Human Rights Watch - Indifference to Duty

December 14, 2010

Indifference to DutyMap of NepalSummaryI. Impunity for Past Human Rights AbusesII. Impunity for Recent Human Rights Abuses III. RecommendationsAcknowledgementsAppendix: Updates on 62 Cases of Grave Human ... 

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Indifference to Duty

Impunity for Crimes Committed in Nepal

Map of Nepal

Summary

Methodology

I. Impunity for Past Human Rights Abuses

Truth and Reconciliation and Disappearances Commissions

Role of the International Community and the National Human Rights Commission

II. Impunity for Recent Human Rights Abuses

Amrita Sunar, Devisara Sunar, and Chandrakala Sunar

Dharmendra Barai

Ram Hari Shrestha

III. Recommendations

To the Government of Nepal

To the Nepal Police Authorities and the Attorney General’s Office

To the Judiciary

To the National Human Rights Commission

To the International Community, especially Australia, China, the European Union, India, Japan, and the US

To the United Nations

Acknowledgements

Appendix: Updates on 62 Cases of Grave Human Rights Violations from Waiting for Justice

Indifference to DutyMap of NepalSummaryI. Impunity for Past Human Rights AbusesII. Impunity for Recent Human Rights Abuses III. RecommendationsAcknowledgementsAppendix: Updates on 62 Cases of Grave Human ... 

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Putting Caste on Notice - Nation

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Navi Pillay, the South African judge who became the United Nations high commissioner for human rights last year, is moving to the forefront of a campaign to free more than 250 million people from the indignities and horrors of caste discrimination. No previous commissioner has dared to openly take on this pernicious system, the majority of whose miserable victims live in India.

"This is the year 2009, and people have been talking about caste oppression for more than a hundred years," Pillay says. "It's time to move on this issue."

For Pillay, who is of Indian descent, the subject of caste has been hidden too long by obfuscation on the part of governments, not only in India, that have successfully argued in UN conferences that existing international conventions against human rights abuses do not apply. Caste did not figure in the official conclusions of a conference on racism and other forms of intolerance in Durban in 2001, after intense lobbying by India, and remained on the periphery of a review of that conference earlier this year.

That being the case, Pillay said in an interview in her New York office on a visit from her headquarters in Geneva, there may well have to be a new international convention written to apply directly to caste.

The campaign is gathering momentum among a wide range of global nongovernmental organizations, religious groups and, lately, a few governments working from a draft document on eliminating discrimination based on work or descent--in other words, being born into predestined deprivation, assigned to the most menial of jobs and segregated socially from the better born.

Pillay would like to see this draft endorsed by the member nations of the Human Rights Council and by all governments, many of which are in denial over the harmful effects of the caste system.

She relayed a story about a group of women who came to her in Geneva recently with a brick from a latrine they had torn down in protest against being forced to carry away human excrement in their bare hands. They wanted to make the point that despite India's frequent assertions that "untouchables," who call themselves Dalits ("broken people"), were no longer condemned by birth to do this job, there were still tens of thousands of such latrines in the country, and the filthy, soul-destroying work continues.

"They have good laws in India, and they have media; they have well developed civil society organizations," Pillay said. "So how come there is no implementation of these good laws, these good intentions?" Discrimination by caste is unconstitutional in India, which also has affirmative action programs for Dalits and others at the bottom of society. Dalits have risen to high office through politics, though even democracy has not helped most of them.

It was, ironically, Nepal that broke ranks with India in September and publicly joined the campaign against caste discrimination. Nepal, a majority Hindu nation like India, is home to 4.5 million Dalits, according to the Feminist Dalit Organization of Nepal. Women among the Dalits everywhere are especially vulnerable to victimization of all kinds, most often sexual abuse.

Women of lowly birth are also sometimes accused of witchcraft, and not only in Asia. Pillay said that in a country in Africa girls and women have been jailed, and officials say they cannot release them or they would be killed. Recently in India's Jharkhand state, village women, apparently Muslims who were labeled witches by accusers, were beaten, stripped naked and forced to eat excrement, the BBC reported.

The Times of India described Nepal's unanticipated decision to align with the campaign against caste discrimination as an "embarrassment" to India, saying that it contradicts India's "stated aversion to the internationalization of the caste problem." The newspaper noted that Sweden then piled on an endorsement from the European Union, "adding to India's discomfiture."

The influence of the Hindu caste system has seeped across other borders in South Asia, into Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, sometimes affecting even Muslims based on their birth or ancestry. Converts to Christianity or Buddhism who flee Hinduism to escape caste often remain branded for life nonetheless.

Dalits, regarded widely as unclean or polluted, can, and have, faced death at the hands of upper caste people for infractions such as taking water from a forbidden well or entering a Brahmin temple. There have been lynchings for intermarriage with higher castes. In some places, particularly in north India, Dalits vote at segregated polling stations. At roadside cafes they often get separate utensils, if they are served at all.

It need not be that way, Pillay, 68, notes from her own experience. Indians in South Africa, a minority in a suppressed black majority under apartheid, soon abandoned caste consciousness, she said. "I know that in the early days they did practice that, because my parents told us," she said. "I think it would be my grandparents' generation. But it broke down by force of social pressures."

As high commissioner for human rights, Pillay takes a broad view of her responsibilities, and that applies to causes she is willing to take up as well as to her definition of human rights. She focuses not only on political or civil rights but also societal shortcomings and abuses. On caste, she said she looks for other forms of similar discrimination globally, anywhere people are held in forms of slavery based on birth, for example, or are relegated to second-class citizenship for other reasons.

"What alerted me to it is that a Bolivian woman minister who addressed the Durban review conference spoke about slavery in Bolivia and described the conditions. In Mauritania [there is] slavery as well."

Pillay has also made three public speeches on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and produced a video on the subject to encourage governments to frame a declaration on LGBT rights.

When we spoke, Pillay had just come from a UN panel where victims of human trafficking presented powerful testimonies. She was struck by a fact thrown out by the panel's moderator: that there are more people being trafficked today than in the entire historical slave trade.

Caste and new forms of slavery are not unrelated, she argued in a recent op-ed article for the Huffington Post, where she wrote that landlessness, debt bondage and labor bondage, involving millions of young children, are the lot of the lowest castes.

"As high commissioner I promised to be evenhanded and raise all issues affecting all human beings," Pillay said. "I can't flow with the political concerns of anyone who doesn't want one or another issue addressed because it embarrasses them or because they are dealing with it in their own way."

Caste is now on notice: the UN has failed, she said, to educate people and change mindsets to combat the taint of caste. "How long is the cycle going to go on where those who can do something about it say, We can't, because it's the people, it's their tradition; we have to go slowly.

"Slavery and apartheid could be removed, so now [caste] can be removed through an international expression of outrage."

About Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

Tibetans in Nepal Feel Financial, Political Pressure as Carpet Industry Unravels

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Thinley Sangmo was taught as a young girl in exile how to weave traditional Tibetan carpets. Her grandmother's thick hands would twist and spin spools of sheep's wool to depict the landscape and religious iconography of their homeland: hairy yaks lumbering up snow-swept mountains, puffy clouds and ponds of pink lotus flowers.

By the time she was 14, Sangmo was hunching over an upright loom for more than 12 hours a day. Sometimes she would fall asleep. She wanted to attend school, but as the oldest of seven children and as a Tibetan refugee living without full rights in Nepal, carpet weaving was her best option.

"It's very hard work. At first, I would cry," said Sangmo, now 36, with walnut-colored hair tucked into a bun. "At times, I was angry and sad about it. But I learned to appreciate it. Now, generations depend on these factories. This is all we know how to do."

Yet today her livelihood, and that of thousands of other Tibetan carpet weavers here, is under threat. The global economic crisis has spread to this landlocked Himalayan nation, among the poorest on Earth. Fewer tourists are coming to buy carpets, and tens of thousands of dollars in export orders have been canceled, industry experts say, leading to the closure of more than 500 factories.

The crisis facing Tibetan exiles in Nepal is exacerbated by the country's new government, led by Maoists, who joined the political mainstream in 2006 after waging a decade-long war. As China's influence over the government grows, Tibetans are experiencing a rise in harassment and extortion, more restrictions on their movements and greater difficulty securing education and jobs than ever before, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Campaign for Tibet. An estimated 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal, which has centuries-old cultural and religious ties with Tibet.

"There has been change in the use of language by the Nepalese authorities to describe the Tibetan refugee flow through their country, suggesting a 'law and order' approach rather than the humanitarian approach that has characterized Nepal's treatment of Tibetans over the last decades," said Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet. "As a result of Chinese pressure on the Nepalese government, judicial system, civil society and media, Tibetans in Nepal are increasingly fearful, demoralized and at risk. "

Tibetan business and human rights leaders say that as the global economy worsened, Maoist militias and Nepalese police began "taxing" the Tibetan factories and workers, often through mafia-style shakedowns and threats. For many Tibetans still waiting for legal papers according them some civil rights in Nepal, there is nothing they can do to fight back as factories are forced out of business.

"The carpet industry is an economic and cultural lifeline for thousands of Tibetans and Nepalese," said Tinley Gatso, a Tibetan community leader in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital. "It was our culture, our art. When Nepal took us in, it was our big gift to Nepal. But now, so many carpets factories are closing. It's a very sad time, a worrying time."

Nepal is home to the world's second-largest Tibetan exile community after India. Buddhist prayer flags flutter along Kathmandu's alleyways and in its markets. Some of the world's most celebrated stupas -- whitewashed temples resembling enormous birthday cakes crossed with spaceships -- draw Buddhist monks and nuns and foreign tourists to the city's crowded squares. Recordings of the Buddhist mantra "Om mani padme hum," played by shopkeepers, echo through the narrow streets.

Since a wave of protests against Chinese rule that began in Tibet in March 2008, Nepal has been under increasing pressure from Beijing to take sterner measures against pro-Tibet demonstrations here, according to diplomats, government officials and human rights workers. A recent press statement by Nepal's Ministry of Home Affairs appears to support the tougher stance: "Nepal stands firm not to allow any external forces to use its soil against its neighbors and it sticks to its One China policy."

China accuses the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader, of trying to split Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India, has said that although he desires greater autonomy for Tibet, he does not advocate independence.

The squeezing of Tibetans in Nepal is most vividly apparent in the carpet business.

Khamsum Wangdu is one of the biggest Tibetan carpet manufacturers in Kathmandu. He once had four factories that employed 600 people. Now he's down to one factory and 20 workers. The economic downturn and the official demands for "fees" have affected his business, he said.

"We need the international community to help us," the burly businessman said. "Instead of giving the Dalai Lama gold medals, why not focus on helping Tibetan people with the recession and all of the political instability and pressure here in Nepal? The Dalai Lama is happy when his people are happy."

Thumbing his prayer beads, Wangdu said he was once proud that he was able to employee Tibetans and Nepalese in his factories. But on a recent day, in the single factory he still operates, only half the looms were in use.

In the half-finished factory built of brick and tin, women sat cross-legged at a vertical loom. Deftly, they wielded iron rods and scissors to stretch and trim the woven pattern. Hammers were used to separate the fibers, forcing out dirt.

The factory also doubles as a day-care center. One woman breast-fed her 2-month-old daughter during a break. Children raced in and out. Others bathed around a borehole outside, shampooing their hair with buckets of water.

"So many of my friends in carpet weaving have already lost their jobs," said Sanu Mayalama, 35, whose husband recently lost his job in a TV factory in Malaysia. "My parents are still living in the mountains. They are so poor. We need this income."

Tibetan carpet weaving dates to the 7th century, when the carpets were used as horse saddles. In the past, monasteries were the weavers' main clients. That began to change in the 1970s, when trekkers and mountain climbers descended on Nepal and began to take an interest in carpets. There was a separate boom in the late 1980s, when Tibet's struggle for independence became an international cause. Today, the carpets are sold in tourist markets, along with Tibetan religious paintings, prayer lamps, brass bowls and T-shirts embroidered with the words "Yak Yak Yak, Nepal."

On a recent morning, Sangmo sat in her neighborhood, where many Tibetan exiles live. Some mentioned that it was the Dalai Lama's 74th birthday but that their celebrations and religious ceremonies had been canceled. Sangmo's family, like many others here, fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama in 1959 after a failed revolt against Chinese rule.

Sangmo sat next to her grandmother, who had been a yak herder in Tibet before she moved to Nepal and learned the carpet-making craft. Both women said they worried that many people in the neighborhood will lose their jobs in the industry in the next few months.

"It's all we have," Sangmo said. "We are lost without carpet-making."