Skip to main content

National strike in Nepal



Nepal begins 2010 with nationwide strike


Nepal News, 1 January 2010

Nepal has stepped into New Year 2010 not with a celebratory bang but with a nationwide bandh. A conglomerate of various indigenous and ethnic community associations has called a general strike throughout the nation, Friday, demanding the implementation of Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples by the International Labor Organization (ILO).



Life in Kathmandu and other parts of the country has been adversely affected due to the strike. Major market, some offices and educational institutions across the country have remained closed. Retail stores and other shops in the interior parts of the city are partially open.

A day after thousand of revelers partied all through the night to welcome new year 2010 in party venues across the capital including tourist hub Thamel, Kathmandu streets appears deserted with very few vehicles plying on the road.  Few private vehicles and taxis are seen plying on the streets of Kathmandu. Long distance buses from Kathmandu have not operated. Many people are seen walking on the road to reach their destination.


Bandh organisers had staged a torch rally in Ratnapark, Kathmandu, Thursday evening demanding the implementation of their demands. Issuing a press release on the eve of the bandh Thursday the bandh organisers said, they would allow essential services including dispensary, and movement of vehicles of media, human rights organisations, Red Cross and diplomatic agencies. They have also said they will not obstruct disposal of garbage during the bandh.

The conglomerate, Indigenous Nationalities Broad Front, has been organizing various protest programmes from the past one-month demanding, among others, that the government ensure the rights of ethnic/indigenous communities, called the 'Janjatis', in the new constitution, give them linguistic and cultural rights including right to self-determination and has called for the establishment of a federal autonomous state.

ILO 169 guarantees special rights on natural resources including land and water of people of indigenous people and preservation of their culture.

Meanwhile, the home ministry has urged the bandh organisers to withdraw their bandh as it would affect life of normal people.



Old poster celebrating 10 years of armed struggle

Comments

DomzaNet said…
Please, somebody else, make a little postikins. Just a small one will do. I'm embarrassed to do so many all by myself, so that it looks as if I am hogging. Whereas it is because you-all are hanging back.

Popular posts from this blog

A warm welcome

. Why blog on ARS NOTORIA? I have set up this website,  ARS NOTORIA ,  (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog. . ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer. Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post. Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequently, or as seldom, as we like. You will be able to moderate and delete any of the comments made on 

Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in tr

Our Collective Caliban

At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me. According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read. I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you