3 May is World Press Freedom Day

Like many other things in life, you don’t know how important press freedom is until someone takes it away from you. Freedom of expression is such a wholesome concept no-one could possibly be against it. Yet press freedom is threatened around the world, and not just in totalitarian states.

There are many myths about press freedom, and another one is that it protects the rights of journalists. Not so. Freedom of expression is actually the right of all citizens, journalists are just the defenders of the public’s right to know.

For many of us doing day-to-day journalism in fragile states and transitional democracies press freedom is not just an ideal. In Nepal, our publication has been threatened by both the extreme left and the extreme right for upholding the values of press freedom, democracy and non-violence. In December 2008, our office was vandalised by goons belonging to the ruling party who physically assaulted staff members and me. The attack on our publication was trivial compared to what journalists in Nepal and other parts of the world have to face in their pursuit of independent journalism.

As a jury member of the Guillermo Cano-UNESCO Press Freedom Award for five years in the 2000s, I was struck by the courage and fortitude shown by many nominees from all over the world in their pursuit of the truth. Some paid for it with their lives, others were gravely wounded, and many were tortured and imprisoned.

The other myth about press freedom is that it is threatened only in repressive states. In fact in democracies, too, civil society and media have to be vigilant about the media being squeezed by politicians, state institutions and the market. In these countries the media is part of the political-industrial complex where the press is often used to propel politicians to power. Demagogues get elected because their jingoism and populism is magnified by a media beholden to them, and when they assume office they proceed to dismantle the very institutions that got them elected so as to perpetuate their rule. Press freedom and democracy are two sides of the same coin. If one is weak, the other side is also weakened. An independent, strong media supports democracy and vice versa.

Over-commercialisation of the media industry has also led to what John Pilger calls ‘censorship by exclusion’ where negative, unpalatable news are dropped because of advertising pressure. Thus the public service role of media is severely undermined.

In Nepal, when an autocratic regime tried to censor our newspaper we went to press with white spaces where the paragraphs were expunged. Radio stations that were ordered not to broadcast news, only music, started defiantly singing the news from their studios. Press freedom doesn’t come with any warranty; it has to be defended by its maximum application even in countries with long traditions of free press. Threats to media freedom don’t just come from tyrants and dictators, they come from owners who see it as just another business, from under-motivated journalists, and publishers who prefer trivia because it is cheaper and safer than doing serious in-depth journalism.

Chapter from the publication ‘Pressing for Freedom: 20 Years of World Press Freedom Day’ issued by UNESCO for the Press Freedom Day commemoration in Costa Rica on 3 May 2013.

The book can be viewed on pdf here.

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Everest rage is a result of the clash of two distinct climbing styles in the Himalaya, and was bound to happen sooner or later

On the month that Nepal is preparing to mark the 60^th anniversary of the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Sherpa, the news of gangland-style fight on Mt Everest has come as a brutal reminder of just how much climbing has changed.

The partnership between Hillary and Tenzing marked the beginning of a long tradition of teamwork between Sherpas and their mountaineer employers who valued their stamina, endurance and sure-footedness at high altitude. But the under-current of resentment between the ‘sahibs’ and their hired help had been growing. It reached boiling point last Saturday on the Western Cwm.

A Buddha figure on the summit of Mount Everest.

The incident on 27 April on the Lhotse Face below Camp III has shaken the mountaineering world, and divided the tourism fraternity into distinct camps depending on whose version of events they believe more. But the bottom line is that the worldwide publicity has hurt the reputation of both sides in the mountain fight.

It has also drawn attention to the over-commercialisation of the Everest industry that got international attention after the book and film ‘Into Thin Air’ by Jon Krakauer about the traffic jams on the summit ridge of Everest that led to the tragic loss of 12 lives in the spring of 1996.

The clash is between purists in mountaineering who say that the pioneering spirit of exploration and adventure has been eroded by large commercial expedition-style assaults on the mountain. Expedition climbing is a part of the Sherpas’ livelihood.

Jonathan Griffith (r), Ueli Steck (l) on a Facebook picture on the way to Kathmandu.

The fist-fight near Camp 3 this week between Sherpas and three world renowned Alpine-style climbers has been jokingly called the highest brawl in world history, and got worldwide attention in media, blogs and social networks.

Jonathan Griffith from Britain, Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Simone Moro from Italy climb Alpine-style which means they do not use Sherpas and climb in small groups of two or three without oxygen to climb some of the world’s most difficult faces.

Moro climbed Shisha Pangma South (8008 m) without oxygen in 27 hours in 1996, using skis in the descent from 7100 m. It was during his winter ascent of Annapurna South Face that his climbing companions Anatoli Boukreev and Dimitri Sobolev were killed in an avalanche.Steck climbed the difficult north face of Eiger when he was 18, and is reputedly one of the three best alpinists in Europe. He was part of the daring but unsuccessful rescue bid of Spanish climber Iñaki Ochoa de Olza in 2008, who had collapsed at nearly 8,000 m on Annapurna.

In this week’s fight, Steck sustained facial injuries from a rock thrown at him, and Moro survived a knife attack that hit his belt when a group of nearly 100 Sherpas attacked their tents when they descended to Camp II.

Simone Moro’s Facebook profile picture.

Jon Griffith told the Guardian: “There was a 50-minute period where we all thought we were going to get stoned to death.”

The attack was triggered by an altercation on the treacherous Lhotse Face where the Sherpas from different expeditions were fixing ropes. The trio were climbing freely, and had to traverse the rope at one particularly exposed spot on the slope.

The Sherpas say the three climbers continued climbing even after being asked not to, and at one point they met near the rope. Moro is said to have hurled expletives in Nepali at the Sherpas, as well as on the open walkie-talkie. Back at Camp II, it got physical.

Says a Namche-based businessman, echoing a popular sentiment there: “The western media as usual is lapping up the blogs by these three guys and the Sherpas haven’t had a chance to tell their side of the story. The three flouted the etiquette of mountaineering and demeaned them with foul language.”

On Monday at base Camp, Moro and his team and the Sherpas had a meeting in which both sides acknowledged their mistakes and promised not to repeat it.

Garrett Madison, a five-time Everest summiteer and guide wrote the first objective account of the fight in a blog on Outside Online saying: ‘In climbing … Mt Everest all the teams collaborate in working together to ultimately achieve a mutual goal to reach the top safely, and the Sherpa are a major part of this goal. I sincerely hope that this incident does not damage how the Sherpas perceive the foreigners who come to climb on their mountain.’

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Kunda Dixit’s speech on 9 March 2013 to the graduating A-Level class of St Xavier’s College Kathmandu.

Our job as journalists is to report on the speeches of politicians, not to give speeches ourselves. Maybe the real reason you invited me here is because I am a double graduate of St Xaviers. After passing out from St Xaviers High School in Godavari, I went on to college in St Xavier’s Bombay.

After getting my first masters in microbiology, I decided that injecting laboratory rats was not what I wanted to do so I got another masters in journalism from Columbia University. After that I worked for BBC Radio in New York and became a foreign correspondent covering conflicts across Asia. In 1997, I returned to Nepal to start our publications.

I soon found out that covering a war in your own country is completely different from covering other people’s wars. Unlike war correspondents covering battles, we had to learn to look for the roots of conflict. The seeds of war are laid in peace time, the precursors of violence lie in prevailing inequality, injustice and intolerance.

But as we have seen in the past seven years, the end of the war hasn’t meant peace. We struggle to find leaders with vision, integrity and statesmanship and a system of governance that will ensure equity and justice into the future.

The favorite Nepali past-time is not to gamble at cards, it is to find nasty things to say about each other. Of course, not all Nepalis are like that but the loudest, most privileged, best educated and most well off among us just can’t bear to see fellow-Nepalis get ahead.

We overlook the visible faults in ourselves but spend endless hours dissecting the imagined shortcomings of fellow-Nepalis. Just look at politicians, they can’t say or do anything that gives us hope—all they do day in and day out is run each other down. And we in the media spread the cynicism by treating politics as one big endless quarrel.

This obsession with finding fault is self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling and self-defeating. It is this refusal to see any goodness in our own kind that I think is at the heart of Nepal’s present crisis. We love to whine and we love to play victim, it is as if we want Nepal to fail so that our own catastrophic predictions will be proven right. It is as if we need Nepal to stay poor because that would give us the excuse we need to emigrate, or to do nothing.

I just got back yesterday from Dadeldhura and Doti districts. In those rugged mountains of far-western Nepal ravaged by poverty and conflict, what struck me was that despite their desperation and despair the people still had faith in the future, they still had hope. It is the legendary capacity of the Nepali people to confront and survive hardships, it is our reliance on each other and our communities that makes us strong.

What a contrast to be back here in Kathmandu. It is us, the most-privileged Nepalis, who are the most cynical about ourselves. It is here in the pampered capital with all its relative affluence that we wallow in pessimism and low self-esteem.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, what is there to be positive about? But, let’s face it, it’s not original anymore to complain about the load-shedding, the shortage of water or petrol, the garbage and pollution, or the political instability, corruption and bandhs. These are all givens. When everyone faces the same problems, it’s not cool anymore to complain about them.

The real question is what are we doing, individually or as communities, to make things better? How determined are we to make a difference? Do you curse the darkness, or do you install a solar panel? Do you complain about water shortage or harvest the rain? Do you complain about the garbage, or sort and recycle your waste?

It is when the going gets tough that the tough get going. Like Dikshya Chapagain, who rescues women abandoned in the streets. Like Pushpa Basnet, a graduate of your school’s social work program, who helps children of mothers who are in jail. Like Hari Bairagi who, instead of complaining about politics, went back to his home district of Sankhuwasabha rehabilitated two hydropowerplants, started selling the electricity to finance three colleges in Khandbari. Or Bhakta Bahadur Balayar, whom I met in Doti last week, who decided it was better to give up politics than to keep complaining about it. He now runs a community-managed school and hospital in a district with one of the lowest literacy and child survival rates in the country.

All that is wrong with Nepal, our rulers, our society are a result of the collective failure of previous generations. It is tragic that we have passed on to you, today’s graduating students, a Nepal that is in tatters. But here at St Xaviers you have been given the tools to surmount the problems. It is not what you learn that matters, it is how you use what you learn.

Like any product, Nepal is a brand. We Nepalis are its brand builders. You, graduates, are Nepal’s brand ambassadors. Wherever you go in the world, whatever you do, whenever you excel in studies or sports, whenever you show simple acts of kindness and compassion, whenever you do well, the country does well. Nepal does well.

Let’s all invest our energy on making ourselves proud to be Nepali. Individually and collectively let’s celebrate what is still good about Nepal: our incredible natural beauty, our immense diversity, our dignified and hardworking people, our generosity and sense of self-worth.

All it needs is for us to believe a little more in ourselves, and to give back to society only a bit of what our society gave to us. We owe it to our motherland, it’s the only one we will ever have.

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The Far Western districts of Nepal have a reputation for being neglected and more under-developed than the rest of the country. But in the past 15 years, they have taken great strides in transportation, infrastructure and child and maternal survival.

There are now roads in almost all the VDCs of Dadeldhura and Doti and the two districts are linked to once-remote Achham, Bajura, Bajhang, and even Darchula. There is now 3G mobile connection in the district capitals and signals all along the smoothly paved highways.

Dadeldhura’s maternal mortality rate was worse than sub-Saharan Africa 20 years ago, with more than 1,500 out of 100,000 dying at childbirth. Today, that figure is 450. Under-five child mortality has come down by more than half.

This is the photo report by Kunda Dixit in Doti.

A girl child holds a rhododendron to welcome visitors to the village of Domada in Dadeldhura. Female literacy is up to 50 per cent in a district where till recently only 10 per cent of girls went to school.

Pylons are being put up to bring 30MW of electricity from the Chameliya plant in Darchula which will be finished next year. The project has been delayed due to local extortion and threats.

Healthy winter monsoons have watered rain-fed terraces of wheat on the border between Doti and Dadeldhura, promising a good harvest this year.

Sunrise in Dadeldhura reveals layers of hills shaded by morning mist and hazy outline of the Api-Saipal range in Humla to the north.

The West Seti river as it meanders past Dipayal. A planned 200m high dam impounding a 20 sq km reservoir to generate 750MW of power for export to India has been delayed by 15 years, and its construction would give a big boost to the economy of the region.

Gauri Devi Bhatt and her son in their kitchen with her Rs 200 smoke-free improved stove that has reduced her daily workload to gather firewood and educed lung and eye infections.

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The next general election is up for grabs to anyone who can guarantee integrity, vision and good governance

At last it looks like the top leaders of the main parties have agreed to agree. In public, they all say they all want elections, but who knows what they really want?

All this week, while a task force was meeting in Kathmandu to iron out the details of the constitutional and logistical provisions for elections, the top leaders fanned out across the country addressing supporters and accusing each other of trying to sabotage elections. In a sense, the speeches were campaign-style tirades. The parties are already in campaign mode.

Whatever the outcome of the Supreme Court verdict on the writ petition challenging the legality of the U-Maoist proposal to make Chief Justice Khil Raj Regmi the head of an election government, the question is not ‘if’ there will be elections, but ‘when’. June is out of the question, even November is looking iffy given the hemming and hawing from party leaders, so May 2014 may be a safe bet.

But none of the parties want Regmi to be at the helm for too long. The Maoist-Madhesi coalition led the most corrupt government in Nepal’s democratic history, and they have amassed a commendable war-chest to finance an election win, but this ill-gotten hoard will deplete the longer they are out of power. The opposition is underfunded for polls, especially if it gets really dirty.

Whenever they decide to face voters, all parties will be desperate for a win, which makes it all the more important to have the mechanisms in place, the rules laid out and agreed, the laws passed. This is a formidable task, and renewing voter lists, demarcating constituencies that reflect new population densities, and requiring photo IDs for voters are questions with deep political ramifications. There is also a strong case to have local elections in June or November, preceding general elections.

But the first order of business is to have a whole Election Commission, and the easiest thing to do would be to re-commission commissioners who were retired earlier this year. Voter registration efforts need to go into top gear. Not only does it have to keep pace with population growth to include those who have grown up to voting age since 2008, women voters as well as those from excluded communities need to be given IDs. For this, all those eligible for citizenship should have citizenship papers. It is a gross violation of human rights to disenfranchise Nepalis currently stateless just because their Nepali fathers are missing. Provisions have to be made for absentee voting by the nearly 3 million Nepalis outside Nepal.

The integrity of the voting process itself needs to be ensured: minimising cheating, booth-capturing, vote-buying, intimidation, violations of the election code that were rampant in 2008. In their hurry to get the elections over and done with, international observers prematurely declared those polls free and fair. The Maoists would probably have won anyway, but by a much smaller margin had the voting been cleaner.

We can’t afford a flawed election this time, when the conditions are, if anything, more difficult. The Annual Himalmedia Public Opinion Poll that are conducted annually sampling more than 4,000 respondents all over the country shows this year that there is huge disillusionment with the political parties.

This year’s opinion poll results which will be carried on Sunday’s edition of Himal Khabarpatrika and next Friday’s issue of this newspaper indicate the popularity ratings of all political leaders have all fallen to the single digits and are too close to call. The proportion of those who either didn’t know or hadn’t decided has exceeded 40 per cent.
The next general elections is up for grabs to any political party that can show it has integrity, vision and the managerial skills to guarantee good governance — even a completely new party with fresh faces.

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Mahabir Pun needs help to scale up his award-winning work in a remote Kaski village to the national level

KUNDA DIXIT

Mahabir Pun won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 for his project to bring wireless Internet to rural Nepal, but he found out last week that the Internet was also a great way to remotely get through to the prime minister.

Mahabir Pun. Photo: Kishor Rimal

Pun had met Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai a year ago to discuss his pet idea to set up a National Innovation Centre to promote creativity and generate jobs so Nepalis don’t have to migrate abroad for work. Bhattarai had nodded, said it was a great idea and instructed his office to implement it.

As expected, nothing happened. Whenever he came to Kathmandu from his native village in Myagdi, Pun followed up with the ministries and all he got was smiles, pats on the back and nodding of heads. Last week, Pun vented his frustration with a direct Tweet to the Prime Minister’s Twitter handle, @brb_laaldhwoj, and in a message posted on the listserv of NNSD (Nepal Network for Social, Economic and Environmental Dialogue) whose members include Nepal’s top academics, civil society activists, politicians and bureaucrats.

‘After talking to responsible political leaders, high level bureaucrats, development agencies, and educated elites in Kathmandu for more than a year, I have a feeling now that nobody cares about the immense need of one innovation center in Nepal in order to uplift Nepal from a beggar nation to a well-to-do nation,’ Pun began his passionate appeal.

He went on to lament that while donor agencies poured billions of dollars into Nepal, no one seemed interested in stemming the haemorrhage of working age people out of the country. He said he was shocked to read in the papers that the cabinet had sanctioned Rs 3 billion buy helicopters for the Nepal Army.

‘If government has that much money to buy helicopters, how come it cannot provide half a billion rupees as loan to help start an innovation center?’ Pun asked. Pun has registered a non-profit company called Nepal Abiskar Kendra with noted ex-bureaucrats like Rameswor Khanal, the man behind the Chilime Project, Dambar Nepali, and others in the advisory board. The plan is to build a 10MW hydropower plant, and sell electricity worth $6 million a year to the grid.

That money will be used to service the loan and run the Centre sustainably into the future. It will use information technology to help creative Nepalis with financing and know-how to launch businesses. Pun is seeking a soft loan of $6 million for equity to build the hydropower plant, either from the government or a multilateral donor.

Pun posted his message on the NNSD bulletin board at 7:45PM on Friday, and within three hours there was an SMS from the Prime Minister’s Office summoning him to Baluwatar the next morning. This was surprising because the all-party negotiations on setting up a CJ-led election government were reaching a critical stage.

HARD WORKER: As a boy, Mahabir Pun used to graze sheep in the high meadows near the village of Nangi below the Annapurnas. Years later he got a scholarship in the University of Nebraska. Photo: Kishor Rimal

Pun cleared security to enter Baluwatar, and within five minutes Bhattarai was there with Finance Minister Barsha Man Pun, Chief Secretary Krishna Hari Baskota, and the PMO Secretary Lila Mani Poudel. The PM began by saying he had read Pun’s Twitter message and fully agreed with the concept of a Nepal Innovation Centre, he asked the Finance Minister how the government could support it.

The meeting dragged on for an hour, and Pun remembers that as expected the minister and the secretaries had no concrete ideas about how the government could help to finance the 10MW power plant. But before the entire PMO, including the prime minister, went off for a picnic in Godavari, the meeting agreed to invite the World Bank, ADB and other multilateral agencies to push the idea.

“It will be a miracle if the Secretary finds a single donor to contribute a soft loan for the innovation,” Pun told Nepali Times, “Let’s wait and see.” As a boy, Mahabir Pun used to graze sheep in the high meadows near the village of Nangi below the Annapurnas. Going to school, he had no pencil, no textbooks. Most of his neighbours became British Gurkhas, but Pun got an education and a scholarship in the University of Nebraska.

Unlike most other Nepalis, however, Pun returned to Nepal. He didn’t just come back to Kathmandu but went back to Nangi to see how Information Technology could help his community leapfrog into the Internet age.

With the Nepal Innovation Centre, Mahabir Pun is trying to scale up what he has done in Nangi to a national level. His plan may have a better chance of being funded under a technocratic government than under one led by political parties. Or better still, Pun should be a part of the technocratic government?

(Updated February 21, 2013)

See also:
Mahabir’s centre for Nepal Connection

www.nepalwireless.net

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Not investigating war crimes ensures that war wounds never heal, and violence will continue in a climate of impunity

Among the most iconic images of the Nepal conflict is the photograph of a woman embracing the body of her dead husband on a blood-stained battlefield littered with the bodies of other policemen executed after capture. Grisly as this picture is, it is another picture from Dailekh of a young girl with tears streaming down her cheek that is actually even more disturbing.

That girl is weeping silently as her mother, Laxmi, tells a press conference in Kathmandu in 2005 about the disappearance of her husband, Dekendra Thapa. Like tens of thousands of other personal tragedies of the conflict, the girl’s story would have been forgotten had it not been for the personal crusade for justice of her mother, Dailekh’s journalists and human rights activists. Nearly seven years after the war ended, a courageous district police inspector doggedly pursued the case and finally arrested four of those involved in the torture and murder of the girl’s father, Dekendra Thapa. Just when it looked like justice was a mirage, this case has become emblematic of the war crimes committed by both sides that have remained unaddressed.

Bikas Rauniar /A people war

Chandra Shekhar Karki / A people war

Laxmi Thapa kept up the pressure, even while the conflict was raging, to find her husband and punish the guilty. The burial site was finally found, and forensic examination showed that Dekendra’s mouth was wide open when he died, his femur and elbow were broken, evidence of having being buried alive after severe torture.It was the summer of 2003, and the Maoists had laid siege to the district capital of Dailekh, cutting off its water supply. After nearly two months without water, a few journalists led by Dekendra Thapa dared to walk up to rebel-held territory to negotiate. The team was abducted and led away, and while the others were released after two weeks the Maoists kept Dekendra Thapa and put up posters in the district detailing 10 reasons why they executed him. His body was not found.

The case filed with the police languished for eight years, no one dared investigate as the former rebels went on to win elections and come to power. Finally, it was Inspector Binod Sharma who had the courage to investigate and follow the trail to the house of Lacchiram Gharti, who confessed to being ordered to torture Dekendra. Gharti readily agreed to be arrested, saying he had been consumed by guilt and haunted by Dekendra’s ghost ever since he buried the journalist while his heart was still beating.

Dekendra Thapa. Photo: Dhruba Basnet

While Dekendra’s killers are willingly going to jail to atone for their crime, in faraway Kathmandu Maoist Prime Minister Bhattarai and his crony Attorney General Mukti Pradhan have been trying their utmost to quash the investigation. They don’t want the masterminds of Dekendra Thapa’s torture and murder to be arrested, and the case to set a precedence against senior party leaders. The Maoist-led coalition has an unwritten pact with state security not to pursue conflict-era atrocities, and to let bygones be bygones. This means there is little chance Army and Police involved in the Doramba massacre, the Kotbada killings, the torture and executions at Bhairabnath, and hundreds of cases of disappearances, rape and extra-judicial killings will ever be tried.

We saw this coming. Ever since the Bhattarai government came to power, he has dismissed more than 100 cases involving 1,715 cadres involved in atrocities during the conflict and the Madhes movement. The prime minister has made sure that senior party members, even those convicted of murder, are not just not punished but are rewarded with promotions. The list is long, but here are a few names to jog our memory: Agni Sapkota, Bal Krishna Dhungel, Prabhu Sah.

Prime Minister Bhattarai has argued that violence perpetrated during the conflict was political in nature and should be addressed by a future Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, his ordinance bill for a TRC that is languishing at the President’s desk is a toothless farce. Bhattarai’s dirty tricks department is handled by hand-picked Attorney General Pradhan, but the buck still stops at Baluwatar.

Bhattarai says digging up war crimes will endanger the peace process. Actually, not investigating will ensure that the wounds of war never heal. The ensuing impunity has eliminated deterrence, and fostered an epidemic of crime involving robbery, rape, murder and violence against women.

Lachhiram Gharti was stung by a guilty conscience, but the real masterminds of Dekendra Thapa have no such remorse. And topmost Maoists are terrified of the payback for the terror they unleashed on the people.

Music video of Dekendra Thapa singing Karnali folk song produced by Dhruba Basnet

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