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Nepal Army kills three Dalit women
Published on : Friday 12 Mar 2010 15:02 - by Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu, March 12 : Only 48 hours after Nepal's communist-led
government declared International Women's Day a national public
holiday, soldiers shot dead three Dalit women, including a 12-year-old
girl, while the authorities tried to hush it up by alleging it to be a
shoot-out.
The three victims were identified as Chandrakala Bishwokarma, 12,
Devisara Bishwokarma, 35, and Amrita Bishwokarma, 32.
The killings took place Wednesday in the Bardiya National Wildlife
Park in farwestern Nepal, a remote and underdeveloped Bardiya district
that had witnessed some of the worst rights violations and
disappearances by the army during the decade-old Maoist insurgency.
The three victims had entered the wildlife park to cut grass, a
precarious means of livelihood for many Dalits.
The government tried to cover up the killings, claiming the deaths
occurred while an army patrol encountered a group of poachers inside
the national park.
In a statement, Nepal Police said the army patrol fired in retaliation
as they were fired upon by poachers. The statement claimed that the
patrol recovered three guns and ammunition from the spot.
Police also said a man, Krishna Bishwokarma, has been arrested. The
two women who were killed were his wife and sister-in-law while the
12-year-old girl was his daughter.
The news of the killings came even as the US Department of State
released its 2009 Country Reports on Human Rights that said impunity
for human rights violators, threats against the media, arbitrary
arrest, and lengthy pre-trial detention were serious problems in
Nepal.
It said the fate of many of those who disappeared during the Maoist
insurgency remained unknown.
The government turned a blind eye to a UN report on 49 disappeared
persons who had been arrested and detained by the army at barracks in
Kathmandu in 2003 on suspicion of being linked to the Maoists. It
ignored a UN document on disappearances in Bardiya district where at
least 170 people went missing between 2001 and 2004, the rights report
said.
Maoist militias too engaged in arbitrary and unlawful use of lethal
force and abduction while violence, extortion, and intimidation
continued throughout the year.
Nepal's biggest NGO, Informal Sector Service Centre, has reported that
security forces or other armed groups killed 229 people in 2009.
While security forces killed at least 37 individuals, the Maoist party
and its affiliate the Young Communist League were believed to have
killed four persons. Armed groups operating in the Terai plains in
southern Nepal killed 21 people while 141 people reported killed could
not be linked to a specific group, or the families and reporters were
afraid to name the group.
Copyright Indo Asian News
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