Author: AFP
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: June 9, 2004
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/09nepal.htm
An Indian-run school was attacked
in Nepal in renewed violence by Maoist rebels who have kept schools closed
for four days in a nationwide strike, officials said Wednesday.
Suspected Maoists pointed pistols
at the guards of the Modern Indian School before it opened Wednesday, doused
seven school buses with petrol and blew the vehicles up with homemade bombs,
police said. Several computers inside the school were also smashed, said
reports.
Nobody was injured in the attack
against the school, which had defied the Maoist strike that has left 7.5
million students out of class since Sunday, deputy police superintendent
Ganesh KC said.
The Maoists have been fighting since
1996 to turn the Hindu kingdom into a communist republic in an insurgency
that has left more than 9,500 people dead.
The Maoists oppose India's privileged
ties with Nepal and in May 2002 torched the kingdom's main school teaching
Sanskrit, the priestly language the rebels associate with India and with
Hinduism's high castes.
The education strike was called
by the pro-Maoist All Nepal National Independent Student Union (Revolutionary)
which is demanding the government lift a ban on the union and reduce admission
fees at private schools.
School administrators Tuesday met
Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and urged him to meet rebel demands to
allow schools to reopen.
"Because of the frequent strikes
at Nepal's schools at least 20,000 students crossed the border to India
in the last academic year for higher studies," said Umesh Shrestha, head
of an association of private schools.
Deuba vowed to broker a truce with
the Maoists after being sworn in last Thursday by King Gyanendra, who had
fired him two years earlier for failing to curb the insurgency and handpicked
a cabinet of staunch royalists.
The rebels have given a mixed reaction
to Deuba's reappointment, pledging to escalate the insurrection but also
calling off a three-day nationwide strike this week which was expected
to devastate the economy.
A landmine killed seven policemen
and injured seven others who were traveling in a truck Tuesday through
southwestern Nepal, where troops shot dead two rebels in a separate incident,
a security official said.
