Occupy Baluwatar activists have been demanding the imprisonment of Maoist leader Balkrishna Dhungel for the murder of Ujjan Shrestha out of personal vendetta. Given that the apex court has already convicted Dhungel of murder, his culpability is not debatable. Consider this excerpt from Nepali Times (Nov 11-17, 2011) and the horror of Dhungel’s crime becomes clear: “. . . Dhungel was angry about an inter-ethnic marriage in the family which involved Ujjan Kumar Shrestha. On 24 June 1998, he led a cohort that waylaid Ujjan on the trail to Ramechhap. Dhungel shot Ujjan Kumar dead, and the body was dumped into the Likhu River, never to be found”.
Based on this account, UCPN (Maoist), which has been defending Dhungel to the hilt, could be considered a party which protects serious human rights violators.
Dhungel disagrees. He has been insisting that his is a political case and only Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) should be entitled to have a final say in it.
Ujjan was not the only person to be killed in cold blood by the Maoists. The murder of Lamjung-based teacher Muktinath Adhikari in January 2002 is no less disturbing. Consider this description from Deepak Thapa and Bandita Sijapati’s A Kingdom Under Siege: “A group of Maoists tied his hands behind his back, and took him about two meters from the school. There he was tied to a tree and shot in the head. He died on the spot.” One may be tempted to judge the Maoists harshly from these two incidents. But the other side of the battle is equally horrifying.
REPUBLICA
Take a 1998 case from a village in Rolpa. Police had arrested virtually every supporter or sympathizer of United People’s Front. When Kumari Budha, the daughter of one of the arrested men, went to meet her father, she was “…raped and killed. The five half-burnt bodies were found smoldering the next day.” Also consider Nepal Army’s brutality in Bhandariya village of Banke on June 2, 2002. Four unarmed Maoists had taken shelter in one Mansaraa’s house and then “A large convoy of security forces drove into Bhandariya in the dead of the night and surrounded the nearby houses… they beat the three Maoists to death. By this time Mansaraa had fainted. Her husband hid in a narrow space between the shingle of roof and tin sheet over the cowshed… Army men hunted for him… when they found him they killed him with two shots to the back.”
Then there are cases in which it is hard to attribute guilt. Consider this incident in Angapani village in Bajura on October 28, 2003: “Having trekked the whole night and arrived in Angapani at the crack of dawn, they [the army] saw the lights in a house and heard voices inside. They surrounded the house and ordered those inside to come outside. Instead the light was turned off and everything became silent… The troops then stormed into the house and killed everyone inside. Seven people lost their lives.” None of them were Maoists.
As horrific as these narratives are, the insurgency is replete with stories of murders, extortions, atrocities, rights violations, disappearances, internal displacements, tortures and killings in which both rebels and state forces were involved. The few known cases—Ujjan Kumar, Maina Sunar, Muktinath Adhikari and Dekendra Thapa—are only reported events. Very few cases have been filed, and fewer perpetrators identified. But memories of the insurgency that took lives of about 17,000 people still haunt the country. While Maoists and their supporters would like to substantiate cases of brutal killings by state forces, those opposed to Maoists highlight the former rebels’ brutalities.
“We are what we remember,” says American neuropsychiatrist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. Indeed, memory shapes our perception of history, nationalism and politics. For example, the memory of Nepali Congress as heralds of the age of democracy makes people give them the benefit of doubt despite their shortcomings.
That the Maoists were among the first to raise issues of republic and inclusion has partly added to their political credentials. But what if we think of NC only as the party that launched violent revolutions and caused deaths of hundreds of people? What if we only think of UML as the party that once beheaded people in Jhapa in the name of eliminating “class enemies”? What if we begin to see the state’s security agencies—Nepal Police and the Nepal Army—as guided by the motive of killing people? What if we see Maoists only as killers?
The voices of both the victims and rights violators from conflict period should be heard.
There will be no one who we will be able to trust, and hatred and bitterness will hound us forever. We tend to retain violent memories. We tend to become selective and judgmental. But is there an alternate way to manage traumatic memories that will be acceptable to all, including Baluwatar activists and others? It may be a hard question for us but trauma theorists have clear answers.
In his acclaimed book Ethics of Memory, trauma theorist Avishai Margalit says there is something called ethics of memory which ought to guide what type of traumatic memories we should retain and what we should discard, because “memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation.” Margalit admits there are certain memories, especially those that concern our near and dear ones, which cannot be forgotten or forgiven. But Maja Zehfuss, another trauma theorist, writes “the issue is not whether to forget or to remember, but rather how to remember and how to handle the representations of the remembered past.”
For these theorists, traumatic events in and of themselves are not the problem. The greater challenge is to manage those memories and handle the politics of memory in the right way. What should we do then? Larry Ray, the Professor of Sociology at University of Kent, suggests that we should wisely mobilize mourning and melancholia related to traumatic events. Melancholia makes people think of the troubling past with bitterness, and makes them continually revisit the loss which can trigger a “release of violence in the name of unexpiated historical wrongs.” Therefore, he suggests, people should mourn the loss so as to enable reconciliation between the parties once in conflict.
Is that possible? Yes, says Maja Zehfuss. But we have to take up what she calls a “crabwise approach of memory.” By this she means remembering all the facets of traumatic events—the causes and consequences—and hearing the voices of both the victims and the perpetrators. In our context, formation of TRC could be a step towards this direction. Giving equal weight to alternative narratives of the insurgency would be another helpful step. It will not completely heal past wounds, but could prevent the old wounds from festering.
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com
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