Report from the First International Brigade's Road-Building Brigade: In November 2005, a group of seven volunteers from Australia, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Germany and Norway went to the liberated Rolpa district in mid-western Nepal and worked on the road that is being built there under the leadership of the regional people’s power, the Magarat Autonomous Regional Government (MARG). We travelled thousands of miles to answer the MARG’s Call to work together with Nepalese from all over the country to build a 90-km road through mountainous terrain. This project is a part of the efforts of the new revolutionary power to forge a self-reliant economy, free of the chains of imperialist domination.
Our numbers were few, but we represented the sentiments of millions more back home. Many who knew about Nepal understood what we were up against and helped support our trip. The reactionary monarchy ruling Nepal has received hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and financing from the Western powers and India, and has compiled one of the worst records in the world for disappearances, extra-judicial executions, and other types of bloody repression. Despite all this it has failed to suppress the desire for liberation of the millions of people in Nepal, and most of the population now live in areas liberated by the revolutionary forces.
The arrival of this first organised group from abroad to help with the road-building effort struck a deep chord among the people of Nepal. Some Nepalese working on the road who at first did not know what we had come for were almost incredulous to see a group of foreigners pick up tools and begin to shovel dirt side-by-side with them. Their incredulity turned quickly to unbridled enthusiasm and good-natured attempts to help our initially clumsy efforts – it was an experience marked by the deepest kind of internationalist solidarity between people.
[Also included after the jump are the call from the Magarat Autonomous People's Republican Government for volunteers & the Provisional Report of the First Int'l. Brigade to the Magarat Autonomous Republic of Nepal.]
The monarchy and some of the media have been trying to slander the road-building effort as “forced labour”. But we saw with our own eyes that there was nothing at all “forced” about the combination of good humour and serious dedication with which people went about their work. We saw and experienced many new things that had been impossible under the old regime. And we returned with heightened sense of responsibility to strengthen solidarity with the struggle in Nepal – a revolution had suddenly moved off the news pages and acquired faces, names, and voices. Those of us from the imperialist countries in particular have deep concerns at the thought of what it means when our own governments provide weapons to the RNA. Are US or British-supplied cluster bombs and bunker busters the next weapons to be used against the people we’d been with – for the “crime” of taking their destiny in their own hands and building up their own self-reliant economy and society?
This first group showed the great, untapped potential for future groups of young people to participate in this project. Our team brought together youth from both the wealthy imperialist countries and oppressed countries to stand together with the people of Nepal.
The countries of the world are divided into two, into a handful of rich countries and a great mass of countries that are kept shackled in poverty and dependence on the wealthy imperial powers, which have a whole range of so-called solutions for “third world development”. The problem is that none of these actually work for the masses of people. Even though years of Western-style development have left Nepal one of the poorest countries in the world, with people’s life expectancy in the 50s, it is still claimed that there is no alternative to Western-style development, built on the “free market”!
Yet what we took part in was a completely different path: some of the poorest people on earth were breaking with age-old traditions and the established way of doing things and relying on their own efforts to forge their future. This was leading to real changes in their lives, and we had become part of that – and we see the potential for many others to want to do the same.
The conflict is sharpening between the new-born revolutionary regime centred in Nepal’s countryside and the decrepit monarchy backed by the West. We know that even though the road effort is a development project, those who oppose it and all the other revolutionary transformation going on in Nepal will try to slander and misrepresent it as something other than it is. The road project is one important way to spread the truth about what is really going on in Nepal; it is a way to put the lie to the charges of “terrorism” and build people-to-people solidarity.
The people of Nepal that we spoke with are eagerly hoping that more groups of volunteer road-builders will be coming soon. We are calling on others from around the world to take part in this project.
For more information about volunteering to go to the liberated area to work on the road, email:
[email protected]
PLEASE NOTE that the reactionary Nepalese monarchy is still being backed, behind the scenes, by the big imperialist powers. These governments extensively monitor the Internet and have every interest in blocking efforts to build solidarity between the Nepalese people and people abroad and/or distort and attack this effort as “aiding terrorism”. So even though our project is completely peaceful and legitimate we suggest you use a pseudonym (a “handle”) and avoid giving details or emailing in a way that would make it easy for them to prevent you (or others) from travelling. Also please indicate your general availability (minimum three weeks including travel time) up through the end of 2006.
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June 22, 2005
Call from the Magarat Autonomous People’s Republican Government, Nepal
The great people’s war that has undertaken a great goal of building an independent and progressive new Nepal, free from exploitation and oppression of feudalism and imperialism, is running in its tenth year. Today, the people’s war being waged under the leadership of CPN (Maoist) and the initiative of great Nepalese people, destroying local hegemony of the old state across the entire countryside of Nepal, has been not only challenging imperialism by building and practicing people’s new power, but also is providing a forceful revolutionary message and new energy to the working masses the world over.
The revolution does not only destroy the old; rather, it simultaneously creates and builds a new also. Today, the colossal works of construction being carried out in an independent and creative initiative of Lakhs of people in the regions liberated by people’s war is justifying this fact. There is insuppressible courage, energy and creation in the unity and labour of the masses that can shake the world. This is the real source of building a history. Encouraging activeness and participation of the masses observed in the construction of 91 KM motorable road, the Martyr Road, which is being carried out under the initiative of people-elected Magarat Autonomous People’s Republican Government in the main base area of people’s war, is justifying the aforesaid fact.
Till now, about one Lakh of people have used their direct labour of more than 10 Lakh working days for the construction of that road. In addition to this, people’s liberation army, mass organizations, different fronts and departments have been using their labour in this work. Almost 35 percent of the total length of the road has already been accomplished, while motors are running in the initial part of 14 KM. In its essence, the work of building a motorable road has not only benefited to the transportation service of the masses in the main base area but also has become a fundamental particularity of Nepalese people’s war changing people’s life and it has also revealed proletarian receptive notion and sentiment, great unity of the labouring masses and internationalism.
Definitely, it is very difficult from the viewpoint of physical labour, though not impossible, to successfully accomplish such a huge plan of construction. The assistance of not only the masses from this autonomous region, but that of entire nation and international community also is necessary for this. And so, we appeal all to provide all kinds of moral and material support for such a great task that has a far-reaching and historical significance.
Santosh Budha Magar
Head, Magarat Autonomous People’s Republican Government, Nepal
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Provisional report of the First International Road Building Brigade
to the Magarat Autonomous Republic of Nepal
In November 2005, the first international road building brigade, consisting of seven volunteers from Australia, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Germany and Norway arrived in the liberated Rolpa district in mid-western Nepal. We had travelled many thousands of miles to work side by side with the people there to build a road as part of the efforts of the new revolutionary power there to forge a self-reliant economy, free of the chains of imperialist domination.
The brigade members were well aware that the regime of King Gyanendra, who dissolved parliament last year and centralised power in the hands of the feudal monarchy, was waging a vicious counter-insurgency war and that we would have to cross army checkpoints to reach our destination. The regime has “distinguished” itself by compiling one of the worst records in the world for disappearances, extra-judicial executions, and other types of bloody repression. We also had some idea of the fierce determination of the Nepalese people to forge a new future, and were eager to see what they had achieved, and to work alongside them on this crucial project for the all-sided development of the autonomous region.
So we set off for the liberated area with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. At one control point, a middle-aged official, clearly depressed at the deteriorating situation the government faces, remarked, from out of the blue, to one of us: “I am a government man, I’ve done well – the Maoists are my opponents. They don’t like me.” It was as if he knew that his era was coming to an end.
While the Himalayas are never all that far away in Nepal, this is not a journey made by many tourists. Anyone travelling into the liberated areas needs to cross a series of roving military check points, where almost anything can happen. Buses into the area are stopped, young soldiers carrying machine guns come inside and the passengers are forced out where their baggage is searched. Any Nepalese identified by the soldiers as Maoist – or a “suspected Maoist” – are taken away… to prison or sometimes just marched off into the countryside and executed on the spot. The soldiers stationed on the approaches to the liberated areas are the elite of the RNA, battle-hardened, crack troops equipped with the army’s best weaponry. You can tell their elite character just from the way they look: not only meaner and more arrogant, but bigger, and better fed than the average soldiers. They also bear more than their share of responsibility for the horrors for which the regime has been repeatedly denounced by human rights groups around the world.
Despite the ever-present atmosphere of war throughout this area, there is at the same time an almost surreal normalcy to the to-and-fro between the areas under the control of the rising new regime and those under the control of the dying old monarchy. More or less regular trade is conducted, as peasants from the higher villages go down into the richer Dang valley and sell bags of ghee, honey, goat meat, and medicinal plants, and return with salt, batteries, oil and other items they cannot produce themselves. After the traffic passes the last army check points, it even runs for a time along the new road still under construction by the Magarat AR, the road we had come to work on.
We felt a feeling of tremendous release when we finally came into sight of the wooden gateway framing the road as we arrived in the first town in the liberated area, Tilla Bazaar. A red flag on one side and the flag of the Magarat AR on the other told us everything we needed to know: we had made it! But our elation soon subsided a bit – this was a poor village, almost no one spoke English, and it was difficult at first to make ourselves understood. The townspeople had grown a bit circumspect about foreigners showing up, since many turned out to be Western journalists, some of them searching hard for any angle that might show the people’s struggle in an unflattering light.
Once it became clear that we were a very different type of foreigner – young people who’d come to work side by side with the peasants themselves, to share weal and woe – one of the team members described it as being like a fountain of joy just got turned on. Complete strangers walked over with grins spread across their faces and gave us big hugs. A reception sprang into place. Six or seven English language banners were put up, and a young English interpreter was produced, who proved to be an energetic and enthusiastic aide throughout our stay. 150 people gathered to hear more about the brigade members, and to express their enthusiasm for our arrival, and the brigaders told the attentive crowd what had motivated us to come so far. As we bedded down for our first night, we all shared a feeling that we were in for an experience unlike any we’d ever known before.
The area the brigade visited is part of the Magarat Autonomous Republic, which was declared in 2003 after the Royal Nepalese Army was driven out by the forces of the People’s Liberation Army, led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The Magars are one of a number of oppressed national minorities in Nepal. The founding of their new regional republic in one of the most advanced revolutionary base areas in Nepal is widely viewed in the country as a momentous event marking the end of centuries-long injustice suffered by the people there, and we saw many expressions of pride in this achievement.
We were awoken with the sun. Life begins early in the liberated areas. The PLA members got up every morning at 4 am to begin their day, which really impressed especially the younger members of the brigade. PLA members, almost half of whom are women, would patrol the perimeter (2 km or so), then exercise and eat a breakfast consisting mainly of “chai”, Nepalese tea. They also put on occasional theatre in the evening.
A work schedule was drawn up with the road organisers. It basically set out which sections of the road we were to work on and when, and with which group of people – families of people who’d fallen in the revolutionary war, local peasants, PLA members, etc. Time was also set aside for some discussion with the different groups. It was explained to the brigade members that the road building was not going on at full speed at that very moment, because it was harvest time. Completing the harvest successfully was crucial to people’s livelihoods, especially over the coming winter months, so this had to be taken into account when mobilising volunteers. This was also why the revolutionary government requested each family to try to provide only one volunteer, so as to ensure the livelihood of the family as a whole.
We were happy that even though building wasn’t going on at the usual rate, we would still get to take part on the work. But setting down to work proved to be a little different than we’d anticipated. For one thing, it was sometimes more than an hour’s walk each way, with a lot of up and down through steep hills, just to get to the part of the road where we were to work. So muscles had been put through some effort even before we lifted a tool. The techniques used were like nothing we had ever seen. Upon reaching the road, some hundred people were hard at work. We first noticed gangs of young men hugging the hillsides with long steel crowbars labouring to remove large rocks to clear a passageway for the road. At first we were a bit sceptical: the rocks appeared much too large to yield to the youths’ exertions. But the young men had had a lot of practice, and soon cries of joy rang out as a giant rock was tumbled out of its ages-old resting place.
Similar techniques were used to deal with big trees: large teams were assembled to literally dig them up. When the tree finally came down and the team could throw it over the cliff, a huge cry of joy invariably went up.
When the brigade picked up our tools, most of the Nepalese at work on the road looked puzzled. Perhaps they’d assumed the foreigners were just some visiting journalists. In any case, seeing the brigade members set to work had a big effect on them: looks of surprise, almost amazement, turned quickly into barely suppressed giggles at the brigade’s initial clumsy efforts, followed quickly by good-humoured efforts to lend a hand and demonstrate to the brigade members how things worked. Soon one of the brigaders began to call out a cadence in English, and the Nepalese would join in – and then the brigade members learned to call out the cadence in Nepalese.
One source of some back-and-forth was over how to look at the issue of “hosts” and “guests”. We had come to take part side by side, but the Nepalese we met were well aware of the efforts we’d made to get there and wanted to treat us like “guests”. So not infrequently someone or other would grew concerned that their “guests” were over-exerting themselves and light-hearted struggle took place over whether it was appropriate to continue working or not.
At one point, perhaps inspired by the efforts of the newcomers, a young woman, Sapana, a nom de guerre which means “Dream”, came up in a full-length red dress, and began to sing a haunting revolutionary melody. As the brigade members looked around, with the majestic mountains in the distance, terraced rice paddies along the hill sides, solitary pine trees piercing the clouds, the beautiful melody rising to the heavens, and people from so many parts of the world and so many different walks of life throwing heart and soul into our common efforts, for such a worthy cause, none of us could help but be deeply moved.
Some work techniques were particularly difficult. For example, one person didn’t work a shovel, but two. A rope was tied just above the blade of the shovel, and just as the first person shoved the shovel deeply into the ground, the other person would lift on the rope to get the maximum amount of dirt out. It was very hard to get the timing right – if the person holding the rope jerked too soon, the person with the shovel got a little dirt hurled into their face (which brought more giggles), and if they didn’t jerk soon enough the shovel wouldn’t come out. At the end of our trip, we were asked to show our hands – some of the team members were a bit embarrassed, because they thought their calluses and blisters were not all that impressive, but the hosts beamed with pride at what had been accomplished.
The work site changed occasionally, and the brigaders would hike to another starting point. But wherever we went the start of work was marked by a collective gathering. Flags were raised, drums began to beat and 100 road builders set off on the day’s work. On our second day we saw a young mother who’d strapped her toddler to her back, carrying a pick-axe in her hands, putting it down only occasionally to nurse her infant. At a work break, the leader explained to the Nepalese that the road brigade had come from around the world to join their efforts. Though conversation was very difficult, because of language problems, people came up to the brigaders with huge smiles and raised clenched fists in solidarity. We did manage to have brief discussions with a number of people, and learned that many of them had lost a loved one in the course of the revolutionary war, usually at the hands of the RNA.
During one session the brigaders spoke with an older man of the Magar nationality, Lila Darpun, 65, from Corshavan. When we asked why he had come, he said, “We’ve come here for ourselves. We feel good about what we’re doing. It will help us. Even though I’m very old, if I can just lift a few stones, I’ll be very happy. As a young man I worked so hard, but this work is different, it’s special.”
Though the work was indeed physically demanding, many women took part too. When asked the same question, Ima Kumari, a 43-year old mother of three, explained, “I’m still illiterate. I don’t know much about books. But I know that the road is a good thing. We’re building a new country. It used to take days to get salt and clothes, but with the new road we can do it in hours.”
The monarchy and some of the media have tried to slander the road-building effort as “forced labour”. They make lurid comparisons with the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and generally play on “anti-totalitarian” stereotypes. But it was clear from watching and talking with the people who’d come to do their share that there was nothing at all “forced” about the inimitable combination of good humour and serious dedication with which they went about their work. Perhaps those whose whole lives have been devoted to clawing their way to the top and “looking out for no. 1” either find it impossible to imagine the people they rule over, oppress and despise joining together in a broader collective effort - or if they can imagine it, they are determined to nip it in the bud.
In any case, the effort to carve this road through this difficult terrain has struck a deep chord among the people here. Government after government had promised it would be built – but somehow the money never came through, or if it did, it just disappeared into the deep pockets of corrupt politicians. After all, who would benefit? Just some peasants in the hinterland – and that was hardly sufficient motivation for the Kathmandu elite to act. So what no Western-backed government ever managed to do, despite their hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, now the people, mobilised by their new leaders, are doing themselves.
The team were asked constantly about the situation in our own countries, especially about the woman question, and people took notes of what we said. The local people were also very eager to show us other new projects they were working on. There was a “model commune” and two “model schools” “not far away” – but “not far away” in the Nepalese countryside meant hours of walking, making a visit impossible in our short stay. They had also launched a big fish-breeding farm, a new thing in this part of the country, which was created with help from people living in a liberated area in another region where this was a more common activity. We were very happy to be able to benefit from it quite directly – one brigader said it was “the best fish I’ve ever tasted”, to the contentment of the new fish farmers.
We saw other new things that had been impossible under the old regime. When one of the brigaders fell pretty ill one evening, our hosts travelled through the darkness to find a “barefoot doctor”, a young village man who had been trained under the new regime in the basics of medicine. He came at 4 in the morning, and gave the sick brigader a drip feed, and stayed by his side till the next day when he was better. Under the old system, many, perhaps most of Nepal’s doctors choose to live in Kathmandu, where life is easier, and attend to the middle classes. But the new revolutionary regime has drawn on the experience of China under Mao to develop new health care policies aimed at serving the majority of Nepal’s people, the peasants in the countryside, and relies on mobilising them to solve their own needs.
The brigaders constantly discussed everything we were doing and seeing. Suddenly the big issues facing the revolution in Nepal were taking on new importance. What was the CPNM trying to accomplish with the ceasefire – what effect was it having? What were the real issues in the line struggle that the Party had thrown open more broadly? Some other more immediate issues caused confusion: the brigaders knew that the Maoists had been attacked in the international media for allegedly using “child soldiers”, but we’d been told that the PLA accepted only youth over the age of 18. Yet we frequently saw very young-looking teenagers dressed in military fatigues. Speculation grew – what was really going on? After talking with some people and observing the PLA itself in training, it was clear that what we’d been told was indeed true – you had to be 18 to join the PLA. But the PLA had become so popular that all the younger kids wanted to emulate the older ones, with the result that fatigues were now the big fashion among the local teenagers.
Not much more than a week had passed, but as our stay neared an end, many of the brigade wished we didn’t have to leave. The members had come from different backgrounds, and different walks of life, and sometimes saw things differently – but differences were put into perspective and resolved readily in the context of the larger cause we were taking part in. All of us shared a determination to embody a spirit of genuine people-to-people solidarity. One source of discussion within the team was over how to deal with the constant efforts of our hosts to make sure we were well taken care of. All of us naturally wanted no special treatment, and especially not to be a burden on the local people. So for example, we ate the same food as everyone else for the entire stay, basically rice with dal and mustard leaves, though we had a suspicion that they were giving us unusually large helpings. Tasks were divided and taken up with energy and enthusiasm, including an all-nighter spent preparing a banner to leave with our hosts at the farewell send-off.
The brigade members looked back on all this and felt a heightened sense of responsibility to strengthen solidarity with the struggle in Nepal – a revolution suddenly moved off the news pages and acquired faces, names, and voices. Those from the imperialist countries shuddered at the thought of what it means when their own governments, like Britain, provide weapons to the RNA. Were cluster bombs and bunker busters the next weapons to be used against the people we’d been with – for the “crime” of taking their destiny in their own hands and building up their own self-reliant economy and society? This took on bitter meaning not long after the brigade left, when we learned that Comrade Sunyil, the PLA commander of the region where the road is being built, was killed by a bomb dropped from a helicopter supplied by the West. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Comrade Sunyil had enthusiastically welcomed the brigaders at the initial reception, and none of us had failed to notice the warmth and camaraderie that greeted him wherever he went among the villagers, and the easy-going but deep respect that he commanded. The news of his death hit hard – and it fuelled our determination to step up the battle to spread the news of what the Nepalese masses were accomplishing and to stop the big powers from continuing to aid the fascist Gyanendra regime.
We also thought a lot about the potential for future groups of young people to go. Despite the portrayal of youth in the West as simply into “live for the moment” hedonism, many of them, for example in the anti-globalisation movement, are very concerned for their brothers and sisters in the oppressed countries. The countries of the world are divided into two, into a handful of rich countries and a great mass of countries that are kept enshackled in poverty and dependence on the wealthy imperial powers, which have a whole range of so-called solutions for third world development. The problem is that none of these actually work for the masses of people. Some of us had attended the G8 protests in Edinburgh, and were only too aware that in Africa for instance the suffering and impoverishment seemed to mount almost in direct proportion to the amount of so-called development aid. Yet what we were witnessing working on the road here was a completely different path: some of the poorest people on earth were breaking with age-old traditions and the established way of doing things and relying on their own efforts to forge their future. We had become part of that – and could see the potential for many others to want to do the same. Quite a few young people who had considered going on the trip had been held back by attending school – yet here was an education that you’d never get from any teacher we’d ever known!
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