Lack of funds may force U.N. to stop repatriating Burundian refugees to Tanzania
Associated Press, 10/28/05

Lack of money may force the United Nations to stop repatriating hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees, the global body said Friday.

"We are running out of funds," said Ron Redmond, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Unless we receive money immediately, we will have no choice but to reduce or even suspend the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Burundian refugees from Tanzania."

More money is also needed to help settle the refugees, UNHCR said. UNHCR said it has only received 48 percent of the US$62 million ([euro]51 million) it needs for the repatriation, the largest such operation in Africa and one of the biggest in the world. The majority of refugees who fled to Tanzania are from the Hutu majority, some of them living in camps since 1972, when ethnic violence devastated the country. Most of the refugees have been in Tanzania since the mid-1990s after fleeing Burundi's latest civil war, which began in 1993 when Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu. More than 250,000 people were killed and over 750,000 sought refuge in neighboring countries.

More than 285,000 refugees have returned home since 2001 as political stability returns to Burundi - 58,000 of them since the beginning of this year, UNHCR said. The process has picked up speed since the election of President Pierre Nkurunziza in August. Since then, up to 15,000 refugees have returned every month, most of them from neighboring Tanzania. Nevertheless, about 400,000 refugees remain in Tanzania. Some 150,000 refugees from Congo also are in Tanzania. Redmond said his agency was already using emergency funds from its operational reserve, but stressed that it could only continue to do so for a couple of weeks.

Indonesia, Aceh rebels agree to speed up peace pact
Agence France Presse, 10/25/05

The Indonesian government and separatist rebels in Aceh agreed on Tuesday to hasten guerilla decommissioning and military redeployment under a peace pact struck in August, foreign peace monitors said.

Representatives from the government and Free Aceh Movement (GAM) met Tuesday and agreed to complete the third of four phases of troop withdrawal and hand over of guerilla weapons ahead of schedule in November, the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) said. Each of the four phases agreed under the historic peace pact, aimed at ending a separatist conflict in the tsunami-hit province, was scheduled to start in the middle of each month. But the third phase will now be completed around November 14, the AMM said in a statement. Indonesia has redeployed half of the 24,000 troops sent to Aceh to control the province following completion of the second phase of the agreement. The remainder and a large contingent of military police will follow once GAM fulfills its commitment to hand over the second half of its declared 840 weapon arsenal in two stages by the end of the year.

Observers see the agreement as the best chance yet of ending the conflict which has claimed about 15,000 lives, most of them civilians, since GAM began its struggle for an independent state in 1976. Under the agreement, GAM dropped its long-held demand for independence in exchange for a form of local government in Aceh, a province of about four million people. The peace pact was spurred by the December 2004 tsunami disaster, which left 131,000 people dead in Aceh.

Jakarta urges Aceh separatists to name ex-guerrillas as part of peace process
Associated Press, 10/27/05

Indonesian authorities on Thursday urged separatists from Aceh province to identify former guerrilla fighters as part of a peace process aimed at ending one of the most intractable conflicts in the world.

"GAM should disclose the names of some 3000 former members to speed up the reintegration process," said Maj. Gen. Bambang Darmono, the Indonesian representative within the Aceh Monitoring Mission. GAM is the Indonesian acronym for the Free Aceh Movement. In August, the government and the rebels signed an accord that will grant wide-ranging autonomy to the province of four million people on the northern tip of Sumatra island.

The agreement, which is being supervised by a mission consisting of 250 monitors from the European Union and Southeast Asian countries, calls for the disarmament of the rebels and the withdrawal of part of the Indonesian garrison. Although the disengagement process has gone off relatively smoothly, the level of mistrust remains high. Two years ago, a similar truce collapsed when the Indonesian army kicked out foreign observers, arrested rebel negotiators and mounted an offensive in which more than 3,000 people died.

The separatists' political leadership still has not returned from Sweden - where they maintain a government-in-exile - citing security fears. They also have indicated that for the time being they will not submit the lists of former rebels.

"The disclosure of the names of the former GAM members is important because they will receive economic assistance from the central government as part of reintegration package to help them settle back into society during the post-conflict period," Darmono told reporters in Banda Aceh."Submitting the names of the former GAM members was also an important step in enhancing the confidence-building process," he said.

Fighting in Aceh has been going on intermittently since 1873, when Dutch colonialists invaded the previously independent sultanate.

Ivory Coast leader vows early election; rebels call for him to leave
Agence France Presse, 10/30/05

Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, whose mandate was due to go into extra time following the west African state's failure to hold elections, pledged Sunday to do everything he could to organize a vote before a one-year deadline set by the United Nations.

Meanwhile the New Forces rebels, who hold most of the north of the country, reaffirmed their call for Gbagbo to leave and said their leader, Guillaume Soro, should be the prime minister of a government of national reconciliation, due to be set up on Monday. "Monsieur Laurent Gbagbo's presidential mandate is well and truly over," the rebels said.

Under political plans drawn up by the African Union and backed by the UN, a transitional prime minister was to have been chosen before Monday by mediators including presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. Under the plan, the prime minister would enjoy enhanced powers and it would be his job to organise elections.

After a day marked by protests calling for him to step down, Gbagbo seemed eager to mollify the nation when he addressed it on television."The international community calls on us to complete this (electoral) process within 12 months at the latest...

"For my part I hope that those elections take place well before those 12 months, and that is the mission I shall give to the prime minister we will be appointing in a few days' time," he said. Elections were due to have been held by Sunday, when Gbagbo's term officially expired, but they were not possible due to the civil conflict that has torn the country in half since September 2002.

Earlier Sunday, security forces fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse demonstrators seeking to march to Gbagbo's residence to protest the extension of his mandate. Some 400 protesters, who had taken part earlier in a rally of nearly 4,000 young opposition supporters, tried to break through a security cordon near Gbagbo's home despite organizers' calls to disperse peacefully. In Paris, there were scuffles as French police blocked a march by some 500 anti-Gbagbo demonstrators who were headed for the embassy of Ivory Coast, a former French colony.

Despite calls for his ouster from the political opposition and the New Forces, the UN Security Council voted on October 21 to allow Gbagbo to stay in power for an extra year, a proposal earlier put forward by the pan-continental African Union.

In his speech Gbagbo blamed the postponement of the elections on the opposition and the rebels."The fact that it was impossible for us to hold elections is due to the rebels and all the parties which supported them in their refusal to disarm," he said, referring to a so-far unapplied peace plan brokered by South Africa.

He also described the rebels as "armed bands that are out of the control of the legitimate and legal Ivory Coast authorities" and accused them of betting on the situation deteriorating so that they could seize power without elections."My profound conviction is that our country will only emerge from its crisis through elections," he said.

In their own statement, the New Forces said they had mandated Soro "to make all necessary contact with all political groups who signed the Linas Marcoussis accord with a view to forming a government of national reconciliation very soon, in the coming hours." The main players in Ivory Coast's crisis signed the now effectively defunct Marcoussis deal in France in 2003 after the New Forces mounted a failed coup against Gbagbo.

Police Disperse Huge Ivory Coast Protest
Associated Press, 10/30/05

Security forces in Ivory Coast fired into the air and hurled tear gas canisters Sunday at thousands of unarmed opposition militants protesting a bitterly disputed one-year extension of President Laurent Gbagbo's mandate.

Hordes of young men spilled from a packed soccer stadium rally into a nearby six-lane highway, turning back vehicles at roadblocks made from overturned tables, burning tires and debris that sent small columns of acrid black smoke into the sky. Elections were to be held Sunday but Gbagbo canceled the vote, saying the civil war-riven country isn't ready. Rebels and opposition supporters agreed, but rejected Gbagbo's claim that the constitution allows him to stay in power until a ballot is held.

"Gbagbo is no longer president, that's why we're here today," said Adama Karamoko, an official of one of the political blocs organizing the rally. "He's incapable of organizing elections so he can't sit there any longer."

"Goodbye, Gbagbo's going!" shouted the crowds of disaffected young men that have helped drive the conflict in the world's largest cocoa producer.

Gbagbo was scheduled to address the nation Sunday evening, said his spokesman, Desire Tagro. "He'll make a speech - and he'll stay in power," Tagro said, declining further comment. There were no immediate reports of major violence or fatalities.

Outside the stadium, though, an angry crowd bludgeoned a man in civilian clothes they claimed was an undercover intelligence officer. In a neighborhood near the airport, attackers swinging machetes and clubs smashed windows of a bus carrying opposition supporters on their way to the stadium, slashing the arm of one passenger, said Ali Sadia, who was on the bus.

After nearly eight hours under the scorching sun, the rally dispersed and thousands of people poured into the highway, joining others who had already set up roadblocks there. Riot police fired warning shots, dispersing the mobs into side streets and taking back control of the freeway, which was empty except for security forces and scattered fires.

The rest of Abidjan was calm, though security forces blocked roads and a roundabout in the city center leading to the presidential palace. Similar protests were held in the rebel-held north, with thousands in the streets of the cities of Bouake and Korhogo.

Echoing past, unfulfilled threats, rebel spokesman Sidiki Konate said insurgent guerrillas "will fulfill their responsibilities tonight at midnight." He didn't elaborate.

Opposition parties and rebels say Gbagbo's objective is to stay in office by any means. Gbagbo says he only wants to arrange elections, and says the constitution gives him the right to do so - a claim his opponents dispute. Once a bastion of peace in a region beset by war, Ivory Coast has been in decline since the late Gen. Robert Guei seized power in a 1999 coup d'etat.

Guei held promised elections in October 2000, but tried to stop vote-counting and declared himself the winner. The move sparked a popular uprising that brought Gbagbo, who ran against him, to power. Renegade soldiers launched a 2002 coup attempt that left the country split between a rebel-controlled north and a government-controlled south. About 6,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 4,000 French troops separate the two sides. Most fighting ended with a 2003 peace deal brokered in France, and a government of national unity was formed that allotted top rebel officials ministerial posts. But mutual distrust, characterized by frequent rebel and opposition boycotts, has crippled the government.

Gbagbo's opponents, including half a dozen Cabinet ministers, say they won't recognize his authority after Sunday. They also claim he no longer has the right to command the army, which has remained loyal so far despite rumors of a possible coup.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed for calm, urging "all the Ivorian parties and their followers to refrain from any actions that might create tensions." The U.N. Security Council has issued a resolution backing an extension of Gbagbo's mandate for a year and calling for the appointment of a new prime minister to lead Ivory Coast toward elections by Oct. 30, 2006. The incumbent, Seydou Diarra, is seen as weak and ineffectual. It was not clear who would choose the new premier or when that would happen. Rebels are demanding they fill the post.

Leadership change makes Kashmiris apprehensive about political future
Associated Press, 10/28/05

Indian-controlled Kashmir's most popular leader in years was stepping down Friday under a power-sharing deal with his coalition partners, making some Kashmiris apprehensive about the continuity of his policies toward separatist militants.

Violence has declined in Kashmir during Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's tenure as chief minister in India's Jammu-Kashmir state. Sayeed's departure has created an atmosphere of uncertainty in the area, hit by a devastating earthquake this month and battered by a 15-year insurgency by Islamic guerrillas fighting for Indian Kashmir's independence or merger with mostly Muslim Pakistan.

After Jammu-Kashmir's 2002 state elections, Sayeed's People's Democratic Party and the Indian Congress party formed a coalition government there, and agreed take turns holding the state's top office. Sayeed will hand over leadership to the Congress party, which has nominated Ghulam Nabi Azad, currently a federal minister, to take charge.

"Apart from the recent (earthquake) tragedy, a lot of critical developments took place in the last three years. There is an apprehension that a power shift could impede those developments," said Ahmed Hussain, a political analyst based in the state's summer capital, Srinagar.

However, local Congress officials insist there's no need to worry."There is no reason for apprehension. We have been part of the government for the last three years, and that is not going to change," said Abdul Ghani Vakil, vice president of the state Congress party. "We will follow the policies for enduring peace and for rapid development in the state."

India and Pakistan resumed peace talks last year to try ending their decades-old rivalry, which centers mostly on Kashmir - a Himalayan territory split between the nuclear-armed neighbor countries, but claimed in entirety by both. During Sayeed's tenure, the two countries also resumed a cross-border bus service for Kashmir, and New Delhi recently began talks with separatist groups from the area. Sayeed advocated what is being called "the healing touch policy," which stressed talking with separatists who oppose Indian control of Kashmir, and finding a way for militants to give up the insurgency that has killed more than 66,000 people.

Rebel violence also declined during Sayeed's rule. According to government estimates, only 1,415 incidents of violence have been reported this year, compared with 2,565 last year and 3,400 in 2003.

Youth Power in Liberia: From Bullets to Ballots
The New York Times, 10/29/05

War took James Garmey's childhood. It came at night, in the form of armed men battering down a door and carrying him off, the 8-year-old son of a rural customs collector, to be a soldier for the warlord and future president Charles Taylor.

''I went to training,'' said Mr. Garmey, now 22, speaking in the smooth patois of the Liberian street, letting consonants and bits of grammar slip away. ''I was small, but I learned to hold gun and after a while went to battlefront. I fire gun, I defend my area.'' When Mr. Taylor fled in 2003, Mr. Garmey finally put his gun down, saying he had traded it for a different weapon altogether: the ballot. ''I cast my vote and that is my power,'' he said. ''I no need any more gun.''

Much of Africa's future belongs to young men and women like Mr. Garmey, members of a generation orphaned by conflict and AIDS, hardened by combat and want, often illiterate and unbound by deep traditions and taboos. Manipulated by their elders, they helped unleash a cycle of bloodshed that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa alone. In that way, through their numbers and their physical strength, young people have wielded a kind of indirect and chaotic power in this region for the better part of two decades.

Now, as democracy slowly spreads, the young wield another kind of power. In Liberia people from 18 to 22 make up almost a quarter of registered voters. Add those up to the age of 28, and young people make up a huge bloc of Liberia's voting public, no less than 40 percent.

Across the region, a population explosion has created a similar youth bulge that is only now beginning to make itself manifest at the voting booth. ''They can make anybody win and can make anybody lose,'' said Sidi M. Diawara, an election expert in Liberia for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that helps develop political parties and monitor elections. ''They are now the backbone of political parties, and not just in Liberia. There is a huge number of youth entering the democratic process across the region.''

In Liberia, which just held its first election since the end of the 14-year civil war that killed 200,000 and displaced a third of the population, the young helped propel the presidential candidacy of George Weah, 39, a former soccer star in Europe who is idolized by many Liberians, but most of all by young men, for whom soccer is virtually a religion.

Mr. Weah came in first in the initial round of voting on Oct. 11, receiving 28 percent of the votes in a field of 22 candidates, despite having no political experience and little formal education. He will face the No. 2 finisher, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, an economist with an Ivy League education and years of experience in politics, in a runoff on Nov. 8.

The race between Mr. Weah and Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, both long assumed to be front-runners, in many ways crystallized Africa's generation gap, offering a stark choice between a well-known member of Liberia's political elite and a total outsider of the new generation. Mr. Weah's lack of political experience and formal education is seen as an asset by many of his supporters. ''He know book, he no know book, I'll vote for him,'' is a popular slogan, a twist on the chilling campaign cry for Mr. Taylor, who dragged the country through so much bloodshed: ''He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll vote for him.''

Mr. Weah's rise has unsettled the tiny elite, with many worrying that he will become a figure like Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, who seized power in a bloody coup in 1980, ending more than a century of political domination by a small, powerful clique of descendants of the American slaves who founded this country more than 100 years ago.

Like Mr. Weah, Sergeant Doe was an unschooled man with indigenous roots, but Sergeant Doe, then 28, found his mandate through force. Mr. Weah has found his at the ballot box, largely by appealing to young men like Mr. Garmey. ''I casted my vote for George Weah,'' Mr. Garmey said, offering his ink-stained thumb as proof. ''I feel like he's a new man and he knows nothing about Liberian war.''

In a society where power usually comes with age, the generational shift has intensified old flash points. Intergenerational conflict is perhaps the oldest kind of conflict in West Africa -- it has formed the basis for power struggles for hundreds of years. ''To be powerful and rich in traditional societies of this region before colonization, you typically just had to wait your turn, until the people ahead of you in line died off,'' said Mike McGovern, an anthropologist who directs the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan organization focusing on conflict resolution. ''It was not a long wait, because of low life expectancy. ''If you waited long enough, you could marry 5 or 10 women and command 2 or 3 generations of children. And in these societies, where land was pretty much unlimited, people represented wealth.''

The only way for young people to jump ahead in line was through warfare, so a kind of low-level conflict has blazed on and off for generations. But in the last 20 years the power struggle between young and old has worsened as resources have become scarcer and the region's population has swelled.

''With increasing population density, wealth in people becomes problematic,'' Mr. McGovern said. ''Land is scarce, water is scarce, resources are scarce. So people become a liability, and the level of tension rises.''

Millions of idle young people, especially young men, have fed and fueled the interconnected civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and have destabilized other nations, like Guinea, long simmering under the thumb of an ailing dictator, and Nigeria, where youth militias run rampant through the oil-rich Niger Delta. Now that democracy is coming to more of the region, these young people are a boon and also a source of instability. They are willing to try new ways of governing and may resist the view of the state as a means of self-enrichment rather than the common good, said George Wisner, the head of the Federation of Liberian Youth, an advocacy group for young people here.

''Many of the children of Liberia haven't seen water from a pipe; they have never seen electricity from the wall,'' Mr. Wisner said. ''There is general frustration that young people haven't been part of the decision making in this country, and this inner yearning to have a voice in national affairs. This means an openness to something new.''

Yet they have been ill prepared for their new civic role. ''This is probably the only country in the world where you have a less literate youth population than the adult population,'' said Angela Kearny, director of Liberia's Unicef program.

Democracy will require a great deal of patience from this young, restive population. But waiting, which is what their elders have always told them they must do, is anathema to the members of this generation.

''When the objectives of an open society are achieved in Liberia, young people are invariably going to ask about the results,'' Mr. McGovern said. ''Do we have jobs, do we have better living conditions? Is it easier to get married? The problem is you can have all the trappings of an open society and still have very little to show for it.''

Patience is already in short supply. At a building called Titanic, a huge office building once meant to house the Health Ministry but never finished, dozens of former child soldiers live as squatters. ''We need job training, something to better our lives,'' said Ballah Henry, a lean, muscular man of 27 who joined up with Charles Taylor's militia when he was 14. His ferocity on the battlefield earned him the nickname Bad Blood. He disarmed, along with more than 100,000 other combatants, and has warily signed on to peace and democracy. He says he will wait, but not forever. ''We need to eat,'' Mr. Henry said. ''If we don't eat, if we don't work, there's gonna be war again in this place.''

Negotiations resume between Moldovan government and separatists after 15 months
Associated Press, 10/27/05

The Moldovan government and separatists resumed negotiations Thursday, 15 months after they broke off.

Two days of talks are taking place in the Moldovan capital. For the first time, officials from the European Union and the United States joined other negotiators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

Moldova has struggled to reach a settlement with the pro-Russian eastern region of Trans-Dniester, which broke away after a short 1992 war that left about 1,500 dead. There are 1,500 troops - leftovers from the Soviet Army - stationed in Trans-Dniester. Russia, which also took over thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition from the Soviet Army, had pledged to withdraw its forces and weapons by the end of 2003. But withdrawal has been slow.

Negotiations between the sides broke off last year. Tensions reached a high in the summer of 2004 when separatists closed two Moldovan-language high schools in the mostly Russian-speaking enclave. At one point separatist troops stormed the Rabnita school, forcing its closure. The school has since reopened in a different location.

Where Maoists Still Matter
The New York Times, 10/30/05

The boy wore an M-16 bullet on a thin gold chain around his neck and was unusually talkative to strangers. Around his wrist was an ammunition belt that he twirled like a bracelet. He said these were souvenirs from the battlefield at nearby Khara, after a celebrated clash a few months earlier between the People's Liberation Army and the Royal Nepalese Army.

Mani Kendra Gharti was his name. He was 17. And he offered two reasons for having joined the Maoists earlier this year: curiosity and peer pressure. He was a student when his uncle, a party worker recently released from prison, pressed him into service. Mani was better suited to carry a tune than a rifle, and so he signed up for the party's cultural wing, took on a nom de guerre -- Comrade Prabhat -- and went around singing and dancing revolutionary songs from village to village, usually at schools. This is one way the party spreads its gospel and draws new members. Comrade Prabhat's decision seems to have been prompted mainly by boredom, and by this afternoon he seemed no longer convinced he had made the right move.

''It would have been better to stay in school,'' he said, playing with his ammunition belt. ''Once you join, you can't leave.''

My Maoist minder for the day, Ratna Mahara, overheard this and intervened. There was no peer pressure, Ratna said; Comrade Prabhat had been keen to join. Ratna didn't yell, but there was no hiding his displeasure. Prabhat admitted he had been curious. But he stood his ground. There was also peer pressure, he said.

Silence. Then Ratna took him aside, whispered something that neither I nor my interpreter could hear and sent the boy into the jumble of houses across a thin spit of river. The next time I saw Comrade Prabhat it was pitch dark and he was wearing a forest green uniform, a red tie knotted loosely around his neck. A fluorescent light had been hooked up to a car battery. Prabhat and his comrades -- boys in red ties, girls in red sashes, Miss Universe-style -- had been persuaded to treat us to a revue, a practice run of what they would perform at an indoctrination session later that week. The dances were a hybrid of Nepali tradition and global-guerrilla pantomime. The songs fused the romanticism of Keats with the sloganeering of the Gang of Four. One song went something like this:

The proletariat's fortress grows stronger. Like clouds that part and reveal the red sky, like daylight after darkness,There is great happiness and greenery in the forest. That is how happy my heart is.

Built of small fighters with flip-flops for combat boots, suffused with rage against a long legacy of oppression based on caste and ethnicity, the Maoists' guerrilla war began nearly a decade ago in these villages of Rolpa District, in the midwestern foothills of the Himalayas. Since then, it has spread a peculiar mixture of terror and desire across the countryside, cost more than 12,000 lives and come to be arguably the most resilient and ruinous Communist insurgency in the world today.

Nepal is a landlocked nation, slightly larger than Arkansas, pressed up against the Himalayas. Its nearly 28 million citizens are among the poorest in the world. Its system of government -- after more than a decade of tumultuous semi-democracy -- is, in effect, an absolute monarchy, ruled by the world's only Hindu king, Gyanendra Bikram Bir Shah Dev, a chain smoker with perpetually downturned lips. Some of his followers regard him as a direct descendant of the god Vishnu.

Our journey from King Gyanendra's capital in Katmandu to the Maoists' capital in Rolpa took an hour by plane, nine hours by car, and nine days on foot, up and down the hills, through clouds and forest and one red-flag hamlet after another. ''Any goal short of capturing the state is revisionism,'' screamed the red-ink graffiti on the side of one house. At each stop, Maoist cadres greeted us with an upraised fist and a lal salaam -- ''red salute'' in Nepali. At most stops there was also a Hindu tradition of hospitality -- a dash of vermilion smeared on our foreheads -- and once, a rousing send-off by a marching band of barefoot Dalits, or those considered ''untouchable'' in the Hindu caste system. A tag team of Maoist minders accompanied us through the hills, with a promise to let us see for ourselves the fruits of their revolution. At the end of the road, on a hill above the revolutionary capital Thabang, they said, was a model Maoist school, a tiny but vital building block for the new society they sought to erect. Each of the comrades in turn urged us onward to this Xanadu.

To most observers, it is obvious that the Maoists cannot win the war and cannot rule Nepal. But a young and infirm democracy and an increasingly discredited monarchy have together rewarded the Maoists with newfound leverage. The Nepali newspaper columnist C. K. Lal described them as ''political entrepreneurs,'' able to exploit the cracks in the system. I asked him, Isn't a Maoist insurgency a bit retro? He told me to consider medieval Katmandu and the strange and bloody misadventures of its royal court: ''We are living in a time warp. An absolute monarchy belongs to the 14th, 15th century. One anachronism invites another anachronism.'' Nepal has struggled to find a more viable politics than this contest between the 15th century and one of the most absurd ideological innovations of the 20th. But the circumstances of Nepal have conspired against reform -- to such a degree that the Maoists may be gaining the upper hand.

Nepal's own Tiananmen Square came in April 1990, when, in response to street protests, Gyanendra's predecessor, King Birendra, opened the doors for parliamentary elections, a new constitution and a free press. With an elected government came roads, private radio stations, aid money and ambitions among ordinary Nepalis to improve their lot. Perhaps most important, the proliferation of schools in the countryside after 1990 taught a generation of young men and women how to read and write -- and become political.

What 1990 failed to deliver was perhaps more significant for the political entrepreneurs of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The new constitution paid lip service to Nepal's diversity, but Hinduism remained the state religion, and calls for more local autonomy, to reflect the country's true demographic mix, were ignored. The upper-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas -- priests and warriors, respectively, in the Hindu pecking order -- continued to run everything. There was no meaningful land reform. The army remained beholden to the king rather than to Parliament. Politicians, local and national, indulged in corrupt dealings. For most enterprising Nepalis, the best prospects required leaving Nepal.

These were the considerable shortcomings that the Maoist political entrepreneurs sought to exploit. By 1994, Nepal's Communists had split. One faction, led by Prachanda -- what would become the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) -- was kept out of the elections. Many Nepalis regard that as the crucial moment in the political history of Communism in Nepal. Had the C.P.N. (M) been allowed to contest for power, it might never have resorted to war. By the time this was clear, however, it was too late.

No sooner had democracy arrived in 1990 than Ratna (our party minder in the Rolpa hills) learned from his father that war was imminent. His father was a Communist old-timer and is today a member of the Prachanda faction's Central Committee. Weapons had been procured over the border in India. And even as the Communist Party of Nepal engaged the democratic system -- once winning the second largest bloc of seats in Parliament -- preparations for an armed confrontation were under way. In February 1996, the Maoists launched a series of coordinated attacks, starting in the midwest. In a village called Holeri, on the road from Nepalgunj to Maoist country, a gutted police post still stands as a monument to that first strike.

Ratna remembered exactly where he was when the revolution began. He and his friends ran around their village shouting revolutionary slogans. Then some of his friends went to the next village and broke the kneecaps of some young men they considered thugs. Ratna was 14 at the time.

For the first five years of the war, it was local police officers who fought the guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers. Then, on June 1, 2001, came the nocturnal massacre inside Narayanhiti Palace in Katmandu. King Birendra and his son, the crown prince, Dipendra, were killed. The king's brother, Gyanendra, and his family survived. Three days later, with a nation in mourning and conspiracy theories swirling under the rain clouds, Gyanendra took the throne. At his order, the Royal Nepalese Army was unleashed against the Nepalese people for the first time in history.

In 2002, King Gyanendra dissolved Parliament. This February he imposed emergency rule, jailed some of Nepal's most prominent elected officials and vowed to crush the Maoists. But the Maoists haven't been crushed. Since emergency rule was imposed in February, 1,334 people have been killed, an average of more than five each day, according to a human rights group called Informal Sector Service Center in Katmandu. The Maoists, for their part, carried out assaults across the countryside; at the same time, they started cozying up to the sort of politicians they had once regarded as ''class enemies'' and often butchered. They began reaching out to Nepal's most powerful allies too -- yesterday's ''imperialists,'' from India, Britain and the United States. In early September came the Maoists' biggest surprise: a temporary cease-fire. It was a deft move designed to further isolate the king at home and abroad. By some measures, it worked; the king canceled a scheduled appearance at a summit meeting of world leaders in New York.

Meanwhile, Katmandu witnessed a kind of Prague Spring after the suspension of emergency rule and the passing of the summer monsoons. In late August and September, street protests echoed with cries for the ouster of Gyanendra, making it increasingly apparent that, if nothing else, the king's February clampdown gave a fillip to the Maoists' principal war aim: it began to turn the nation against monarchy.

Three weeks after the Maoists' cease-fire pledge, King Gyanendra announced that local elections would be held early in 2006 and parliamentary polls a year after that. Most of the country's largest political parties -- having lost patience with, and even respect for, the monarchy -- agreed to boycott, and a seven-party alliance called for new talks with the Maoists.

Initially, the Maoists' best opportunity for driving a wedge between Nepalese and the monarchy was to pay respect to those castes that a Hindu monarchy was bound to trample on. ''We Dalits, we weren't even considered human beings,'' said an old man named Irkha Bahadur Pariyar, a tailor by birth, in Thabang, the Maoists' run-down capital. ''Dogs were considered more human.''

Dalits couldn't fetch water at the upstream village tap, the old man said. They had to go to the one downstream, so as not to pollute the water for those higher up the caste ladder. Pariyar had been a tailor since age 9. His father was a tailor, too. His grandfather the same. Today, two of his three sons are migrant workers in the Persian Gulf. He doesn't know what they do, only that they left because it became impossible to stay, thanks to the constant police harassment of young men and women. A third son works for the party -- as a tailor, stitching uniforms.

Was Pariyar pleased with the party's accomplishments in Thabang? ''Well, the party could have done more,'' he said. ''They could have done better. But this is the beginning.'' He looked at his nephew, a member of the party's Dalit committee, and smiled. His wiry fingers returned to a pair of blue pleated trousers under his sewing machine. He complained of a backache and refused to say any more.

The stated Maoist plan for Nepal was always a mix of leveling social relations, addressing serious grievances, imposing far-left Puritanism and promoting economic growth, if there was to be any, through either revolutionary enthusiasm or, if necessary, revolutionary violence. The party's first list of demands, presented in February 1996, was typical: a call for a new constitution and an army accountable to the government rather than the palace; calls to ban ''vulgar'' Hindi films from India; an end to the recruitment for foreign armies of Gurkha soldiers, most of whom hailed from the midwestern hill districts. The government ignored these demands entirely.

In their own territory, the Maoists have instituted a raft of new laws. Untouchability is proscribed, in theory and practice. Alcohol and child marriage are banned. New polygamous marriages are not tolerated, although, depending on the local leadership, existing ones are left alone. Migrating to India in search of work is frowned upon. Legal disputes are adjudicated by a roving people's court that Nepali human rights advocates consider a travesty of justice. Policing is done by a people's militia, members of which also appeared to run Thabang's main tea shop.

Red flags mark the gates of this guerrilla capital. Olive-colored Chairman Mao caps are sold at the People's Liberation Army cooperative, along with ammunition belts and hemp soap. Morning drills for new recruits begin with the rooster's first crow. The nearest police station or military post or post office -- or indeed any sign of the authority of the Royal Kingdom of Nepal, within whose boundaries this hamlet officially sits -- is a three-day hike through the hills. Chickens cross the road, back and forth. The smoke of cooking fires hangs low in the air, making everything sooty, making it hard to breathe. There is not a single child without a runny nose, and it's not even winter. Medicines are extremely difficult to ferry into these parts, thanks to military and guerrilla checkpoints along the way. The nearest doctor is a couple of days' walk.

Up and down the jagged Rolpa hills, small girls in plastic flip-flops haul bushels of fodder and firewood on their backs. A man lugs a manual sewing machine on his shoulders across a fast-moving river, swollen from rain. As always in the weeks before the monsoon, the hills are terraced with seedlings of rice; if the sky is generous, it will be sufficient to yield enough food for maybe half the year. If they are lucky, people will eat two meals, identical, day after day: rice, lentils and maybe a side of marijuana-leaf chutney. Among the few name-brand goods you can buy at the village shops are instant noodle packets with improbably giddy names like Yum Yum and Shakalaka Boom. There is no electricity here. In one village, Ghartigaun, on the road to Thabang, there was once a telephone tower, the villagers said, but the Maoists destroyed it years ago. Outside their so-called base areas like this one in the midwestern hills, the Maoists don't hold territory for long. But for all practical purposes rural Nepal, apart from the district capitals, is theirs to rule.

On the way to Maoist country, I stopped to see the district education office in Nepalgunj. In the last 18 months, it had been bombed ''only eight times,'' the education officer, Vishnu Prasad Thaiba, gamely said. Of 220 instruction days in the official school calendar, classes had actually been in session for 150 days. Two teachers had disappeared. (Last year, according to the United Nations, Nepal had the largest number of new disappearance cases in the world.)

A little farther up into the hills, the principal of a primary school said that all his teachers recently had been whisked off to a weeklong Maoist training program. In the neighboring district of Dang, a teacher's corpse was found beheaded this summer; the Maoists evidently suspected him of spying.

Routinely, the Maoists' student wing -- Ratna was among its leaders -- sent Thaiba a list of demands: hire more teachers, install toilets and gyms, ban the singing of the national anthem. Thaiba refused to be engaged in a conversation about the merits of their education agenda. ''I take information only,'' Thaiba said dryly. ''I don't have any opinions, any ideas.''

Why? I asked.

''I will be lost,'' he said. ''I will be disappeared. My family will not see my corpse.''

The portraits of 13 successive kings of Nepal hung on his wall. Thaiba was a cheerful man, with the short-sleeved gray safari suit of a lifelong civil servant and, considering his surroundings, a wry sense of humor. Earlier that week, bombs had been hurled at three public schools -- there were only explosions and no damage, he said -- and he nimbly led us downstairs and onto the parking lot to point out the private school across the road. It had been bombed a few weeks earlier.

Why this intense revolutionary focus on schools? For the Maoists, schools represent a vital source of both revenue and recruits. Teachers, often the most influential elites in rural communities, can either be roped in as allies or eliminated as enemies. (Tulsi Kumari Dangi, a Nepali language teacher we met along the road, said it was routine practice for all teachers to give 5 percent of their salaries every month, plus the entirety of their annual bonus.) Public schools are also the last vestige of His Majesty's government across the Nepali countryside. And, of course, schools in an almost media-free rural society are the best place to assert control over the public mind.

The Maoists have shut down many schools, particularly the fee-paying private schools that have mushroomed in recent years. They have ferried away students and teachers for indoctrination and forced labor. They have brought their Communist song-and-dance shows to schoolyards. They have made children dig trenches around schools in preparation for what they regard to be an imminent, final military onslaught. A Unicef survey of one war-torn district found that the number of children who showed up for year-end exams had dropped by nearly half. To Unicef officials, this signaled that children were either not coming to school at all, or that their instruction days had shrunk so much that they no longer bothered to sit for the year-end exams. The gains made in the last decade to get children into schools, they concluded, were at risk of being lost. I learned in Thabang that no one in the last two years had passed the national 10th-grade matriculation exam, a benchmark recognized as the completion of formal schooling.

Maoists will tell you that the ''feudal'' education system of the ''old regime'' is not worth saving anyway. They are preparing for a new day. Sanskrit will be outlawed. Royal history will be replaced with people's history. Teachers will impart practical training and revolutionary values: patriotism, selflessness and the principles of ''scientific Communism.'' A Katmandu-based television journalist, Kishore Nepal, was shown a copy of the model curriculum on one of his trips into Maoist country. The fourth-grade syllabus contained an introduction to dialectical materialism, poetry about Maoist martyrs and an introduction to homemade guns. Fifth graders would learn about the Spartacus revolt and receive a primer on ''explosives, grenades and booby traps.''

On our second morning in Thabang, we trudged an hour uphill for a look at the model school that our Maoist minders had promised to show us. Its doors were bolted. Benches and cots were piled hurly-burly inside classrooms. The outhouse had never been used. The teachers, I was told, were elsewhere, receiving training; where, they couldn't say. The books were being printed; where, they couldn't say either. Conveniently enough, the students had already gone home for summer holiday. As an afterthought, the chief of Rolpa District produced two orphans, ages 7 and 12, who nervously nodded when asked if they were studying at the Maoist school. They did not recall when they had last been in class.

In the early 1970's, when I was a child in Calcutta, Maoism was sweeping through our part of India -- and through parts of my family. The uncles I knew from that time lived with peasants in the countryside, and when, occasionally, they turned up to visit us in the city, smoking cheap cigarettes and carrying hand-woven shoulder bags, they taught me not nursery rhymes but marching songs for the revolution. Once, while sitting with my mother in a sari shop in Calcutta, I broke out into one such song. My mother thinks the lyrics had something to do with a red sun rising. Whatever it was, it was not safe for a 3-year-old to be singing in a sari shop in Calcutta. Terrified, she scooped me off the counter, ran from the shop and jumped onto the nearest rickshaw. My singing uncles went underground and some were soon dead. In 1975, as emergency rule was declared in India, my family left the country.

In the 30 years since, vast changes have swept through South Asian life and politics, but the Maoists, with their songs, their hubris and their grungy hand-woven shoulder bags, have held on, even flourished. Amid the economic boom in India, Maoist guerrillas thrive across a vast crescent of forest and countryside stretching from Andhra Pradesh in the center of the subcontinent northeast to Bihar and Bengal. Their advance is slow, but they have endured, and they will kill those who seem to oppose them -- usually local policemen. Meanwhile, in the years since the Berlin Wall fell and Communism was declared dead, Nepal's Maoist insurgency has blossomed.

I met Comrade Huri on one of my last days in Maoist country, on the morning that she and her fellow soldiers of the People's Liberation Army had stationed themselves in a village called Tila, for the landmark inauguration of the first completed stretch of the road the party was building through Rolpa. Her real name was Tika Gharti Magar, and she was 24.

She said she was a teenager when the police came around her village, not far from here, and singled out Communists and their sympathizers for harassment. The first time they arrested her, she was accused of writing Maoist slogans on the village wall and threatened with life imprisonment. Once, when she and some local kids defeated some officers in an impromptu volleyball contest, the police cursed and searched their schoolbags. If the police hadn't harassed her people like that, she told me, perhaps her life would have taken a different turn. ''The only alternative was to join the Maoists,'' she said.

In eighth grade, Tika Gharti Magar dropped out of school. By the time police officers came to arrest her a second time, she had left home. She joined the party's student wing, then the women's wing; then, at age 18, she became a full-fledged fighter. ''As it is, there is so much suppression, and on top of that, I am a woman,'' she said, dressed in fatigues and a pair of cheery lilac-colored plastic sandals. ''I thought I must go for real war for women's liberation, for class struggle. I am young. I understand my country's problems. I needed some military experience.''

What's it like being a woman in the P.L.A.? First, she said, ''our party has a policy of total equality.'' Then she said that sometimes, young male recruits had a bit of trouble following orders from a woman. She also told me how radically her own life had changed since she stepped into uniform. Before, in her village, if she wanted to go out somewhere, she would have to be escorted by a friend or one of her brothers. Today, she is a platoon commander, with 25 soldiers under her authority. At dawn this morning, she was on a ridge, keeping watch over these hills, in case of an enemy attack.

I asked her about her ambitions for the future. She looked bewildered, as if despite her training and her confidence she hadn't bothered to think about who she would be after the revolution. ''Whatever the party decides'' was her final answer.

Not everyone would make her choice, even if the alternative consisted of flight, immiseration and fear. Lal Chandra Jaisi's story was typical. A formerly well-to-do farmer and a supporter of the Nepali Congress Party, Jaisi said he had for years been friends with the local Maoists in his village, Dhayankot. They stayed in one of his homes. His daughters-in-law cooked for them. They debated politics with his family, and Jaisi was on their side on many issues. The idea of equality, he said, still appeals to him.

''It's the violence I don't like, all this destruction of infrastructure, the coercion, the attacks against political workers -- all this I don't like,'' he told me in a refugee camp made of poles and blue tarps.

He experienced coercion up close one night when his Maoist friends suddenly asked that he turn over his three sons to the party. His sons fled to India. The Maoists retaliated, beating him up and seizing his house, his shop, his apple trees and his beehives. That's when he fled, too, with his wife, three daughters-in-law and two grandchildren. He had no intention of staying in this swampy camp. But he has no other place to go.

The Maoists have climbed down from their original demand of a ''people's democracy.'' They have invited political parties to resume working in their base areas and, as one of the party's Central Committee members put it, they have promised not to look at the politicians against whom they once waged war ''with yesterday's eyes.'' Informal talks between the parties and Maoist emissaries have already begun.

The guerrillas' commander in chief, Prachanda, does not come out of hiding to talk to journalists. But in an e-mail interview, he insisted that while the ultimate aim of his movement remained the ushering in of Communism, adjustments would be made to suit the times. ''Right now we are fighting against the remnant of medieval feudalism represented by an autocratic monarchy,'' an e-mail message read. ''So, our immediate aim is to liberate the masses from the yoke of feudal autocracy.''

Born Pushpa Kamal Dahal and trained in agricultural science, Prachanda had once been employed on a U.S.A.I.D.-financed rural-development project in these midwestern hills. Today his insurgency, combined with the growing protests against the king, has placed Prachanda and his movement in a particularly advantaged position. He is not inclined to be cast into the dustbin of failed revolutions. He is willing, he says, to work within the confines of what the Maoists call ''bourgeois democracy.''

''We are quite serious to develop our ideology so as to face the challenges posed by the situation of 21st century,'' Prachanda wrote.

Prachanda's friend from college days, Prasanta -- a Central Committee member I met on my way to Thabang -- told me there was no need for anyone to fear their party. ''We have said what we mean by people's democracy,'' he said. ''It is a multiparty people's democracy.'' Nepali politicians ought to trust the revolutionaries, he added; they ought to know by now they have no choice. ''We have emerged as a big force,'' he said flatly.

It was hard to imagine how and why the Maoists would give up the control they had won, especially the total hold over these hills they call their base areas, and more important, how they will persuade the thoroughly indoctrinated rank-and-file fighters to abandon war before a total takeover of the state. The hubris of a young cadre, Comrade Azad, was typical: Nepal, he told me, would be ''the base area'' for worldwide Maoist revolution.

Moreover, whether the Maoists will actually share power in a democratic system, or take up the gun again if they lose at the polls, remains a critical subject of dispute. ''I don't know if they know what they will settle for,'' said one senior diplomat involved in talks with all sides in the conflict. ''In private, they can be quite candid. They understand their own limits. They understand the need for a political way out.''

They also need to show they can build as well as destroy. The Nepalese state has decayed so far that it, too, needs to prove that it is good for something other than retaining military power. And so the Maoists and the state are engaged in a contest to see who can build a better road. The Royal Nepalese Army has also been building one just northwest of Maoist country. A German aid group was working on a road in Rolpa District until harassment from local Maoist leaders prompted it to pull out. The party's own Martyrs' Road is slated to connect Nuwagaon, the southernmost village under Maoist control, 56 miles up to Thabang. The Maoists have used some of their precious explosives to blast through the toughest stretches of mountain, but the rest is done by conscripted labor crews. They are cutting a road through the Himalayas with their bare hands.

One morning, not far from Nuwagaon, I watched a man with a hammerhead drill disembowel the side of a mountain. The underside of the rock shone with specks of silver and mauve. On another stretch of road, close to Tila, I watched small boys and hunch-backed old women erecting a reinforcement wall under the gravel trail, one stone at a time.

The construction crew was not unlike a chain gang. Each family in Maoist territory was required to send one person for a 15-day shift. They were responsible for their own food and lodging, which meant hauling their own rice on their backs and sleeping under a tree. Several road workers said this was already their second shift of the year. For this crew, who had walked two days from their home village, the Martyrs' Road would bring no direct benefit: they used another gravel road, only two hours' walk from their village.

Aiber Pun, 54, a farmer like the rest of his crewmates, said he had sent his 17-year-old daughter on the last work call. He didn't have the heart to send her a second time, he said.

Are you happy about the road project? I asked.

He cracked a slight smile and fetched another rock.''What can I say? They said to come and do a development project. So we come.''

On inauguration morning, Comrade Huri and her fellow P.L.A. soldiers were posted around the hills surrounding Tila. New gates had been erected, streamers hung and the portraits of the party gods (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao) had been placed on the table set aside for V.I.P.'s. There was some anxiety about the prospect of an air attack, but a thick cloud cover, Comrade Huri told me, meant the chance was slim.

Soon, the first official bus, groaning with comrades, came barreling up the road, followed by a long train of children, hollering in delirious joy. They had never before seen such a vehicle.