Above: Kumar Lama

Who’s the torturer?

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News shares his thoughts about the recent arrest of a Nepali former soldier in St Leonards.

Being a 47-year-old Nepali man living in St Leonards-on-Sea, I was astonished to discover last week (Thursday 3 January) that a 46-year-old Nepali man had been arrested in St Leonards-on-Sea, on suspicion of torture! There aren’t that many middle-aged Nepalis in East Sussex and it was a strange sensation to have a doppelgänger who, unlike me, took part in the Nepali Civil War (1996–2006) and then ended up here on the South Coast.

Colonel Kumar Lama of the Nepali army was arrested on the basis of information supplied to the Metropolitan police by Advocacy Forum, a Nepali human rights group based in Kathmandu, which for many years now has been working on ‘transitional justice’, which should be part of Nepal society’s recovery from the conflict.

The Nepali peace process has had many extraordinary features. The war was fought by an absolute royal dictatorship against a Maoist insurgency, and the peace resulted in the fall of the Shah dynasty and the election of a Maoist government. Since 2006, Nepal has seen every possible combination of coalition government between the royalists, the liberal Congress party, the mainstream communists and the Maoists.

One of the few policies all the governments have agreed on is effective immunity for war crimes committed during the civil war.

Nepal has not had a truth and reconciliation process; it’s had a ‘silence and cover-up’ process. Both the former guerrillas (now in government) and the security forces (still in power) have resisted accountability for their actions. During the conflict around 15,000 were killed, and 1,300 continue to be ‘disappeared’, according to the Red Cross.

This official and judicial resistance in Nepal is why the Lama case has blown up here in the UK, where alleged war crimes are regarded as having universal jurisdiction.

General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, was famously arrested in the UK in 1998 for murder during his period of rule. Arrest warrants have been issued in British courts for Israeli officials and politicians including for retired Israeli General Doron Almog, who refused to get off his plane in September 2005 after learning that he would be arrested for destroying Palestinian houses as collective punishment. In 2009, leading politician Tzipi Livni cancelled her trip to the UK rather than face arrest.

The Conservatives promised in the run-up to the last election that they would change the law to protect Israeli leaders, and they did. In September 2011, the Coalition government made it impossible to get arrest warrants for war crimes in magistrates’ courts – you now have to get authorisation for a warrant from the Director of Public Prosecutions. When the idea of watering down universal jurisdiction first came up, under Labour, many Lib Dems opposed the measure, including current ministers Vince Cable and Lynne Featherstone.

It’s pretty clear that torture continues in Nepal. It also continues in Afghanistan, another friendly state.

Last November, it was revealed that the UN mission in Afghanistan had told British diplomats that ‘torture was continuing to take place at NDS [Afghan secret police] and ANP [Afghan National Police] facilities across Afghanistan’. According to the UN mission, the director of the NDS, Asadullah Khalid, was one of the ‘principal culprits’ in Kandahar, where ‘systematic abuse’ was taking place ‘of many times the magnitude of the problem elsewhere’.

The British courts are going to have wrestle with what the Nepali army did and didn’t do during the Nepali Civil War, just as (courtesy of Maya Evans and Public Interest lawyers) they are being forced to wrestle with the truth about what Britain’s allies, the Afghan security forces, are doing right now.

Also in: Hastings People