1/11

Twenty years ago this week, in the aftermath of the killings of 12 Nepalis in Iraq, Nepal descended into a state of chaos leading to rare communal strife in Kathmandu and elsewhere across the country.

This was during the Maoist insurgency, and as the police tried to control the situation with the army as just bystanders and no fire service or any other support, we could not help but point out an obvious: an absolute vacuum of political governance, and how our first instinct in the face of tragedy was to turn to violence.

Excerpt of the editorial published in issue #212 3 – 9 September 2004:

When the lives of 12 young Nepalis in search of survival were brutally ended by Iraqi terrorists in rage against the United States, the response in Kathmandu should have been grief and introspection. Also, a search for ways to make Nepal a better place for its citizens, one in which desperation would not lead our youths to seek livelihoods in far-off places of war. Instead, on Wednesday our country descended into a state of uncontrolled violence as the monster of communalism for the first time stormed Kathmandu Valley and towns elsewhere.

The abject absence of governmental authority served to compound the extreme confusion and chaos. The violence against manpower agencies was widely covered by the media. Indeed, the destruction of property and the records of more than a hundred such agencies must in the end affect tens of thousand of Nepalis working overseas as well as those aspirants still in queue for visas. 

Nepal has become anarchic, ungoverned and ungovernable. Our sisters and brothers in the villages doubtless have known this fact for some time, but it took Wednesday's numbing events to confirm to city dwellers that chronic political skullduggery and the Maoist insurgency has today left us a shell of a government. It's all hollow inside.

For archived material of Nepali Times of the past 20 years, site search: nepalitimes.com.