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| Sunday, 29 February 2004 |
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Elections in Nepal possible around November-PM AFP - Nepal's Prime minister Surya Bahadur Thapa said Friday his government was preparing to hold general elections around November following the successful staging this week of a student union ballot. "The general elections will be held near and around mid-November this year and the government is making necessary arrangements for it," Thapa told a delegation from the Nepal Bar Association (NBA). "The final date for the election, however, will be announced in due course." Parliament has been suspended since King Gyanendra fired the elected prime minister and named a loyalist in his place in October 2002. The five main opposition parties have since demanded the king call fresh elections or restore the elected legislature. In the campus level elections, the pro-leftist student factions affiliated with the Nepal Communist Party-United Marxist and Leninist (NCP-UML) won 80 percent of the seats, including that of the state-run Tribhuvan University. The student elections assumed importance because every political party has a students' wing and the ballot served as a test of political support, political analysts said. "Over 50 percent of ballots were cast in the Free Student Union (FSU) elections at 68 campuses Thursday despite four bomb blasts in the capital," said the rector of Tribhuvan University, Mahendra Singh. The fact that the campus-level elections were staged at all in the Himalayan kingdom, which has been beset by strikes and protests from political parties and students and by violence from Maoist rebels, had prompted the government to look towards national elections, the analysts said. In its meeting with Thapa, the NBA delegation had sought the prime minister's help in ending the indiscriminate arrest of legal practitioners by the police and army. "The premier reacted positively on the need for the upholding of human rights," NBA president Shambhu Thapa told AFP. Soon after meeting with the premier, two lawyers who had been in detention were released, the lawyer said. He added that the prime minister had stressed that the government's door was open for peace talks with Maoist rebels, who have been fighting a "people's war" since 1996 in a rebllion that has so far claimed more than 9,000 lives. The revolt in the nation, which sits as a buffer between India and China, is also one of the world's most brutal with human rights groups accusing both the armed forces and the Maoists of human rights atrocities. In its latest report this week on worldwide human rights abuses, the US State Department singled out Nepal among Asian countries whose rights records remained poor. According to the lawyers, Thapa had admitted to the growing human rights violation in the country and said it was "a matter of serious concern." Had peace negotiations with the Maoist rebels been successful, human rights violations would have ended, he said. A ceasefire between the rebels and Nepal's government collapsed last August, resulting in bloodletting resuming in even greater intensity. |
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