Nepal rebels try talks, not guns

For most of the past year, while Maoist guerrillas were launching one of the most brutal campaigns ever against the Nepalese government, Krishna Bahadur Mahara lived in hiding.

Mr. Mahara - who refuses to discuss this time in detail - was part of the top leadership of an organization that had led a seven-year insurgency that left 8,000 Nepalis dead.

But Friday, as the Maoists' top negotiator, Mr. Mahara is waging a very different kind of People's War, as they call their insurgency, to change Nepal's social and political system from within.

Mainstream politics may prove a frustrating stop-and-start process, he acknowledges, unlike the rapid military sweeps his party achieved over the past seven years of insurgency. But Mahara says his party is ready to seek its goals - an egalitarian republic, led by his party - without the gun.

"Our military men are not just soldiers, they are also political activists," says Mahara, sitting in the office at the Maoists' new headquarters in Kathmandu. "We are not that dogmatic. Just because we talk, it doesn't mean that we lose everything we have gained thus far."

For diplomats and politicians here, Nepal's peace process is one of the rare positive stories in the region - and a pause in a civil war that has brought Nepal close to economic and political ruin. A January cease-fire halted fighting that killed some 8,000 Nepalis, more than 6,000 of them in the past year. Now, many Nepalis are using the moment to get a closer look at the Maoists, or Maobadis, and to assess whether they have the temperament for the give-and-take of parliamentary politics.

Yet a mere peace process brings little solace. A previous round of peace talks in 2001 ended after a few months. But while it is uncertain that the two sides have anything of substance to agree to, there is some benefit in simply talking.

"The people at the top of the Maoists are very politically motivated, disciplined, and highly educated, but the people at the bottom are not educated at all," says Arjun Kumar Karki, president of a coalition of nonprofit groups, who has kept close contact with Maoist leaders. "These lower-level fighters don't see any opposition parties in their districts, and they don't see any government forces, so they think they have won the war already."

For Maoist leaders like Mahara, persuading their own people to support peace talks may be a top priority. Nepal has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, at 27 percent, and the Maoists have traditionally drawn their strongest support from the poorest of the poor.

Yet, the fact that the Maoists could be so popular in Nepal - while communist parties elsewhere have largely disappeared or changed their ideologies - is testament to the ineffectiveness of the many sparring democratic parties since Nepal first allowed parliamentary government in 1990, Nepali analysts say. Rang- ing from right-wing monarchist to radical communist, with few parties in the center, they have spent a decade pulling each other down, with 11 governments in the past 12 years.

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