PRESS CONFERENCE ON NEPAL

 

Humanitarian and human rights action was desperately needed in Nepal to prevent further deterioration of an internally displaced persons (IDPs) situation that was in a “pre-crisis stage”, the Special Adviser of the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator on Internal Displacement told correspondents at Headquarters today.

Speaking after a week-long visit to the country, Dennis McNamara, who also serves as the Director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, said some villages had lost up to 80 per cent of their young people, who had fled to avoid conscription by either the Government or Maoist rebels.  But figures were difficult to pin down, since people had also moved to escape poverty, find new lives in urban areas, or take on seasonal jobs in India.

He said the best, unofficial guess for IDPs was from 100,000 to 200,000, but an estimated 1 million to 2 million people had also relocated to an uncontrolled area of the Indian border, where no documents were required.  “If the estimates are right, this is a major displacement ... of the population of one of the most impoverished nations of the world, on top of nearly a decade of a nasty, internal conflict.”

Exacerbating the IDP problem were conflict-related hardships that the people also faced, said Mr. McNamara, who met during his stay with representatives of the Government, the Royal Nepalese Army, non-governmental organizations, victims of the conflict and displaced communities.  Those included arbitrary arrests, unexplained disappearances, high levels of child trafficking, and widespread violations of human rights.  Many areas lacked functioning government administrations due to the Maoist groups, who controlled much of the countryside, often imposing bans or strikes that crippled all movement and weakened civil authorities.

Although his focus was on IDPs, Mr. McNamara said they were part of a wider impoverished, suffering population at large, where the “poor are living on top of the poor”.  The United Nations must carefully balance its actions with host-country interests, without detracting from Government efforts to protect and assist refugees.  However, it should press the authorities to do more, to provide basic services as health, education and welfare.

He noted that Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nepalese Government, which had agreed that United Nations human rights staff could set up office in Nepal and deploy monitors throughout the country.  “This was a ground-breaking agreement for the United Nations and the region, and a fundamentally important step that the entire United Nations system must strongly support.”

The United Nations now possessed a “window” into the country through the Memorandum, he said, and would progress further once United Nations agencies reoriented from development -- at a standstill due to the conflict -- to humanitarian activities, which he would discuss with donors in Geneva next week.  However, humanitarian work should not become a substitute for political activity, and sustained action was needed on the part of the United Nations and key governments to resolve the conflict.

Questioned about the population of Nepal, Mr. McNamara said some 25 million people lived there now, but he would try to profile some villages to get firmer estimates on how many remained.  Responding to another query, he said people had been displaced by the conflict for almost a decade, but movement to India had only been occurring over the past two to three years.

Asked by another correspondent about IDP regions, he said displacement had begun in the hill areas, but had now spread to Nepal’s border with India, where random attacks and abuses, including forced conscription, were regularly carried out by both sides to the conflict.  Ethnically, some minorities had been easy recruits because they had no established system of support in the country.  He had also seen recently released bonded labourers with no support, no rights, and no land.  They were fertile for insurgency.

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