Ironically, substantial initiatives by police to maintain security in the Tarai has coincided with spiralling up of killings, kidnapping, threats, tortures, extortions, robberies and so on! Why is there increasing sense of insecurity among the public despite vital security initiatives such as Special Security Policy (SSP) in the Tarai? And, what strategic initiatives may have to be taken in order to solidify human security for peace? These are some of the pertinent questions facing peace building in Nepal. This piece of writing aims to deal with these questions in order to offer insights, assuming that it might be helpful to build effective security strategies. To this effect, there may be, at least, five dimensions that need to be taken into account.
What is lacking in security strategy is the Tarai is its unimportance given to developmental initiatives. It will be grossly fallacious to see post-conflict human security merely as a ‘security’ agenda – it is much more than just security. Human security means not only to be ‘free from fear’ but also ‘free from want’. To be ‘free from want’ means, in simple terms, to liberate the people from poverty and create opportunities for public to enjoy basic human needs so that the nexus between poverty and insecurity is broken. The 3D (development, defence and diplomacy) approach of security is also a useful tool to consider in formulating security plans. The 3D approach broadly emphasizes the value of economic development combined with defence and diplomacy in restoring security, peace and law and order. And this makes sense in the Tarai where insecurity is rooted in unemployment and poverty.
Insecurity in the Tarai is fundamentally a consequence of chronic poverty and underdevelopment of the region. Therefore, unless security strategies are combined with poverty eradication, any operation to curb insecurity will simply remain inadequate. It is important here to understand that post-conflict human security is therefore not only the jobs of the police and state security actors but also that of politicians, development workers and civil society alike.
One of the paramount complexities to unlock the security challenges in the Tarai is its overlapping with criminality. It requires a thorough analysis to understand which armed group is ‘political’ and which is ‘criminal’, albeit it is complicated as there are often typically shared elements of politics and criminality in the Tarai. Notably, a report by Home Ministry in 2009 asserts that just 12 out of 109 armed groups active in the country were political and 70 of them were purely criminal in orientation. This means that addressing insecurity needs to shift from a ‘blanket approach’ to take a systematic ‘double-pronged’ security strategy: Tackling criminality and political armed groups separately.
Like elsewhere, rigid security operations are essential to curb criminality as criminal gangs are exploiting the fragile presence of the government and the state security providers in the remote villages. For political armed group, the solution inextricably lies in political dialogue and negotiation. Resumption of dialogue and negotiation with political armed groups in order to bring them in the mainstream of peace process is crucially important at this stage.
Human security means not only to be ‘free from fear’ but also ‘free from want’. To be ‘free from want’ means, in simple terms, to liberate the people from poverty and create opportunities for public to enjoy basic human needs so that the nexus between poverty and insecurity is broken.
Without properly disarming and reintegrating the political armed groups, it will be almost unlikely that the Tarai will ever be a ‘safer zone’. Lack of disarmament of armed groups means inexorable circulation of small arms and weapons in the communities thereby constantly undermining human security. If unchecked timely, the security threats can spiral up to regional levels. Similarly, lack of reintegration of armed militias (only political) means consistent possibility of their remobilization by both criminals and fringe rebel groups. Currently, the number of political armed groups is fairly few, therefore designing a disarmament, demobilization and reintegration strategy at this stage can be comparatively swift and less costly. As youths constitute majority in the armed outfits and unemployment remains at the crux of the problem, without disarming and socio-economically reintegrating them in the community, human security threats will endure persistently.
There is also a stark mismatch between demand and supply of security provisions at local level. First, let’s see the supply side. Police posts removed during the peak of the Maoist conflicts and Madhes movements are just being replaced. However, police posts have been languishing in remote villages with stark shortages of physical infrastructure, number of police, vehicles, radio sets and trustworthy weapons, which is further exacerbated by security personnel’s low level of motivation. For instance, what can one expect from police in Bara district – one of the worst hit by insecurity – where police-public ratio in mid-2010 was 1:2,000.
On the demand side, public expectation from police is enormous. The enormity partly emanates from increased consciousness and awareness of people in terms of their knowledge around service delivery by the state, human rights etc. The engagement of non-government organizations at community level can be credited to this enhanced consciousness and awareness. Women’ group, saving-credit groups, community cooperatives, community-based organizations, human rights groups etc often structurally unite the people. However, the mismatch between demand and supply of security services eventually creates bad imageries of security providers and reduce public trust in police. Peace building organizations working with human security agendas at community level therefore need to integrate initiatives to support local police to enhance their capacities in physical terms.
When it comes to security issues in the Tarai, politics inextricably appears in the scene. There have been several reports that reaffirm links between politics and criminality and both benefiting from each other. A large chunk of civil society and business actors in the Tarai condemn the collusion between ‘crime entrepreneurs’ and ‘political entrepreneurs’. It is a pity that often a criminal arrested by police is, at the same time, claimed to be the cadre of all the political parties present. What could be the message of such claim? Why do political leaders save a criminal? It raises enormous suspicions about the degree of political protection of crime and impunity that has often mentioned as a barrier to effective security interventions. This also corroborates the findings of several studies that reveal political interventions as a major barrier to effective security provisions in the Terai.
When asked why there is such a scale of interference and allegation of collusion between politics and criminality in the Tarai, a respected civil society leader in Birgunj asserted that leaders there have been moving away from politics of morality and integrity and this has become a barrier not only to security and ending impunity but also to development of the region. If this proposition is true, then insecurity in the Tarai becomes a ‘game’ of politicians. Therefore, changing this dynamics may require a ‘political will’ as well as a culture of fair, accountable, responsible and democratic politics.
dbsubedi@hotmail.com
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