NEW DELHI: Nepal’s former premier who was sacked by King Gyanendra for failing to crush a Maoist revolt has called for greater international pressure on the monarch to restore democracy in the Himalayan kingdom.
“We are in really deep trouble, our people are suffering,” Sher Bahadur Deuba said in an interview published yesterday in The Times of India.
“There has to be much greater international pressure (on Gyanendra to give up power),” said Deuba, speaking to the newspaper in Kathmandu.
Nepal authorities freed Deuba last month after six weeks of house arrest.
The country’s political parties have been virtually muzzled by emergency rule imposed by the king February 1 outlawing freedom of speech and police have quickly broken up demonstrations to protest Gyanendra’s power grab.
India and Britain have suspended military aid to Nepal while Washington has threatened to follow suit unless the king restores basic freedoms.
Gyanendra dismissed Deuba’s multi-party government and seized control of Nepal, vowing to tackle an increasingly bloody Maoist revolt that has claimed 11,000 lives since 1996.
Deuba said the crisis racking the desperately poor kingdom had caused a flight of capital and devastated the tourist industry, one of the main money earners in the country that is home to Mount Everest.
“We are steadily going downhill economically,” Deuba said.
Deuba said Nepal’s mainstream parties would not join forces with the Maoists to oppose the king unless the rebels renounced violence.
But “we are not averse” to a Maoist call for power sharing “without violence,” he said.
Deuba’s comments came as the rebels kept up an 11-day general strike against the king’s power seizure that has disrupted supplies in Nepal and is slated to end today.
The rebels who have been battling since 1996 to install a communist republic control wide swathes of rural Nepal.
Military experts say Nepal’s army is ill-equipped to tackle the rebels who stage hit-and -run attacks on security forces from their mountain hideouts.
“This is the endgame, Gyanendra has to restore democracy,” Deuba told the newspaper. “No one supports him.”
Deuba, who has called for all of Nepal’s normally feuding political parties to work together to reinstate democracy, said he did not care who led the opposition to Gyanendra’s takeover.
“Democracy is far more important than petty rivalries.” - AFP |
