Article Launched: 4/23/2006 01:00 AM
nation | world
Riot police clash with Nepalese
Protesters in the capital defy yet another curfew - and their king's offer to share political power.
By John Lancaster The Washington Post DenverPost.com
Katmandu, Nepal - Defying another curfew Saturday, this time in the center of the capital, the protesters had stopped in the tiny square to regroup - and perhaps to take stock of the scores of riot police waiting on the edge of the historic Thamel district little more than a mile from the royal palace. That was when the police attacked. With blood-curdling yells, police in helmets and light-blue camouflage uniforms unleashed a volley of tear gas and rubber bullets, then charged the protesters, smashing long, wooden batons into rib cages, heads and extremities. The protesters broke and ran, but in the panic many of them fell, raising arms to ward off blows that fell without mercy. One of the police officers smiled and laughed; most worked with a grim, methodical efficiency. When it was over a minute or two later, acrid fumes hung in the air and the ancient paving stones were covered with blood and abandoned shoes and sandals. Several people lay injured, including a boy who appeared to be in his early teens. He was unconscious and blood poured from a wound to his head. Foreign journalists tried to stanch the bleeding with a cloth; after 10 minutes or so, an ambulance maneuvered into the square, and the child was bundled inside along with other injured and taken away. The violence came just a day after King Gyanendra offered to turn over power to political parties in hopes of ending more than two weeks of street protests and strikes that have brought the Himalayan country to a virtual standstill. Fourteen people have died in clashes with security forces, and hundreds more have been injured. On Saturday, party leaders formally rejected the monarch's offer as insufficient, and tens of thousands of protesters drove home the point by pouring into the center of the capital for the first time since the democracy movement began. "We almost have won," said Fanindra Dhamala, 32, a trekking-company owner who joined the marchers Saturday. "We don't want to stop." For the past decade, Nepal has been battling a Maoist insurgency, and Gyanendra last year suspended elected government and assumed powers of direct rule, defending the move as necessary to defeat the rebels. Political parties insist that he restore the last elected parliament as a first step toward writing a new constitution in which the monarchy could be weakened or eliminated. The parties, which have formed a loose alliance with the Maoists, also insist that any new government be vested with authority to negotiate a settlement with the rebels. The king's offer Friday night met none of those conditions, party leaders said. "We will not accept," Madhav Kumar Nepal, general secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal, told a cheering crowd in Katmandu. "We will continue the protests." Gyanendra's offer was welcomed by many foreign governments, including the United States, as offering a basis for negotiations that could bring an end to the crisis in the Himalayan kingdom of 27 million people. "The parties don't think he has done enough, but we think it is (a) basis on which we can build and move forward," British Ambassador Keith George Bloomfield said.