revolution in the country and not to impose any
communist system. Though in a future democracy everybody will be free to
propagate and practice his/her ideology and philosophy in a peaceful manner.
Since the whole country is now
united to fight against the autocratic monarchy and its genocidal RNA, we are
politely asking all foreign powers, particularly the USA and our immediate
neighbors India and China, not to interfere in our internal affairs and let the
Nepalese people choose their destiny themselves. We are committed to have good diplomatic and
working relations with all foreign countries in the future.
The essence of democracy , as they say, is to agree to disagree. Isn’t it ?
24 September 2003
Baburam
Bhattarai
International
Department
C.P.N.
(Maoist)