To forgive or not to forgive
Deepak Joshi Pokhrel & Rajendra Senchurey/
My Republica
The decade-long armed insurgency in Nepal ended with signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the warring parties in 2006. One of the core agendas of the CPA was to address the legacies of the conflict through transitional justice (TJ) process. However, even after 13 years of the CPA, the TJ process seems to reach nowhere. Amongst many, one of the major jolting issues in the TJ is the demand for and fears against amnesty.According to Merriam Webster dictionary, amnesty is the act of an authority (such as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals. Usually, it is in the political violence that the large group of individuals gets engaged in. Therefore amnesty could most likely be defined as an official pardon for people who have been convicted of political offences. As for the war-era political violence of Nepal, amnesty became a largely disputed issue as the alleged perpetrators always tried to play on it to evade accountability whereas the victims and rights activists did not allow it to enter into the mainstream post-conflict peace and justice discourse. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the champion of non-violence movement, once said “eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” Despite all the good intentions involved, the principle of the saying varies from individual to individual in particular and country to country in general. Just to recall, Nepal experienced bloody armed hostility killing thousands of people and rendering many homeless. During the conflict,
lives in villages were extremely difficult. They were troubled by both the warring parties. It used to be reported that the Maoists capitalized on security force’s excesses by spreading stories of their inhuman treatment to children and women. The villagers, mostly youths, were held hostage by the state forces and the rebels in charge of spying against them. People used to be publicly shamed or tortured for the reasons they would never know. Rape and other forms of sexual violence were common in detentions or during interrogations. In many places, the houses were burnt and the properties were seized. Sadly, the whereabouts of those taken into hostage by both the parties are still unknown, fueling the wrath among the families of the disappeared person.
Debating amnesty
Like other conflict-torn countries, Nepal also experienced innumerable post-conflict challenges particularly in terms of transitional justice and clemency. These days, the intelligentsias are often seen divided on clemency to the conflict-era human rights abuses versus prosecution as per international laws. Some argue that it would not be justifiable to provide clemency to the perpetrators while others claim just the opposite. Whatever be their views on this, it should not ignore and undermine the voices of the victims who are the key decision-makers in this regard. If not, this would contradict the historic verdict of the Supreme Court (SC) of Nepal of January 2, 2014 and it would set a bad precedent for the post-conflict settings like ours.