Royal pain

King Gyanendra has deftly managed to expose the international community's hypocrisy with his royal coup

Lolita Maya Magar Kathmandu

The palace-military takeover of Nepal of February 1, 2005 may have shocked the politically "sophisticated" world, with India no less stunned by the fact that for the first time in recent history, a Nepali ruler chose to do something without big brother's consent.

Other major international players in Nepal — the US, UK, European Union (EU), aid donors and international human rights organisations — claim to be equally aghast, especially as King Gyanendra had promised them he would toe their line.

Officials from Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch, the EU, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights' (UNCHR) Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, and India's Foreign Secretary, Shyam Sharan are just a few that flew in and out of Nepal. They prepared their reports, had their obligatory consultations, cautioned the monarch, and left. Obviously, their caution was not enough to restrain a monarch bent on having his way.

Now that unforeseen events have overtaken Nepal, the global media has trained its sights on the country. Nepal is a signatory to nearly all international instruments on human rights. The king cast aside these obligations and proceeded to set in place a regime virtually overnight that blatantly violates the fundamental principles of rule of law. All evidence is on crude display, be it the gagging of the media, persecution of the defenders of democracy, the creation of extra legal bodies with overriding powers to both prosecute and adjudicate (the Royal Commission on Corruption Control), the army on the streets, the mass illegal detentions and arrests, the disappearances, and the impunity. Yet, again, fighting terrorism and extremism provided the cover for an attack on democracy. But the cult of antiterrorism has been the most dignified form of global geopolitics these past few seasons. The unattractive consequences of democracy should, therefore, not be scrutinised in too much detail lest the messianic purpose of the transnational liberty industry be undermined altogether.

Those states that provided the government of Nepal with military aid to fight terrorists are not guided by inviolable codes of etiquette. Here is a core problem that Nepal presents: From the point of view of realism, all that has happened is just trifling bother, more to do with the image management of democrats doubling as arms merchants. But, in the long run, this raises problems that militate against the logic of imposing stability by supporting tyrants. A fundamental question for them is: will this monarch, who has shown the capacity to unite all Nepali political forces against him, succeed in preventing the possible descent of Nepal into absolute instability? After all, the original fear that animated the international coalition into supporting the king at the expense of democracy has been the prospect of instability. But this is not the only contradiction that the king's "gambit" has exposed.