The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  ‘Did they include some of your targets?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know all the names. So many people were arrested on our information. The police arrested them. The army arrested them. Some were disappeared, some were, some were, you know, they were left.’

  ‘Left? What? Freed?’

  ‘They were freed.’

  At a fast food restaurant I told a general, who’d been in the thick of it, `The Brits must have been aware that the people who were arrested because of their operation ended up getting abused.’

  ‘I’m sure they knew,’ he said, ‘They knew. Being British they must have thought about human rights also, but they knew exactly what was happening to them.’

  After a while he said, ‘The thing must have been approved at a high level.’

  ‘It must have been,’ I said. `Maybe by the foreign secretary.’

  ‘It must have cost a lot of money.’

  ‘Yes, plenty of money.’

  He said that the British had suffered frustrations, including over human rights. He questioned how well they understood the local context (‘there may have been something lacking there’). He regretted that the whole thing had been exposed. ‘They kept it secret for a long time,’ he said. ‘Even now not many people talk about it, and they talk only in vague terms. We just know there was this Mustang operation going on. Nobody asks, “who were the victims?” It never came out.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘It’s quite difficult to pin down. I suppose it’s in the nature of these things.’

  ‘Very difficult,’ he agreed.

  There is no question that the British knew how the army treated prisoners. The British ambassador protested strongly to the Chief of Army Staff around the beginning of 2002, after a man who was collecting his father’s Gurkha welfare pension was arrested from a British Gurkha Welfare Centre, taken to an army camp, and summarily shot. The Doramba killings were raised at a meeting between the king and the British foreign secretary in London in August 2003. In December of that year, Amnesty International circulated a list to all the foreign embassies of nine people who had ‘disappeared’ in Kathmandu in the previous three months. A few days later the National Human Rights Commission published a list of hundreds of ‘disappeared’ people in the newspapers. In February 2004 Amnesty International declared that government forces ‘seem to be pursuing a strategy of disappearance’.7 The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances both reported on the abuses at the time. Nepal was said to have the highest rate of ‘disappearance’ in state custody in the world. The UN’s report on torture and disappearance at the Bhairabnath Battalion in late 2003 came out in May 2006, five months before Operation Mustang was closed down.

  British public statements, and private discussions with the Nepali authorities, repeatedly expressed concern, and emphasized the need to protect human rights. Funding was provided to human rights NGOs. ‘At that time, every single person who was released from custody would claim that they had been severely tortured,’ recalled a prominent human rights lawyer, who himself received British funding. ‘Everyone knew there were hundreds of prisoners in army barracks.’8 The Red Cross registered 1,122 detainees in the Kathmandu Valley between 2001 and 2006, but less than a third of their visits were to military establishments, to which they were rarely granted access. According to the Red Cross, 1,401 people were still missing from all parts of Nepal in 2012, six years after the war ended. There are eighty missing people in the Kathmandu Valley whose fate is unknown and a further seventeen for whom there is information that they are dead but whose remains have not been found.9 If there are ever prosecutions or a truth commission examining what happened, the British will surely have a good deal of evidence to contribute.10

  On November 4, 2004, the Maoists’ Valley Commander Sadhuram Devkota alias ‘Prashant’ was arrested by the army. Several NID and army officers confirmed that Operation Mustang was involved. According to a general, the NID had passed the information to the army through the Palace Military Secretariat, including photographs of the target and his address. The DMI then added their own surveillance before he was taken in. The prisoner was held at the Balaju Barracks in Kathmandu, near where he’d been living. Four days after the arrest the British junior foreign office minister (now shadow foreign secretary) Douglas Alexander visited Nepal. It seems likely that he was briefed on the success of British counter-terrorism.

  On December 19 Prashant was dead. He’d apparently hung himself from a low wall in his cell. There was a panic. Somebody tried to convince me that he really had committed suicide. I later confirmed with the autopsy doctors that it is possible for a man to hang himself from a point lower than his own height: it’s called partial suspension. They said that two kilos of pressure on the jugular are enough to cause the loss of consciousness, and the constriction continues.

  ‘I was surprised,’ recalled a senior army man. ‘They say he committed suicide with a bootlace from a low window, and they showed his almost naked body on TV. I still tell this story to others whenever some junior people come to me to take advice. I say, “don’t hide, do as they have done to Prashant”. If that body was not shown then people would have come against the army saying, “Where is that body? How did it happen?” All the human rights chaps would have come… On TV there was a dead body, they started shouting for a day or two, and it was over.’

  This turn of events, he believed, was simply good fortune, owing to the fact that the colonel in command at Balaju was ‘particularly thick headed’. ‘When he showed that body on TV I said, “Look at that fool, what is he doing?”’ Whether through luck or judgment, the row quickly faded.

  A senior foreign official put it this way. ‘Why did the army panic when Prashant died? ‘They’d done this to hundreds and hundreds of guys. It’s because he was one of the great successes of Operation Mustang.’ […]

  The NID headquarters is by the south gate of Singha Durbar, where most visitors enter. The spies have their own separate gate beside it. Their compound is fairly extensive. It is known as Baraph Bagh, the ice garden, because in the days of palaces the buildings there (which are still shaded by tall pine trees) were cool in the summer. A small temple can be seen above the high perimeter wall and, standing on a hillock among the pines, an old building where the Begum Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow is said to have lived in her exile. The present structure is plain and from the street it looks like it might not be old enough for the Begum herself to have known it, but it’s fairly handsome and I can imagine how it appealed to the British. It was in a dilapidated state until MI6 paid for renovations. The main building today is a modern, squat white block. On a half-landing on the stairs a recent chief has installed two wall-sized mirrors facing each other, so that a person standing between them is surrounded by reflections.

  ‘Is that some sort of joke?’ I asked him.

  ‘Does it look like a joke?’ he said, but he seemed pleased with the idea.

  By late 2004 it seemed that King Gyanendra was planning a coup to seize power outright. MI6 had strong indications of this from sources inside the palace and army, but one only had to read the newspapers to realize it was a distinct possibility. Through their senior contacts the British spies tried to pass their advice to the king, that a coup would be a bad move for the monarchy. An extra layer of cover was added to Operation Mustang when the High Altitude Research Centre was formally registered as an NGO on November 11. Around December that year the British and American ambassadors both sought assurances—and received them from the king personally—that no coup would take place, and some people in the British embassy may have given too much credence to this. Certainly the final timing of the coup, on February 1, 2005, seems to have been a surprise to the British, otherwise MI6 would not have chartered a cargo plane to deliver a consignment of equipment the same week. (Despite frayed nerves, the delivery was made without attracting attention.)

  In fact, the timing of the c
oup played havoc with all kinds of shipments. There were tons of military hardware waiting to be delivered, but the king forfeited it to the suspension of military supplies that Nepal’s vexed allies now imposed.11 Within months the army was running low on ammunition. ‘If he’d waited a few weeks the trucks would have been in Nepal,’ a general lamented. ‘But it was an auspicious day, an auspicious time, given by the astrologers.’

  The same general said, ‘The king must be wise enough to understand. He must have a good ear for listening, but he lacked that. He had many advisors, but one has to understand also. He saw many things as, “either you are with me, or you are not”.’

  On the whole, in their willingness to accommodate themselves with the new republic, members of the royal regime can’t agree whom the king listened to. ‘Unfortunately King Gyanendra couldn’t manage the political strings,’ said a top policeman. ‘I must say that he was a failure to manage the political strings. I don’t know how he was briefed by his advisors.’ The king’s ineptitude even made it difficult to turn Maoist agents, who couldn’t believe they’d be joining the winning side. ‘It’s what we call counter intelligence.’ the cop explained, ‘but that didn’t work in the later phase, because the king’s political string didn’t work.’

  Another general put it simply: ‘The Maoists had a better agenda.’

  The war was a political issue, and in the end India managed the political strings. A US embassy cable of March 15, 2006, has a visiting State Department official sitting with the Indian and British ambassadors at a lunch hosted by the American ambassador.12 The British and Indian ambassadors were sanguine about the 12-point understanding recently reached in Delhi between the Maoists and the parliamentary parties, which the Americans still opposed.13 All the ambassadors had long hoped that the king would ‘reach out’ to the mainstream parties, but grown pessimistic that he would ever do the clever thing.14

  The American ambassador announced the disquieting news that the army’s ammunition shortage had reached ‘crisis point’. The British ambassador expressed concern, but the Indian demurred; they could still manage by moving their supplies around, he thought, and anyway the army’s real problem was morale. One unit hadn’t been paid for three months. Meanwhile, the senior officers were enriching themselves on a procurement spree. They’d recently asked China to add an extra 30 per cent to their invoices for small arms. (The reason the top brass hadn’t seemed to care much when India, the US, and UK halted shipments after the coup was that they made no money from such government-to-government transfers, and preferred to operate on the grey market.) So poor was the army’s training, leadership and morale, the Indian ambassador reckoned, that foreign governments could provide ten times what they previously had and they still couldn’t defeat the insurgency.

  The British ambassador disclosed a plan the EU was working on, to challenge both the king and the Maoists to accept democracy and a negotiated solution, in exchange for vast sums of donor aid. The Americans pointed out that it hadn’t worked in Sri Lanka. But there seems to have been a general sense at the lunch that there might soon be some sort of peace process for the international community to pay for, because the ambassadors started chatting about international experience in arms monitoring and disarmament.

  At the same time there was great complacency in the regime’s high command. A top level NID officer said that in the weeks before the People’s Movement of April 2006 began his agency provided the palace with intelligence that the Maoists were moving large numbers of people into the city, but the generals around the king assured him, ‘There is no such problem your majesty.’ The final crisis could have been avoided, he insisted, if the government had announced a ceasefire, or called everyone for talks, but the king didn’t see the need.

  Operation Mustang continued until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in November 2006.15 When it was closed down, and MI6 withdrew to Delhi, the palace, which by now was supposedly cut off from power, used whatever contacts it had in the British establishment to lobby for the spies to stay. MI6’s apparent complicity in torture in Nepal had not been any of the things apologists talk about: ‘a tough compromise’ ‘on the front line of the war on terror’ ‘with national security at stake’. It was an unnecessary operation in support of an unpleasant and misguided regime. The details were leaked, of course, because the faction in the NID of the outgoing chief had enjoyed all the spoils, as part of a conspiracy among the rivals to replace him.

  THE QUAKE

  Sushma Joshi

  A rain of bricks.

  I thought somebody was hitting me with bricks from behind.

  What the…!

  My instinct was to turn around, to look, to react. But the earthquake gave me no time. Everything happened in the fraction of a second. The next thing I can remember is sliding down the stairs midway to Mangal Hiti, and lying flat on the ground. A latticework of heavy pillars of wood and bricks, the debris of a temple that had collapsed behind me, had pinned me down. It took me a while to register that this was real. This just happened. This wasn’t fiction. This was the real deal, an apocalyptic accident of unimaginable horror that we think lies safely within the pages of books and on cinema screens, but that we will never experience in real life. An incident I had never imagined would happen to me – until it did.

  I managed to raise my head a bit, and I could see the light through the small chinks and openings. I had just eaten a samosa and in my left hand I held a jalebi wrapped in paper – absurdist details that bring home the irrelevance of human concerns even when one is face-to-face with death. My left hand opened and I let go of the sweet – I knew I wouldn’t be eating it that day.

  I put my head down again, and noticed blood dripping from my mouth. The blood was dark red. I put my tongue against my tooth and felt it shake. I had no idea, in that moment, what had hit me and my country. As the cries of the people around me rose in eerie terror, it felt like an attack of some sort – a military attack, perhaps, or a bomb. It didn’t occur to me that this was an earthquake.

  I’m not a good practitioner of dharma; my practice tends to be patchy, at best. But at this instance of gravest danger, I fell back upon the Tara mantra, almost by instinct.

  This is how I’d gotten to it: on a visit to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, I had requested his support to do a Tara puja. Rinpoche had said to me: ‘Why do you want to do the Tara puja? That is very complicated.’ When I insisted, he said: ‘Here, I will teach you the Tara mantra instead, and you can do it at home. After you’ve practised for a while, come back and we can discuss the puja.’ Then he gave me the mantra, the same one I started to repeat in my head, over and over, as I lay buried under the debris in Patan Durbar Square. There’s something about a mantra that automatically calms the mind, gives solace and dispels fear.

  I knew that somebody would come get me – the Patan Durbar Square is usually full of people, and I imagined that some would start to come down the steps to get water from the stone spout at Mangal Hiti around 5 p.m. for their evening meal, if not before. So there was little chance that I would be left behind, buried under a pile of rubble. I waited. The cries of despair around me did not cease. After about half an hour, I started to panic. ‘Didi, didi!’ I shouted, thinking of the handicraft vendors who laid their wares on the left side of the water-tap complex. ‘DIDI!’ The more agitated I became, the more high-pitched my screams. As if to punish me, and drown out my cries, the second earthquake hit. The shaking was extraordinary – everything on top of, below and around me gyrated violently, like the wheel of the Kalachakra. It seemed certain I would die – it did not seem possible that anybody could escape this moment alive.

  The shaking stopped. I lay quiet and supine under the debris. Making a noise and disrupting the atmosphere, it seemed, could bring death. And besides, there must be so many other people who needed more help than I did, I reproached myself. I knew I had to exercise patience and wait. Sooner or later, people would come get me. And this was when I went back
to the Tara mantra, and made a promise to the female form of the Buddha: If I ever get out of here alive, I’ll spend my life spreading word of your teachings.

  After another ten minutes, I heard someone climbing down. I imagined the person to be a child – a curious boy, perhaps. ‘Babu, I’m in here, please take me out,’ I said, in what must have been a perfectly calm and casual voice. Then all of a sudden, a crowd was upon me, pulling the wood away, trying to force apart the pile of brick and centuries-old earth to get to the human body lying at the bottom. From their terrified voices, I could sense that everybody must be shaking with adrenaline and fear – nobody knew when the next quake would hit.

  The instinct of the crowd was to pull me out as fast as they could, which is what they did. First they tried to forcibly pull my body out, but my ankle was pinned down and would not budge. Instead of raising the big blocks of wood, they tore my leg out, mangling the ankle in the process. ‘Didi, let go of your bag!’ somebody said, and I detached the straps on my arm.

  Then, as they held me aloft in what must have been a spectacular rag-doll human effigy moment, I felt the crowd pull me to the left, then the right, as if I were the ropes of the Macchindranath chariot – and in that push-pull moment of Newar cooperation and competition, I felt my left arm snap, fractured by the energy of a crowd trying to pull me in different directions. I’m a Vipassana practitioner, and can be unnaturally calm in the face of pain. But it occurred to me that I better cry out, or I might be pulled apart by the crowd. Which is what I did. ‘My arm! My arm! Please don’t pull!’ I felt like something out of a jatra – held aloft, a mangled body covered with centuries-old dust, a totem of a clumsy and hard-won victory. My eyes opened to blinding light. I saw what appeared to be the white ramparts of a fort, where people stood in a line, watching the rescue. And then I lost consciousness.