Opinions from around the region   September 1995

THREE ENVIRONMENTAL BREEDS proliferate in Nepal, according to Surendra Raj Devkota editorial page article in The Kathmandu Post of 15 September 1995 entitled "Beware from Environmentalism", which blames environmentalists for the Arun III debacle.

In this prevailing circumstance, environmental professionalism in Nepal is losing its ethics. Rather than expressing the true picture, it seems that so-called environmentalists are used to verbalizing in peripheral latent voices. Subsequently, there are three types of environmental professionalism growing in Nepal. The number one breed is donor supported elites with louder voices who vocalize global issues and confuse locals. They have expertise in talking and knitting the complex web of problems rather than seeking relevant solutions. Basically, this category constitutes individuals who are fond of talking environment and lack of basic knowledge of the subject matter. Another strain of environmentalists is due to the chair that individuals occupy, bureaucratic environmentalists, who are available in both donor and governmental units. They are very much fond of files and paper works so that income source does not get aborted. The third type is a true environmental professional who is either marginalized or exploited. Lack of opportunities in proper field, limited scope of the environmental discipline and wrong man in right place are major hurdles for genuine individuals. Environmentalists should not be biased to review the governmental work and have to abandon their ideological differences while talking about environment. Environmental issues should be raised for any developmental activities but owing to environ¬mental consideration, developmental process should not be closed, because most of human-induced activities have certain mitigation options and these must be sincerely adopted wherever required. The ethics of environment does not mean that we the people be ruled under there public of grasses, insects and litters.

CURSES ARE CURES when coming from a jhankri (shaman), writes Gregory G. Maskarinecin Rulings of the Night An Ethnography of Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts (The University of Wisconsin Press 1995 ISBN 0 19914490 0). Some excerpts, which are Mahadev´s curses as recited by Gumane Mohar Kami of Syaula Village of jajarkot District, West Nepal.

He joined hands, joined feet, joined a head, joined legs."Well, put in a full breath," so saying,he put in a full breath, left it a bloodline."Well, now on the sixth night, look man, your share," so saying, Bhabi wrote, ´The day of birth yields fate." Mahadev brushed a white yak tail at the head, brushed a black yak tail at the feet, with a power bolt staff delivering seven blows, "Speak, man," he said, "Ha, ha, hu hu," it went. "Go and die," said Mahadev, gave a curse.

The race of man didn´t die, became so many they didn´t fit, didn´t diminish.
"The soft unstable earth is finished. I will trick the race of man."

Flowers that you picked and put on your head,
they are miscarriages;
tiny ones you picked and put in your mouth,
they are infants´ deaths;
half ripe cucumbers you picked,
they are three- and two-year old´s deaths;
those the size of sickle handles you picked,
they are adolescents´ deaths;
those with a yellow shadow you picked.
they are thirty-six, thirty-two-year-olds´ deaths;
those that were completely yellow you picked,
they are middle-aged deaths;
split open ones you picked, they are old ones´ deaths.

GURKHA TAKEOVER OF MONTANA is imminent, according to Mark Koernke, an American radio personality whose preoccupation is with right-wing conspiracy theories. One of these has to do with the Gurkha takeover, writes Time in its 26 June 1995 issue (page 61).

... And that´s just for starters. Reliable sources have detected 300,000 foreign troops on American soil, including a contingent of Nepalese Gurkhas in Montana, this doctrine holds. Soon they will attempt an outright takeover of America, dispersing count¬less Patriots to dozens of detention camps already built for the purpose by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (FEMA´s employees are the new world order´s shadow govern¬ment: "Only 59 to 63 out of 3,060 actually deal with storms, disasters, hurricanes and nuclear attack."} Once the nation is supine, it will be carved into large regions ruled through terror by new-world-order proconsuls. Microchips enabling the gov¬ernment to track each move by a new generation of citizens. Americans will live in slavery. Unless...

BHUTAN AND BURMA have more in common than consonants and vowels, according to this editorial excerpt from August 1995 issueof lhe Bhutan Review monthty, published by Lhotshampa refugees in Kathmandu.

To the average Bhutanese, Burma might as well be millions of miles away—and vice versa—as the two countries have never had direct trade or diplomatic relations. But there is a connection, and Suu Kyi is both a link in the limited interpersonal relationship that exists between Bhutan and Burma as well as the common denominator highlighting similarities in the prevailing political situations in the two nations, as also in underscoring the often glaring dissimilarities in the way the world has ven¬tured to view the two parallel situations.

Suu Kyi spent a year in Bhutan in 1971-72 and worked as a general research assistant in the then Department of External Affairs. Her husband Michael Aris, a renowned scholar of Tibetan and Bhutanese history and author of several books on Bhutan, whom she married in 1972, was a royal tutor and government translator in Thimphu between 1967 and 1972. But Suu Kyi´s ties to Bhutan go back much earlier as her family had known the Dorji family in Kalimpong, India, since the late 1940s. This relationship was further strengthened when Suu Kyi´s mother Daw Khin Kyi served as Burmese ambassador to India from 1961 to 1967.

In 1948, six months after the assassination of Suu Kyi´s father General Aung San, national hero acknowledged as the father of the nation, Burma which was made a part of the British. Empire in 1885 became an independent republic. The country had a parliamentary democracy until 1962 when the elected government of U Nu was overthrown by a group of army officers led by Ne Win, the commander-in-chief. Since then, Burma has been under army rule.

The announcement by Ne Win in July 1988 of his retirement and his promise of a referendum for Burma´s political future was followed by an upheaval when his party refused to relinquish control. Suu Kyi, visiting her ailing mother, was drawn into the struggle for reforms and became the focal point of the dissident movement...

The Bhutanese crisis also surfaced in 1988 with the petition submitted to the King by Royal Advisory Councillors Tek Nam Rizal and B.P.Bhandari in April. The petition was deemed seditious and treasonous; Rizal was arrested, forced to sign an agreement-cum-confession before his release on June 4, and removed from his elected position. Unable to abide by the restrictive conditions of the agreement, Rizal fled the country in July 1988, Rizal was abducted from Nepal by agents of the RoyalGovernment and brought back to the country on November 16, 1989. For four full years, Rizal was kept in continuous solitary confinement. For two years, from the date of his arrest until October 10,1991, he was continuously kept in iron shackles. In January 1993, three years after his abduction, Rizal was brought before the High Court charged with crimes based on the National Security Act promulgated only in 1992. He was found guilty and sentenced to life on November 16,1993. Three days after this verdict the King granted Rizal a bizarre condi¬tional amnesty, promising to free him after the crisis in the country was resolved. The problem remains, and so does Rizal´s fetters.

Both Suu Kyi and Rizal were compelled by circum-stances, coincidentally at about the same time, to throw themselves into the struggle against state injustice and repres-sion; both were incarcerated at around the same time; both spent six long years away from family and friends. The uncanny similarities in the two cases has now ended—only one is free.