December 2, 2007
Kanak Mani Dixit is a Nepali journalist, activist, publisher and writer of fiction living in Kathmandu. He edits the English-language magazine Himal Southasian (www.himalmag.com) and the Nepali magazine Himal Khabarpatrika (www.himalkhabar.com), the first newsmagazine in Nepali. He also runs a publishing house and Nepal's preeminent printing press, as well as writing occasional children's novels.
His opposition to the authoritarian
regime imposed by King Gyanendra led to him being arrested several
times, once for a period of 19 days along with his wife, who runs a
school in Kathmandu. During these years Dixit wrote much and gave
several interviews to the foreign media, at times from jail. He is
recognized as perhaps Nepal's best-known and most important journalist.
I interviewed him at his restaurant, which faces the gates of Patan--a rambling structure which was originally a Rana's stables, now admirably restored.
Portions of that interview follow.
DUNHAM: I’ve
just returned from the Madesh, an area that struck me as resembling a
tropical version of America’s Wild Wild West. It’s every man for
himself down there. No law and order. Fear. Anger that the big shots in
Kathmandu marginalize the Madeshi problem and refuse to come down to
Madesh to have a look for themselves. How important is Terai in the
peace process?
DIXIT:
Extremely important. The peace process was meant to bring in the
Maoists from the cold-- the so-called “People’s War”-- and to come into
mainstream politics. And then, while the State was engaged in doing
that, the People’s Movement erupted. So the Terai people, who were
seeking to find their identity within the modern-day Nepali State,
which they had been denied, were not given due credence. Soon
thereafter, in the anarchical situation, it became clear that the
Nepali Home Ministry was absolutely incapable of checking violence in
the Terai, which was also goaded by open frontier [the Indian border]
and an ability to jump across the frontier for refuge and security. As
a result, you had an anarchic situation evolving into a violent
situation. …What happened was that-- when it came time to organize for
the constituent assembly elections and the assembly was supposed to
restructure our State and define our future—the people of Terai
suddenly felt: “It’s late; we have done nothing about our place in the
national movement.” And that is when the People’s Movement in Terai
arose. People will try to pin it on Indian activism, the Indian State’s
malfeasance or the royalists in Nepal—none of that! The movement was a
movement of the Terai people in Nepal to demand recognition of their
identity as citizens within the Nepali Nation State.
DUNHAM: Do you think that the Maoists were shell-shocked by the Terai movement?
DIXIT: Yes.
The Maoists had had the run of the Terai-- essentially moving into a
vacuum left by the State over the last decade. And they suddenly spread
like wildfire in the Terai…very quickly…they picked up anybody that
they could find, just to build on their grouping. They even took on
local criminals and local warlords and groups that might not be
ideologically absolute fellow travelers. Now, all of this is coming
home to roost, especially in the Terai. …There was the terrible event
where many Maoist activists were killed in a place called Gaur. That
was also part of the shell-shocking of the Maoists: that such drastic
events happened to a group of Maoists who were, themselves, going
around being active in violent politics.
DUNHAM: Some of these newly emerged groups were originally Maoists, right? They use Maoist techniques against the Maoists.
DIXIT: Yes, except they don’t seem to have the deeper underlying political orientation of the Maoists, which does
exist. It is because the Maoists, deep-down, howsoever violent they
were, (and there were even instances of Khmer Rouge-type violence
connected to the Maoist cadres), nevertheless, the very fact that they
were political enough to understand that there was no winning the
People’s War. They reasoned: “Let’s try to go into the political system
of mainstream politics and try to work it out from within.” Whereas,
for many of these other groups—to begin with, there seems to be much
more reliance on criminality and much less on ideology than their
Maoist counterparts. Plus the political leadership of the Terai—there
are already many groups utilizing and leading politics in the Terai. So
these violent groups can, at best be supportive if there is an
evolution and collaboration among them. By themselves, I do not think
are credible as political groupings.
DUNHAM: Six
months ago, I was on another trip to the Terai and I had a roundtable
discussion with Madeshi academics and activists of a more moderate
slant and their complaint was ironic: For decades they have felt
marginalized and now they, themselves, feel marginalized by the more
radical Madeshi factions. It’s the violent factions who capture the
headlines—
DIXIT: That is a fact—
DUNHAM: And the less radical feel they have no voice.
DIXIT: The
Terai violence that has grown after the great Terai Madeshi Movement of
the winter of 2006-2007-- the blame actually goes to the Home Ministry
of Nepal and the current government of Mr. G.P. Koirala-- the way they
let law and order collapse in the Terai. You can find many excuses but
the blame lies there. As a result…a lot of people of hill origin have
had to evacuate from deep Terai regions. That is relatively well known.
What is less appreciated is that this run of Terai violence is
impacting the Terai people, the Madeshi people, who are the original
people of the Terai much more than the hill people. So essentially,
you can say Terai violence is presently attacking and victimizing the
people of Terai.
DUNHAM: You
just alluded to Sitaula, the Home Minister: How does he manage to
maintain his position in the government if he is so universally loathed?
DIXIT: That
is a mystery and the answer can only be provided by G.P. Koirala—Mr.
Sitaula’s mentor and boss. Mr. Sitaula was extremely successful as a
negotiator of the Maoists; there is no doubt about that. And the credit
he deserves, which is a great deal of credit, is for negotiating with
the Maoists (under the direction of G.P. Koirala) to bring them in from
their People’s War. Ten years of brutal war. Anybody who helps stop
that war deserves a lot of credit. At the same time the same person who
has had obviously so much interaction and so much invested in a
relationship with the Maoists, is made the Home Minister, whose task it
is to control those Maoists!
We all knew---logic told us that
ten years of war with young unruly men and some women going
about—they’re bound to do extortions, they’re bound to utilize their
socialization of violence some more for a little while longer. So you
need a Home Minister who can control affairs and stand to up the
Maoists as require-- not the right-wing reaction of shoving them off a
cliff. No. Nobody wants that in mainstream Nepali politics. It is a
challenge enough for the Maoists that they will come in with some
humility into the open process. Sitaula was unable to do that.
Now,
your question about why does Sitaula remain if he is so universally
loathed? This is something that Mr. G.P. Koirala can answer. The lack
of motivation of the police is a fact. The lack of state presence
around the country is a fact. The lack of law and order is a fact. Nepal
is not a failed state but it is certainly a failed government. And that
failure of government is ascribable directly to the Home Ministry.
But
now there is no sense in blaming Mr. Sitaula. You have to blame his
boss, Mr. Koirala, who in conversation indicates that he understands
how bad the situation is, but seems unwilling to act on the knowledge
that Mr. Sitaula has been abject in his failure as a Home Minister.
DUNHAM: Where is Nepal is in the peace agreement? I’m sensing some regression in the last six months.
DIXIT:
It’s too early to say that we are actually going backward. We are going
through the highs and lows and, perhaps, this time had to come: when
the Maoists decided to challenge their own decision to come into
mainstream politics. And then they’ve got to settle down and decide
there is really no “Plan B”. There is nowhere else to go. ...What the
Maoists are trying to do, and what we are all trying to help them do,
is come to mainstream politics after ten years of violent, often brutal
revolution. That is one hell of a demand. And I would suspect that
there are very few insurgencies that have been brought to a safe
landing in the way we have already half-succeeded in Nepal. But it
would be foolish to believe that there would not be hiccups. Mainly the
hiccups would be in the conflict between the Maoist propaganda of
People’s War and dictatorship of the proletariat-- and actual
utilization of the gun and brutal methods over ten full years-- and
finally to say, “Ok, all that is now passé. We are going into peaceful
politics. Obviously there is going to be contradictions in between--
both ideological contradictions in the leadership ranks as well as the
socialization of the cadres and slowly converting them.
I
believe that we are going through the throes of such a process and for
the average Nepali this process has taken too long—nearly two years
after the People’s Movement. We’re supposed to be reaping the peace
dividend. Our economy is like a spring willing to just about release
itself and has not been able to release itself. India is growing at 9%
and China about 10%; Nepal, in the middle, is growing at less than 3%
and the population growth undercuts most of that. So the people of Nepal are suffering badly and hence, they are saying, “How long do we have to wait?”
But
the other way to look at it is: “Just two years.” In just two years,
(a) the Maoists have not gone back to the jungle; (b) it doesn’t look
like they can afford to go back to the jungle—that is the good news.
The bad news is that it’s been two years and two years are too long. I
feel that the Maoists are just now tackling their internal
contradictions. I wish that their leadership had been better able to
train and prepare their cadres over the last year-and-a-half to open
politics. Instead they concentrated on saying one thing to the
international community, saying one thing to the Kathmandu
intelligentsia and…at the same time telling their fighters, “The fight
is really not over. We still have the great glorious fight ahead of
us.”
DUNHAM: Do
you believe, as some people do, that Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai are
shifting into a more radical view espoused by more radical factions of
the party?
DIXIT: That is
clear. That is clear. The Maoists have had [unintelligible] in various
places every couple of years. And the great decision they made to come
to aboveground politics was in 2003, when a central Plenum took place
in their original hinterland, west-central Nepal. There they decided to
work with the political parties and to come to aboveground politics.
And that trend was kept in place. There was a big division between
Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai.
DUNHAM: What was the source of their falling out?
DIXIT: Their
falling out had to do with how to perceive India and how to perceive
the king, as far as we can understand. And essentially, in determining
who can be more useful in this process of transformation of the
Maoists. And there was even a time when Baburam Bhattarai, from what we
understand, was under house arrest by the Maoists. But then, after
their own meeting of minds-- and it seems that India may have played
some role in cajoling them-- but then [Prachanda and Bhattarai] were
like twins and have been since. Which is a good thing. We do not want
the Maoists to fracture. Because that will lead to a warlord-ism of the
kind that we do not want. We would rather that they take a little more
time, that they battle out their internal contradictions…
…The
so-called “radicals within the Maoists”-- led by Mohan Vaidya, Mr.
Gajurel, Mr. Badal, and a few others-- they suddenly came to a majority
at a Plenum held in August 2007, in Balaju, here in Kathmandu. They
said, “We cannot go into elections. We will humiliate ourselves. We
have given up the Revolution. We must put forward a more radical
stance.”
The only problem with that stance is that there is no
place to go. There is no “Plan B” other than to say, “Let’s get out of
government. Let’s us not go for elections.” The only “Plan B” they could have would be to keep this society in suspended animation. …But
the longer you do that, the more the Maoists will lose their base—even
the little base that they have. We just have to wait for this to play
itself out and for the Maoist radicals to be exposed. Then, the
so-called “moderate line” that Mr. Baburam Bhattarai and Prachanda
represent will once again be able to lead their flock, as I believe
they would want to. The only problem with all of this is that whatever
way you look at it, the Maoists will be humiliated in a free and fair
elections because the Nepali people are no different from any people
anywhere else in the world. They detest violence. It is a denigration
of the Nepali people for observers elsewhere, beyond Nepal, to look to
Nepal and to hope for a Maoist victory as the Maoist would want it,
because that implies the utilization of violence in politics, besides
all the other non-democratic practices that a communist totalitarian
State would do.
We believe that the Maoists will be forced by
geopolitical circumstance and internal circumstance to actually convert
into a mainstream political party. In the beginning, they will not get
many votes, but if they stay with their original philosophy which is to
defend the rights of the poorest, I believe that they will evolve into
a very strong force. It’s just that their politicians were in a hurry
and went underground.
DUNHAM: And the YCL? Are they helping?
DIXIT: Not at all. To
begin with, Nepal is a country where politics functions in the Nepali
language. The entire discourse and the terminology is in Nepali, but
the Young Communist League is an English terminology foisted on the
Nepali people by Maoists. To be kind to them, it could be that
they were trying to create a phalanx or a group that would help them in
their political transformation among the youth so that their militia
and some of their fighters would evolve as political individuals. But
obviously that is where their intentions were not trained enough on the
transformation. They relied on what they knew to do best, which is
violence or the threat of violence. Rely on extortion. Rely on forcible
procedures.
A lot of Westerners who come
to Nepal tend to forget one fact. (And, I think, a lot of Maoists, too,
forgot this fact.) For 12 years, between 1990 and 2002, we had a
rambunctious democratic exercise. It was not a clean exercise, but
nowhere in the world is democracy clean. Neither was it in
Nepal. We were learning all along. But it was a dozen years of
successful democratic experimentation where the people found a voice.
There are many problems with our constitution of 1990, which allowed us
these 12 years of experimentation, but on one factor-- freedom-- civil
rights in a relative way-- Nepal was a free country. As a result, the
people found a voice. They knew how to speak up and how to reject. The
only reason they could not reject Maoist violence was because a gun can
control a valley.
And it is naïve to expect that, because a Maoist had the gun, they actually had the support of the people. That has
to be proven by the ballet. That is what we are trying to vote for. The
problem in Nepal right now is that we are trying to do three things at
the same time, and this is what the international community has to
understand. First, we are trying to re-democratize after the marauding
of King Gyanendra. Second, we are in a post-conflict phase of
rehabilitation: of our economy, of our infrastructure, of our blown-up
bridges, of the very civil service of government which has been so
destroyed—our school buildings that have been taken over by the Maoists
or by the army—we are rehabilitating in many, many different ways.
While we are doing these two things, which are what most societies
would have to do, we have a much larger challenge of State restructure:
giving due space in the newly designed constitution and the newly
designed State; giving due space to all the marginalized communities in
Nepal. That is a debate that has barely begun.
So while you
are trying to do all three things at the same time, you’ve got a
government that is in a confused state because they are still trying to
bring in the Maoists, while the other rebellions are erupting. So, in
all of this, the one thing that should have happened—extremely
important—is good law and order. We should have had at least a
half-capable Home Ministry. That, we didn’t have.
…Nepal is in
such a crisis right now, but you can still see where we can descend
further. …this is the real scary scenario that we hope never to see:
The political parties and the Maoists would be so unable to manage
their affairs within each party (and between the various parties), that
there would be fear of a left-wing takeover …and the possibility of a
collapse of the Nepali State, at which time, there would be an outsider
right-wing reaction. India, which would always like to see stability in
Nepal for its own reasons-- regardless of what kind of regime was in
place-- would be backed by the international community to support
politicians who came forward to say, “We will run this State and
government. We will do your bidding. We will be backed by the army” And
the Nepali army would back such a government. It would be a hodgepodge
solution made up of opportunistic politicians. And at that time, the
politicians of Nepal would lose the handle.
As things stand
today, the politicians of Nepal are still in command and in control.
The parties are still talking to each other-- not very efficiently, but
they, I believe, understand the pitfalls of letting things go somewhat
worse than what it is now.
DUNHAM: In
the meantime, it seems to me, King Gyanendra has been doing the
smartest thing he could possibly do, which is to remain silent. He lets
other people make a mess of things for a change. What is the
possibility of there being a resurgence of popularity with, not just
the monarchy, but King Gyanendra?
DIXIT: Slim. Mainly because King
Gyanendra so underestimated the people of Nepal and their democratic
leanings, and their good sense. He took this idiotic line—a takeover
that could never have worked. He, himself, was an abject failure when
he did try to rule absolutely for a year-and-a-half. It was an
absolutely a failure and people have already seen that-- a total loss
of face...if the people of Nepal look for salvation in another place,
it will not be the king. Almost certainly it will be more like a
right-wing combination without the king. Even the right-wing of Nepal,
even including some of the generals who might be called “right-wing”
within the Nepal army, don’t see the king, I think, as a solution,
even as an iconic head. The idiocy that he exhibited! Anybody with good
sense was telling him, “Don’t take over. You will destroy the
kingship.” And he just went head-on. In too many ways to describe, he
showed himself to be an idiot. I think the public understands that. He
could have made himself popular by clearly stating that he had made a
mistake. It is very easy for a king to come back in popularity, if you
do things in the right way--except he didn’t. He has not apologized. He
has backtracked, under pressure, to allow the Parliament to be
reinstated and the political parties to come back into place. But
everybody knows that that was under the pressure of the army, the
international community and the great People’s Movement we had in April
2005-- not because King Gyanendra wanted to. …He could have easily
evacuated himself, left the country for six months, let the country
settle down. That would also have added to his image.
But in the end, in Nepal, where the whole political class is slowly becoming republican,
the biggest republican is Gyanendra himself. Nobody I know has been so
successful in taking a wholesome monarchy—a constitutional monarchy at
that—with a 250-year legacy, and destroyed it within a year-and-a-half.
King Gyanendra has that to his credit as a republican himself. Therefore
for all these reasons, people will look elsewhere for some kind of
release-- even a rightwing release-- but not to him.
DUNHAM: Prince Paras?
DIXIT: Not
at all. Prince Paras is the bad boy with clear involvement in two
negligent homicides, which were never taken to the court—never charged.
And there are many additional instances of Paras being uncontrolled…
DUNHAM: What about King Gyanendra’s grandson-- for people who retain a latent soft spot for the institution of the monarchy?
DIXIT: Not
right now. I think the political parties so much control the political
discourse---this is what an average observer doesn’t appreciate. First,
political discourse happens in the Nepali language and the other local
languages, not in English. So you are completely removed from the
understanding of the vibrancy of this discourse. Also, this is a
mistake that diplomats make all the time: not appreciating the power of
the political parties’ to shape the discourse. So what you see as you
see as complete anarchy and a mess---it is true, it is exactly as you
see—but there is discussion all the time. And because the political
parties control the discourse of Nepali politics, to an absolute level,
they will never, never—across the spectrum, from the UML to the Nepali
Congress, to now the Maoists—we will never allow the king to be active,
even if, per chance, due to various factors, he gets into running the
show—it won’t be for more than a few months. At that time, there will
be a true revolution, particularly because King Gyanendra has shown
himself to be not a man of great intelligence. So he’ll make mistakes.
Even now, the sense I get is that he is still hoping that, indeed,
things will get so bad that people will come to him to act as a savior.
I think that is a mistake. Nobody will go to him.
DUNHAM: But the king is still here. He must be clinging to that hope.
DIXIT:
That’s for sure. …But I think he is a very selfish man and he would
want to take the kingship down with him, if it were to be obliterated.
DUNHAM:
One more question, this time about the Media: How important is the role
Nepali media plays in the political chess game—nation-wide, but also in
the Madeshi turmoil? Several Madeshi journalists have complained to me
that the stories they post to their Kathmandu editors are either
re-written or re-interpreted before being published by their
newspapers. Editorial Bias?
DIXIT: The
media is very powerful in Nepal because it is very close to the people.
It has its weaknesses because we attained freedom of press only in
1990. As a result, there is some lack of professionalism. There is
domination by one community, the Bahun, which is the hill Brahmans.
There is a lack of awareness of the issues of the world, because most
of our journalists are not converse in English, so the world of
learning is locked away from them. The strength
is that, unlike colonized societies, Nepal does not have that
differentiation between the English language papers, that are quite
powerful, and the vernacular. Here, the vernacular rules top to bottom.
The Prime Minister and his private secretary and the average laborer
will read the same newspaper. So you can take a relatively
sophisticated idea and take it to the mass level. That is the true
political power of Nepali journalism, which was exhibited over the last few years, as we learned the ropes…
One particular facet of our media, which is unique to Southeast Asia, is our free radio.
Radio
arrived in south Asia in 1946-47 and it got promptly high jacked by the
State propaganda, the State machinery as well as sheer
commercialization. It was only in 1994-95 that the radio transmission
was handed over to the people. So you’ve got public radios, community
radios and commercial radios, which tend to be more localized. In a
country made up of a lot of illiteracy, the radio helps.
Nepali
media helped generate the People’s Movement. In the beginning, we had a
lot to learn. Even today, we don’t have good investigative or economic
journalism. Our media was, in general, a little too romantic about the
Maoists. They didn’t do enough critiquing of the Maoists, as the
Maoists rose. But it has been a very quick learning curve for the
media, which started from zero in 1990, to what you have now.
On
the other hand, there are pitfalls ahead. For example, all the violent
groups are now pressurizing the media not to serve its function. It was
relative easy to fight the Maoists because the Maoists had hopes and
expectations of coming to the center. So they had to go by certain
rules. And they were political up to a point. But when you have
apolitical groups, which are increasingly violent, then the local
journalists…are more likely to be under pressure from violent groups.
As far as the government pressure is concerned, the government doesn’t
exist so it cannot exert any pressure on the media, as happened under
the King.
There are some problems of bias, which have to be
sorted out. Coverage of the Terai issues, for example, could have been
much, much better, with much more empathy for what the Terai people are
doing. It should have been recognized as a People’s Movement and that
its underpinnings were truly a people’s desire to be heard…
DUNHAM: But
what about the journalists’ fear of being targeted by violent groups?
There was the incident of the journalist who, a month ago, was abducted
and murdered—the Maoists taking credit for that.
DIXIT: There
is no question that the journalists like myself, in Kathmandu, are very
well protected, with the distance from the violence and some level of
protection of international and national exposure. But when you are a
good journalist that is based locally, the pressures you face are
enormous and some of that is the threat of violence.
DUNHAM:
I experienced some pretty serious tension when interviewing the owner
of a burn-ed out teashop. This was in Krishnanagar. Before I knew it
there were 80 people surrounding us and blocking the entrance and they
were quite angry—shouting at us to turn off the cameras and go home.
There were policemen on the opposite side of the road do nothing of
course. There was a sense of helplessness. We were crossing a fine
line. The incident could have taken a more violent course.
DIXIT: Was it a hill community or a Muslim community?
DUNHAM: That particular morning, I was interviewing hill people.
DIXIT:
The hill people feel especially aggrieved in Kapilvastu because, after
the initial murder of the Muslim leader, the killings thereafter were
all of hill origin, which then led to a backlash in which the people of
plain’s origin, mostly Muslims, simply ran away. And as usual, the State didn’t know how to respond—no, they did know how. The just didn’t. They didn’t respond.
The State didn’t go after the killers. Neither did they go after the
killers of the Muslim leader, Mr. Mohit Khan, nor did they try to
locate and bring to justice the people who killed the people of hill
origin. But after that initial massive tragedy of those killings, it is
also a fact that the people of hill origin felt closer to the State
administration than the Madeshi because the State administration is run
almost exclusively by people of hill origin. The people of Terai
origins, or Madeshis, or Muslims—they will not feel that the State will
listen to them. So when they feel pressure, unlike the hill people that
you would have met in Kapilvastu, who will have the wherewithal to
express their extreme anger, most of it justified, against the State--
the other community just disappears into the light because it doesn’t
feel that the administration will speak for them. Kapilvastu was a
terrible problem where a charismatic local leader was murdered, we do
not know by whom. …What the State should have done at that point would
have been to (1) investigate who killed Mohit Khan. 2) investigate who
killed all these other people of hill origin and (3) reassure the
entire population, including the people of plains and hill origins.
Instead, the State was so ineffective. I would still give credit to the
local politicians of Kapilvastu, that things did not get worse. Things
could have sparked from there to many other places…but politicians
rarely get credit in this country even thought they worked hard to try
to keep a semblance of calm amidst all the anger that you did see.
DUNHAM:
But there is this open wound down there because of the lack of
accountability. Until they see some evidence of the State working hard—
DIXIT: I said the political parties are working hard.
DUNHAM: Right. I’m sorry: the political parties. Even so, if you are an average villager, you don’t see the political parties working hard.
DIXIT: But
they are trying to help. For example, the whole issue of
rehabilitation: That’s what people want right now. Because to begin
with, if you remember, the talk of how many people died and the kind of
rapes and killings—most of it didn’t happen. Not fifty people, sixty,
eighty people dead. But 14, if I remember the count. So the numbers
were bad and grievous indeed, but not as bad as had been spread about.
DUNHAM:
The media was reporting those inflated figures. Were they not at least
partially responsible for spreading those numbers?
DIXIT: Yes,
this is the weakness that I alluded to earlier. We have to be careful--
especially about radio-- and also local vernacular media-- they have to
be much more responsible. All I’m trying to say is that Kapilvastu was
very bad, but it could have gotten so much worse. It got controlled in
time. And then even the media became alerted to its own power and the
need to conserve its power and not to misuse it. Radio, in particular,
as you know, from examples of Rwanda and elsewhere. We can be extremely
proud with what we have done with radio. But that same radio can be a
tool for killing by spreading conflagration.
We know from the
eastern Terai, for example, where they came under a lot of pressure
from local insurgents and local criminal gangs; the media started
spreading the word as required by such gangs and groups. It has not all
become a useless exercise, but the dangers are clear. And
the responsibility to learn from Kapilvastu is how close we can come to
intercommunity violence. The only way out of it seems to be something
so obvious: That everybody who’s in a position of being an
opinion-maker-- a politician or journalist-- must understand not the
fears of their own community but fears of the other community. Anybody
can speak of the fears of their community. But empathy is required for
the other community. To me, that is the answer and this is
something that must become a national movement in Nepal. There are
issues of, firstly, historic neglect of so many communities in Nepal by
the State. Then, there are current issues of displacement, violence by
people, often acting on local prejudges, but giving it a
community-based orientation. You might be a local bandit who wants to
get rough on a local journalist or leader, but you can give it the
coloration of community-to-community fight. And then, what happens is
it really impacts on other community members to speak up because, the
moment you are saying, “I am doing this for my community,” all the
other people in my community who know better, cannot speak up.
Everybody tends to fear the isolation that comes from being a lone
voice in their community. In all that, you must have a State that
exists, a State that holds people accountable, regardless of which
community they are from. And right now I can say that that the State is
not even being biased toward one community: It is a State that is just
not doing anything. It’s not that the State is biased towards the hill
people, as we speak. There has been an historical bias, but right now,
it’s not even exhibiting that bias, the State is not even there to
exhibit that bias. Which means --
DUNHAM: It’s a vacuum.
DIXIT: Yes, a vacuum.
DUNHAM: I think that’s a good place to end: on the need for empathy.
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