KATHMANDU: When Nepal's controversial king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah handed over power to a resurrected parliament on April 24, 2006 and faced the abolition of his throne, it might not have been entirely the thought of his subjects' wellbeing that prompted the move.
While royalists say the monarch, who had seized power through a bloodless coup the previous year, stepped down because he wanted to avert the bloodshed that would have occurred had the army been asked to take on the crowds demanding the restoration of democracy, the real reason could be that the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) was running out of ammunition.
In February and March 2006, days before the 19 days' peaceful protests that paralysed the royal regime started, the RNA's arsenal had started dwindling alarmingly after its main arms suppliers, India, the US and UK, stopped providing arms the previous year to show their disapproval of the royal coup, according to the latest Wikileaks revelations.
In February, the then RNA master of ordnance Major General Prakash Bahadur Basnyat had informed the US Embassy in Kathmandu, once the army's staunch supporter in its anti-Maoist terror campaign in Nepal, that the RNA had only 16,800 rounds of ammunition for its 16,000 M-16 guns. Also, for the 25,000 Insas firearms given by India at a 70 percent subsidy, it had only 130,000 rounds of ammunition left.
The dire crisis was reconfirmed to the Americans by the then army chief, Gen Pyar Jung Thapa, when the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia, Donald Camp, visited Kathmandu in March. Camp then shared the information with the then Indian ambassador to Nepal, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee.
Mukherjee, in turn, was reported as saying that even if the foreign governments had increased the supply of arms ten-fold, the RNA would have failed to tackle the Maoist insurgency because it was corroded by corruption, poor leadership and low morale.
The Indian envoy said the cutting off of Indian arms assistance did not deter the RNA because its top guns were against buying guns on a government-to-government basis where there was little chance of kickbacks. Instead, they favoured buying arms on the black market with "senior officers enriching themselves with funds set aside for procurement", the leaked cables said.
The cables also said that at the meeting on March 11, 2006, Mukherjee had told the Americans that the RNA officers had told the Chinese to "up their invoices for small arms by 30 percent".
The later cables also indicated that the Americans were keeping close tabs on the Maoists after they signed a peace pact. One of the cables focused on Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda's growing girth, saying that he smoked and drank and took little exercise.
While royalists say the monarch, who had seized power through a bloodless coup the previous year, stepped down because he wanted to avert the bloodshed that would have occurred had the army been asked to take on the crowds demanding the restoration of democracy, the real reason could be that the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) was running out of ammunition.
In February and March 2006, days before the 19 days' peaceful protests that paralysed the royal regime started, the RNA's arsenal had started dwindling alarmingly after its main arms suppliers, India, the US and UK, stopped providing arms the previous year to show their disapproval of the royal coup, according to the latest Wikileaks revelations.
In February, the then RNA master of ordnance Major General Prakash Bahadur Basnyat had informed the US Embassy in Kathmandu, once the army's staunch supporter in its anti-Maoist terror campaign in Nepal, that the RNA had only 16,800 rounds of ammunition for its 16,000 M-16 guns. Also, for the 25,000 Insas firearms given by India at a 70 percent subsidy, it had only 130,000 rounds of ammunition left.
The dire crisis was reconfirmed to the Americans by the then army chief, Gen Pyar Jung Thapa, when the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia, Donald Camp, visited Kathmandu in March. Camp then shared the information with the then Indian ambassador to Nepal, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee.
Mukherjee, in turn, was reported as saying that even if the foreign governments had increased the supply of arms ten-fold, the RNA would have failed to tackle the Maoist insurgency because it was corroded by corruption, poor leadership and low morale.
The Indian envoy said the cutting off of Indian arms assistance did not deter the RNA because its top guns were against buying guns on a government-to-government basis where there was little chance of kickbacks. Instead, they favoured buying arms on the black market with "senior officers enriching themselves with funds set aside for procurement", the leaked cables said.
The cables also said that at the meeting on March 11, 2006, Mukherjee had told the Americans that the RNA officers had told the Chinese to "up their invoices for small arms by 30 percent".
The later cables also indicated that the Americans were keeping close tabs on the Maoists after they signed a peace pact. One of the cables focused on Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda's growing girth, saying that he smoked and drank and took little exercise.
No comments:
Post a Comment