NARENDRA SHRESTHA/EPA

FLARING UP: Student protests against King Gyanendra intensify

A Kingdom in Chaos
	As Nepal slips toward anarchy, its embattled King speaks to TIME about his efforts to restore order
	By Alex Perry Kathmandu

Posted Monday, January 26, 2004; 21:00 HKT
As his servants take their leave with a series of silent bows, it becomes apparent that King Gyanendra spends much of his time in the company of ghosts. Outside his window in Kathmandu's cavernous royal palace, a pale sun is setting over the Himalayas, the day staff is leaving in a hushed file through the western gate and a flock of hundreds of ravens is settling noisily into the firs. As night falls, the birds in the royal gardens cease their cawing and a gloomy silence descends upon the dimly lit palace. "It is lonely," says Gyanendra, drawing deeply on a cigarette and flicking ash absently onto a tiger-skin rug. "I miss my brothers and sisters. I am a human being after all."

It has been two-and-a-half years since Gyanendra's 29-year-old nephew, Crown Prince Dipendra, cut his deadly path through Narayanhity Royal Palace. Enraged by his mother's refusal to let him marry his girlfriend, numbed by whiskey and hashish and armed with an assault rifle, a submachine gun and a pistol, Dipendra strode wordlessly in full combat dress into his grandmother's wing of the palace and opened fire on his assembled family. By the time he turned the handgun on himself, Dipendra had shot and killed his parents Queen Aishwarya and King Birendra, his brother, a sister, an aunt, two uncles and two cousins. Gyanendra, Birendra's brother, was away in western Nepal. But his wife, Komal, who had taken their two children to spend the evening at the palace, was hit several times. She survived, losing six pints of blood and a lung; Gyanendra's son, now Crown Prince Paras, escaped with his sister after pleading for their lives with their cousin. "I left this palace 30 years ago when I got married," says Gyanendra in his measured English. "I never thought I would have to occupy it again. It is difficult, but we do the best we can. It's people that change a house into a home, and that's what we've been trying to do."

Since assuming the crown in June 2001, Gyanendra's isolation at the top of the world has only increased. Frustrated by ceaseless political infighting among Nepal's elected leaders, the King sacked the government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba 16 months ago and appointed his own administration to hold all executive powers. Gyanendra, 56, says his intervention was necessary in order to deal with the country's greatest threat: a growing insurrection by Maoist rebels, 10,000 fighters whose ongoing civil war has claimed 7,500 lives in the past two years alone. Beset by enemies from within and without, with government control outside of the capital slipping away, Gyanendra alone rules a country that foreign diplomats and many Nepalese believe is verging on anarchy.

In terms of its daily body count, the Maoist uprising is currently the deadliest conflict in Asia. It is also the most brutal. While human-rights groups accuse the 15,000-strong Nepalese paramilitary police and 72,000-strong Royal Nepalese Army of executing hundreds of Maoists, the rebels themselves are even more savage. An October 2003 report by relief group Mercy Corps relates how crowds of Maoists would watch their leaders break every bone in a "class enemy's" body, then skin him and cut off his ears, lips, tongue and nose, before sawing the body in half or burning it. The study concluded that the "almost identical pattern" of such atrocities suggested this was "a policy coordinated at senior command levels."

It is not just the horror that has prompted international concern. Outside the capital, a dangerous anarchic vacuum is developing throughout the countryside, the majority of which is under the control of neither the Maoists nor the army. Nepal's civil structure is disintegrating in the face of conflict, weak central control and the absence of local elected leaders. Thomas Marks, author of Insurgency in Nepal, says that since 1996, Maoists have destroyed 1,321 village administration buildings and 440 post offices, while police have abandoned 895 stations and teachers have abandoned 700 schools. Little has been done to address the endemic poverty that fuels the conflict, with 42% of the population earning less than $1 a day. Adding to the sense of a nation in flames, past weeks have seen students demanding a republic by setting fires, torching effigies of the King and smashing car and shop windows in Kathmandu. The fear of deepening chaos is now on every observer's lips. "The smell of burning tires on the streets of the capital reeks of democracy in decay," writes Nepali Times commentator C.K. Lal. Says Kenichi Ohashi, the World Bank's country director for Nepal: "The student agitation could get out of hand. And outside the capital there is a risk of things slowly falling apart, a sense that the country is at risk of becoming a failed state. The next 12 months seem pretty critical—it's a race against time."

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