The Springs of Namje by Rajeev Goyal

Author:Rajeev Goyal [Goyal, Rajeev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0176-9
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

On February 17, 2004, Royal Nepal Army soldiers paid a visit to a home in Kavrepalanchowk in search of Devi Sunuwar. Earlier that day, a Maoist cadre being interrogated had stated that Devi was also a Maoist cadre. Finding that she was not at her home, the officers grabbed her fifteen-year-old daughter, Maina Sunuwar, and took her to the Birendra Peace Operations Trainings Center in Panchkhal, the site where Nepali soldiers were trained for UN peacekeeping operations overseas.

When the young girl wouldn’t answer questions about her mother’s affiliation to the Maoist party, the officers beat her repeatedly. When she still wouldn’t answer, her head was dipped into a cauldron of water six or seven times until she almost choked. Finally, the captain ordered that a live wire be brought over from the geyser line. The electric wire was connected to her wet hands and the soles of her feet as she was repeatedly shocked while seven other officers looked on. To make it stop, Maina confessed her mother had been involved for a few months with the Maoists but by then blood was seeping from her wrists. The captain ordered she be taken to another location within the military grounds where she was handcuffed and blindfolded. When they found her dead an hour later, they put a bullet in her back and the soldiers secretly buried her body within the compound.

The next morning Devi Sunuwar came to the camp asking for her daughter’s whereabouts, but the soldiers said they had never seen her before. The principal of Devi’s school and another teacher were also turned away. It was only later that Devi Sunuwar was falsely told her daughter had died while trying to escape captivity.

When I first started working at OHCHR, I didn’t understand why so many people in the office were assigned to this one case. Writs had been filed with the Supreme Court, voluminous legal reports had been authored, and high-level press conferences organized. OHCHR and every other human rights group in Kathmandu seemed almost obsessed by the case. In fact, the whole purpose of the High Commissioner Louise Arbour’s visit was to press for the proper punishment of the men involved in Maina Sunuwar’s death. They had only been given six-month sentences for the crime of “improperly disposing the deceased.” There was an attitude within the Nepal government that what was done was done, and why exhume her body and risk rupturing the peace process? They contended that over the course of ten years, between 1996 and 2006, more than sixteen thousand people died from the conflict and countless atrocities were committed—it was time to forget and move on.

But on a cloudy afternoon on March 23, 2007, when the small ivory-colored bones of Maina Sunuwar’s remains were finally dug up and laid out in the shape of her body for the whole country and the whole world to see, I realized why this one case mattered so much. The story of a Dalit girl being murdered by

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