Even the most hawkish hardliner will grudgingly admit that there is no military solution to the present conflict. The Maoist leadership knows better than most that their People\'s War has in the past eight years turned an ornamental army into a powerful, battle-hardened force, made the monarchy more powerful, emasculated parliamentary parties, eroded the authority of constitutional organs and frittered away the early gains of their revolution by letting it get out of hand.
The military brass, for its part, will confess that killing fellow-Nepalis and being dragged down to fight a nasty civil war is not its idea of fun. No army wants to be bogged down in a guerrilla war against its own people in this kind of terrain. The military's argument is that the Maoists can be brought back to the negotiating table only by force of arms. The Maoist strategy is to hit hard at targets of their choice at regular intervals, while keeping the populace cowed down by terror.
By now it should be clear to both sides that they can't win, but they think that if they can drag it on long enough they won't really lose either. It's a classic vortex of violence: you keep fighting because if you don't, you have to talk. Societies in conflict reach such points of stalemate when they have exhausted all other options except the military one. But we haven't exhausted all other options, we haven't even tried out the most pragmatic, bloodless alternatives. There are viable compromises that have only been half-explored: ways around the locked positions on the constituent assembly.
This past week till press time, there have been 33 security forces personnel killed, upwards of 100 Maoists dead and uncounted non-combatants disappeared or dead. A housewife in Bhairawa is killed in her bedroom by a stray bullet fired by panic-stricken sentries shooting wildly at no one in particular. A student on a motorcycle in Pokhara is killed at a checkpoint by jittery police, after which, security forces guarding nearby offices start firing aimlessly at adjacent residential buildings thinking they are under attack. It turns out there were no Maoists after all in this phantom firefight.
If this is what happens with .303s, one shudders to think what kind of casualties there will be with more guns and even more lethal weapons. This war has unleashed an arms race, although sometimes it feels more like an alms race. With generous help from friends and neighbours, the Royal Nepali Army now has Belgian belt-ammo machine guns, American M-16s and Indian attack helicopters with gun pods. The army is now distributing guns to villagers and sacrificing the neutrality of civilians by turning them into combatants (See p6). Everywhere else in the world it has been tried, in Guatemala with PACs, in the Philippines with CAFGUs or in Angola, volunteer militias have degenerated into vigilante killing machines. Human rights violations have shot up and what remains of the social fabric lies in tatters. In our own conflict we have already seen how, once armed, village Maoist youth can get out of the leadership\'s control.
The way to end this war is not by giving the people more guns, but by ensuring their safety and security through a genuine peace process.
