Be Ready for Fresh Revolt: Prachanda
Nepalgunj, Sep 9/ CPN-Maoist chairman Prachanda on Saturday directed party cadres to be ready for another revolution. He was addressing a workshop of the Tharuwan Rajya Samiti (TRS) in Bhurigaun of Bardiya. Some 500 key TRS leaders and cadres including district presidents, secretaries, committee members and office-bearers of TRS’ sister organisations are attending the workshop that will continue tomorrow also.
Prachanda said revolution was necessary as the government had still not laid the foundation for the constituent assembly election. “The CA can’ be set up under pressure. Therefore, be ready for another revolution,” he said.
Prachanda said that within 10 days the Maoists would try and arrive at a fresh agreement with the seven political parties. Failing this, the Maoists will start their revolution from September 18. He added that unless the political aims were fulfilled, there was no point setting up the constituent assembly.
Prachanda also said that the CPN-Maoist is preparing to convene a round-table conference of all left forces on September 11, adding that efforts will be made to form a new struggle committee of the Maoists and the left forces to jointly launch the revolution.
Speaking to the media at the Nepalgunj airport before returning to Kathmandu, Prachanda iterated that the possibility of the CA poll taking place was getting remote. “The government has not laid the foundation for the CA polls. Therefore, I have directed my party to be ready for another revolution,” he said. He said that atmosphere was not conducive for holding the CA polls, adding that holding the election in such a scenario would be fatal for the nation.
The CA polls can be held only after the government concedes the 22-point charter of demands put forward by his party, said Prachanda. “The seven parties should work harder to create an atmosphere for the polls. Holding the polls in a situation like this would be a farce. The CA polls should be truly historic to be memorable,” he said.
Ruling out the necessity of deploying the army during the polls, Prachanda said that if security arrangements were tightened that would suffice. He insisted that the Maoist People’s Liberation Army also should be deployed during the polls if the Nepal Army is.
Prachanda said the CPN-Maoist was firm in its stand that the nation should be declared a republic before the CA polls. Referring to the recent blasts in Kathmandu, he said that it proved that the atmosphere was not right for the polls. He lauded the Nepali Congress party’s decision to go for a federal democratic republic, adding that it would certainly help in creating a proper situation for the polls.
Meanwhile, a Maoist party source said Prachanda, CPN-UML general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal and Ekta Kendra general secretary Prakash also discussed the ideal model of a republic during their recently held talks.
Though I too tendered hopes, I never had great expectations for what they call the peace process as it has been framed. Not because peace is undesirable and that one should prefer war — to the contrary, like the great Black American leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, I feel that war is always evil and that only evil can come of it — but because the problem in Nepal is not peace or war but how the country’s communities, both human and natural, are being re-integrated into the world political economy in an age of global corporate governance.
Nothing is being done about the problem of almost universal rural debt and unequal distribution of property. Nothing is being done about the dismantling and destruction of communities and draft of Nepal’s young people into urban labor and flesh trade markets. Nothing is being done about the destruction of the urban environment in Kathmandu and other cities. Nothing is being done to turn the process of designing a new government over to the communities to be governed. If peace negotiations are to have any meaning, all these issues and many more must be on the table.
In fact, the whole thrust of twentieth-century new colonialists such as USAID and the international development banks has been to push for extending inequality, in what they call “privatization” and farming out governmental functions to international contractors, and protecting the creditors against all other claims, both human and natural, while opening up local markets and communities to the free entry of gigantic international corporations. These corporations, owned by stock holders and bankers indifferent except to their dividends and interest, directed by overcompensated gray suits in climate-controlled office towers looking down from the skies of the great metropolitan capitals, have basically no understanding of what it takes to run an agrarian society, and I might add, any society. The same people that call themselves peacemakers are for the most part involved hand-in-hand in this process and take it to be the normative starting point of their negotiations.
Violence can be the only outcome of such a peace process, framed as it is by outsiders as a state of “no war,” which means passive compliance, based however on conditions of increasing subordination of the country of Nepal to international bankers and contractors. The question is whether the world’s peoples should to their communities and environments crumbling around themselves and call it peace, or resist it and try to give substance to a different vision of the world. My caveat to this is that the ends will necessarily take form in the means, and that no ends can justify unjust or evil means: War cannot be Peace; Freedom cannot be Slavery; Ignorance is never Strength; and Lies are never Truth.
Comment by Stephen Mikesell — September 11, 2007 @ 5:02 pm