Photo: IRIN  | | A sick child at Rajana IDP (internally displaced persons) camp. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people are thought to have been internally displaced since the start of the conflict in February 1996. |
A sick child at Rajana IDP (internally displaced persons) camp. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people are thought to have been internally displaced since the start of the conflict in February 1996.
Credit: IRIN |
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Since the start of the Maoist insurgency in February 1996, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people are thought to have been internally displaced in Nepal. Largely from rural communities, the displaced have fled violence and economic hardship. The majority live with relatives in temporary accommodation or on abandoned plots in towns, or in the capital Kathmandu.
Up to 2 million more may have become migrant labourers working in India or elsewhere.
Many displaced people would rather not be identified as such, lest they attract the attention of Nepal's security forces. As a result, data on internally displaced persons (IDPs) are scarce: details on where people are located and what conditions they are living under, sketchy.
When he visited Nepal in April 2005, Dennis McNamara, the United Nations Special Adviser on Internal Displacement, concluded that it was “difficult to describe who [was] being displaced by conflict”.
Assessments of IDPs in Kathmandu and the city of Nepalganj, indicate especially poor nutritional status and vulnerability among IDPs. Women are thought particularly vulnerable, with local NGOs reporting a rise in sex work and trafficking as displaced women struggle to make a living.
In Rukum district, targeted attacks by local Maoist guerrillas have forced some families to seek the relative protection of the district headquarters of Musikot. Typically, individuals have been singled out by local Maoists because they are government workers, or perceived as sympathisers.
Bir Bahadur Gharti was the former village head of Hokum, three days’ walk from Musikot. After six years of harassment by Maoists, he was eventually forced to leave with his family for the district headquarters when the police post in his village was abandoned. Twenty-five other families from his village, a quarter of the entire community, have fled in recent years.
“I was repeatedly attacked and beaten by the Maoists for being the headman in the village. I survived by the will of God. I should have been dead a long time ago,” he said. The final straw came when local Maoists seized Gharti’s house and possessions. “They even took my ornaments, silver, all my furniture, livestock and the house.”
His family now lives in an empty house near a mountain top airstrip. With his extended family of 10 - ranging in age from 14 months to 60 - he moved initially into Musikot, only venturing back out to take possession of the abandoned home he currently inhabits, about 3 km away.
Balaram Buda and his wife lost son in the crossfire between the security force and the rebels.
Credit: Naresh Newar/IRIN |
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Gharti's family was given a resettlement grant of 6,000 Nepalese Rupees (US $87) by the chief district officer with the approval of a local army colonel. The four women in his family were trained as weavers to provide a means of livelihood.
Male members work as wage earners, but the work is irregular. “Sometimes we carry loads for the air passengers, but there is a mad rush for these jobs. So we carry stones for construction here and there. We also work in the quarry or go down to the river and carry sand up if people need it,” Gharti said.
The family expects to be displaced again, this time by the army, which wants to reclaim the house they are in. Despite its proximity to the garrisoned town, the male members of the family do not spend the night in the house. Every evening they go into the town itself before dusk, leaving behind the women and children. “We don’t feel safe, even here,” he said.
Gharti said there were 13 families displaced nearby, and more elsewhere in Musikot. Most of those displaced first were political workers, subjected like Gharti, to attacks by the Maoists who wanted to uproot political opposition and government presence in the villages.
More recently displaced families had gravitated to the district hub for greater security.
The conflict had affected every aspect of life, said Gharti. “There’s not enough to eat, not enough for us to survive on. There is no security. You can’t live with your family. A lot of families have been displaced, a lot have been broken up. Young kids are heading out. It’s a total disaster.”
He saw no end in sight, and said people had reached breaking point.
Rukum district is a renowned Maoist stronghold, one of the first districts to witness the rebellion in 1996. But after almost a decade of violence, the Maoists appear to have failed to win the support of the people, alienating themselves from the population.
“It’s all the force of the gun. Even when you are doing your best, there have been reckless killings of anyone who dares to raise their voice to say ‘we have no money, we can’t feed you’. They just kill you,” Gharti said.
Deteriorating Conditions
Nepal’s first IDP camp sprung up in 2004, when a “significant number of displaced” settled in Rajhena camp, near Nepalganj. Since then, the IDPs have been subject to a stream of visits by local and international teams, although they maintain that this has led to little concrete help.
A recent survey by an international non-government organisation (NGO), Terre Des Hommes, found poor nutritional conditions among displaced children in the district, particularly those from female headed families whose husbands were working in India. The survey established that 59 percent of under threes screened were underweight and 16 percent were emaciated.
Although this was alarming, the results for Nepal as a whole are equally poor. According to the Nepal Human Development Report for 2004, “nearly 63 percent of children under five suffered from chronic malnutrition”.
In another rapid assessment of displaced people in Kathmandu, a local NGO, HimRights, in June reported IDP coping mechanisms to be “near exhaustion”. Overwhelmingly, the motives for leaving home were linked to the threat of forced recruitment or extortion by the Maoists, fear of reprisals by the security forces and a general climate of insecurity and poverty.
The most alarming new development with respect to displacement, has been the emergence of village defence committees in some districts. The committees are pro-government vigilante groups that the state takes no responsibility for.
In Kapilbastu district, hundreds of houses were burnt down when village defence committees attacked people suspected of being pro-Maoist. Over 30,000 people were initially estimated to have fled to India as a result of those attacks, though many have since slowly trickled back to their homes, according to aid officials in the capital.
Migration
Gharti said he had relatives working in Qatar and Malaysia. One of his daughters said her husband had been in Malaysia for three years, but that she had not received any money from him. “He only sends letters occasionally. He might have trouble making ends meet as he has two wives,” she said.
This pattern is typical, with elders staying in villages while younger people obtain visas and documents to work in India or overseas.
The rebels have asked the IDPs to return to their villages, but they have given no assurance that returning villagers will be given back land and property the Maoists have seized.
Credit: Naresh Newar/IRIN |
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Local NGO groups monitoring Nepal’s border crossings with India, have reported large numbers of young men crossing into India, but say making sense of these movements is difficult without more data.
Some aid agencies have considered approaching Indian universities to assist them with analysing the movement of Nepalis into India, to help better understand the dynamics.
Anjana Shakya of HimRights maintains that an exodus of young Nepali men is under way. “It’s not well-documented, but there are planes full of young men leaving the country weekly for India, Qatar, Thailand and Malaysia. They have little choice.”
Following the massacre of 12 Nepali hostages in Iraq in September 2004, and the subsequent riots in Kathmandu, Shakya visited India's economic capital, Mumbai, to assist Nepalis stranded by the airline suspensions. Despite the risks of travelling to Iraq, she found Nepalis barely put off by the risk of being taken hostage or killed – an indication, she said, of just how bad conditions were for many back home.
Vulnerable Women
Sarada Dangi, coordinator of a children’s NGO in Musikot, said a large number of women had been displaced to the district headquarters.
“In some instances, the husband has been killed. In others, the man goes abroad to earn money in India, Qatar or Malaysia. The women often stay behind, making them extremely vulnerable,” she said.
Dangi said that she knew of at least 15 women who rented rooms in the town and distilled their own alcohol. Some of these desperate women “offered other services”. They were patronised by the security forces, Dangi noted. “If the conflict continues, we’re going to see a dramatic rise in prostitution as people need to survive,” Dangi said.
Mankumari Bista has been an IDP since her husband was killed by rebels five years ago. Many displaced women like her are living in extreme poverty, without any support from the government or international humanitarian agencies.
Credit: Naresh Newar/IRIN |
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These conditions are also prompting women to seek opportunities abroad. Local NGO Saathi has reported an increasing number of women leaving villages. Many of these women are falling prey to traffickers.
On the busy, open border post with India, near Nepalganj, Pushpa Rana and her colleagues monitor movements across the frontier. Over the last year and a half, Saathi has intercepted 70 girls being taken across the border crossing against their will or knowledge.
The NGO has also counselled 1,000 women on the risks of working in India, especially the risk of brokers who might lure them into brothels. “We just want them to be aware of that, so they don’t fall prey to these characters who would exploit them,” Rana said.
Rana said that the women she intercepted being taken across the border by minders had different levels of understanding as to what was happening. “About 40 percent were entirely innocent and unaware that they were crossing over into India. They had assumed that Nepalganj was in fact Kathmandu and they were travelling to another part of Nepal,” she said.
Other women had been led to understand they were being taken to Arab countries. In some cases, women knew the risks, but went voluntarily as they felt they had no option.
A surprising number of women came from the district of Sindhupalchok in central Nepal, and were told that they would be carpet weavers in Kathmandu.
Rana said there were also a number of women from the local IDP camp near Nepalganj who had been trafficked to become sex workers in big Indian cities.
The human trafficking business is not new in Nepal. “What is new is that the conflict has displaced a lot of women, many of whom are young, typically between 20 to 35 years old," Rana said. "In many cases, these women are married but don’t have their husbands around. They need to look after their families. These women are prime targets for traffickers. Many of them go across the border. They are not educated and consider going across border as one way to earn a living.”
[ENDS]
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