Children of Nepal

Between the two warring parties of the royalists and the rebels in Nepal, it’s the innocence of little children caught in the crossfire.

In the past year alone, 14,873 children along with their teachers have made headlines for abduction by the Maoists and ill treatment by the Royal Army security forces of Nepal. There are many hurdles including the fact that there is just one child specialist for every 1,04,066 children, the brutality of the army and the Maoists who are fighting the people’s war through the blood of the very same people and their children, and the lack of access to schools which many NGOs in the country are trying to convey as ‘zones of peace’ are just a few of these brutalities.

Between January and November 2005, 3,611 schools were closed at one point or another due to the armed conflict. Bunkers were built in 56 schools while bomb explosions and fires destroyed another 32. Thousands of teachers were abducted and many were killed. Shyam Ghimere fled his village in Naighat Gaon two years ago at the age of 14. He moved to Kathmandu where there is less presence of violence and more money, received regular blows from a Nepali journalist, where he worked, who paid Rs 500 a month. “They would only pay when my parents came to see me. They come once or twice a year,” he tells me. “There is another boy who is still working there. He is 12.” But Shyam and his friend are not the only ones, “I left home when I was ten. I worked till my hands swelled and puss would flow from them. I wanted to study, they didn’t let me. I slept on a big cushion under the stairs. I am also from the same village,” says Kumar Tamang, now 21 years old.

Over the past 10 years of this armed conflict, a total of ‘30,394 children along with their teachers have been abducted. Over 40,000 children have been displaced, over 8,000 orphaned, and 421 children have died in the course of the armed conflict’ are a few of the figures by the Child Workers in Nepal (CWIN) Report.

To escape this, hundreds of village children run away from home to enter the city, where the armed conflict is considerably less since only the army dominates the cities. The Maoist people base their groups in the villages, conducting cultural programmes to educate the rural population of their message and purpose. “Most of the children who join these cultural programmes – comprising of singing, dancing and street plays – get ‘absorbed’ into either the Area level of the Maoist group, where the children are placed within the villages as guards, and collect donations through means of extortions; the culture groups campaigning for the CPN (Maoists); or the Company where child soldiers are sent forward to fight,” says Rabina from CWIN.

If the children are found by the Royal Army, “they are either shot, tortured, or arrested,” says Rabina, “No NGO is authorised to approach the military camps except for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), so the question of inspections is completely ruled out.”

“ICRC has been invited by the King. Our work here is in accordance with the King’s instructions,” says Dalphin from ICRC, “We have no authority to conduct any sort of inspections. The army contacts us and subsequently hands over whatever children are in their custody.” As a result, over 100 children are reported to be languishing in adult prisons. But NGOs fear that the number of children actually affected might be more than what is recorded by the government and human rights organisations. “There is no way of knowing the real number but so far, the official figure of children rescued from these camps is 17.” So is it possible that the Army doesn’t always hand over every child they catch? “Yes, it is possible.”