Nepal’s new Premier Pushpa Kamal Dahal whose party won an overwhelming mandate in last year’s general election talked yesterday to a senior US diplomat visiting Katmandu. At the same time, the same US diplomat was also talking to Prachanda, “the fierce one,” the leader of Nepal’s Maoist party which is on the list of proscribed US terror organizations. The diplomat was able to do this because Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Prachanda are one and the same man — and yesterday’s talks included the almost certain removal of the country’s Maoist party from the US terror list.
This is because the Maoists have embraced the democratic process; their militias have disbanded or been subsumed into the security forces and the leader now heads a government with a healthy parliamentary majority. The man who once modeled his Maoist insurgency on the brutal Shining Path terrorists of Peru is about to be welcomed formally by Washington as one of the world’s political leaders.
So why is it that Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister-designate, following the overwhelming Hamas election victory in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, is not scheduled to be sitting down any day soon with Barack Obama’s special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell? And is Mitchell planning to meet the other political leader in the region, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, whose Hezbollah organization is also on Washington’s terror list? After all, both these organizations have embraced the political process.
While Bush used to extol democracy as the cure for all Mideast ills, he forgot to say that democratic electoral results were only acceptable if they produced the “right” winner. His hypocrisy over Hamas and Hezbollah’s movement into politics did as much as anything to undermine regional faith, certainly in his sincerity and possibly also in his intelligence. Can the so-much-smarter Obama administration not see the double standards at work here in Nepal, Palestine, Lebanon and indeed in Israel? The Bush line was that Hamas and Hezbollah had not renounced terror and disarmed. Nepal’s Maoists are widely believed to have kept much weaponry. But now Prachanda is premier, just as the Zionist terrorist Irgun gang leader Menachem Begin and Stern Gang member Yitzhak Shamir were premiers of Israel. In each case, the former terrorist leader had the armed forces of the state at his command. They could renounce terror in terms of fighting by loosely organized groups of militant irregulars and move instead to organized force — wielded by the state — which suddenly is no longer considered terror and therefore does not need to be renounced.
If force, however brutal, is ordered by a government, it is not terror. Thus the 1,300 Palestinians of Gaza, 400 of them children, who were blown to bits by Israeli weaponry were not victims of terror. But the three Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets in Israel were. Not only this, but the Gaza attack was a political ploy to keep Israel’s Kadima party in power. Could it be that Hamas and Hezbollah have somehow misunderstood this democracy business? Perhaps George Mitchell can explain to them where they have gone wrong.
