Nepal bombing bad news for peace process

A massive bomb attack at an election rally in ethnically tense southern Nepal marks a serious escalation of violence by groups intent on derailing the country’s fragile peace process, analysts said Thursday.

The attack late Wednesday left 55 people with shrapnel wounds, and raises doubts of whether the polls scheduled for April 10 that will decide the impoverished country’s political future can be a success, they warned.

“The bomb on Wednesday at the mass meeting was a show of strength by the armed groups,” Prashant Jha, a journalist and researcher in southern Nepal issues, told AFP.

“Next, they will kill election candidates and bomb more mass meetings. Violence will escalate,” he grimly predicted.

Nepal’s southern Terai region is home to around half of Nepal’s 27 million people, and its residents — known as Mahadhesis — have long complained they have been treated as second-class citizens and excluded from the capital’s corridors of power.

Unrest in the south kicked off shortly after the country’s mainstream parties and Maoist insurgents signed a peace deal in November 2006 that ended a decade of civil war, but still left ethnic activists in the south feeling left out of politics.

The bombing came as the Maoists and main parties were trying to rally support in the south for the April elections, which will elect a body that will rewrite the constitution and most likely abolish the monarchy. “This is a strong sign of things to come,” Jha said of the bombing.

Kathmandu, Friday, AFP