From our correspondent
Francesca Lancini

Kathmandu is a city that confuses. You get lost in the crowded streets and in the narrow alleys. You can’t get your bearings in the circular piazzas used like strolling markets, and when you arrive in Durbar Square, the heart of the Nepalese capital, it is difficult to recognize the Hindu temples of a red brick color and of every dimension marked on the map. To walk in traffic, then, can become an undertaking, dazed by the continuous trumpeting of the horns of Maruti buses and scooters, they, too—all the same—imported from nearby India. Disorientation, moreover, is part of the unique fascination of this obligatory destination of travelers and adventurers from the entire world, but it is also a metaphor for whoever tries to analyze the present political situation of Nepal, balanced between peace and war.

Everything happens in a great hurry. In April, in only nineteen days of peaceful rebellion of the people in the main cities of this little Asian country, wedged between the giants India and China, results worthy of a revolution were obtained. The despotic king with the impossible name, Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shad Dev, renounced absolute power, assumed February 1, 2005, and reopened the parliament closed in 2002. It immediately decided on the election of a new constituent assembly that will rewrite the principal Charter of the State and will decide whether it will survive or whether to substitute a republic for the monarchy. But this isn’t the end of it. At the beginning of May the prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, named a new government, choosing a communist as his vice, while the Maoist guerrillas have adhered to a ceasefire for at least three months, thus accepting to enter into new peace negotiations with the Executive. In the end the newborn government has deprived the sovereign of all powers, transforming him into a ceremonial figure. The price of the mobilization that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets with anti-monarchy slogans has been at least 14 deaths and many wounded, above all young people.

The long road to peace. In Nepal no change can happen without leaving an after-effect or a wound. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, where a patriarchal Hindu society is based on discriminations of caste and sex and where the decade long conflict between the Maoists and the royal army has caused at least 13,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of evacuees in the country outside the valley of Kathmandu. The expected historic agreement reached last June 16 between the head of the Maoists, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, called Prachanda (“the fierce”), and prime minister Koirala has been cultivated with all the tones of optimism from the most fired up to the most cautious, even if many experts invite a sane skepticism. The rebel leader Prachanda, 52 years old and with the deceptive attitude of a timid intellectual, came into the capital for the first time after an absence of twenty-five years in the remote areas of Nepal and in India. At first he was often visible in public, but last January, in the wake of recent events, among which a strict alliance between the seven parties of opposition and the Maoists, in function anti-monarch, he gave his first interview to international media, the BBC, justifying the use of violence for his so-called “war of the people.” Today Prachanda and Koirala have decided on the dissolution of parliament and the formation of an interim government with the participation of the Maoists, but in the eight-point agreement the abandonment of violence on the part of the guerrillas is not mentioned. June 20, however, the minister of the interior, Sitaula, said that he will not share power with an armed force, but the rebels have insisted that they will not lay down their guns until the elections are held, around April of 2007.