Krishna Pahadi, who was held for months as a prisoner of conscience, will give a free, public talk.
By Elizabeth Gudrais
Published in The Providence Journal
Nov. 6, 2005
PROVIDENCE - Krishna Pahadi, who spent nearly five months as a prisoner of conscience in Nepal earlier this year, will speak at Brown University Wednesday. Nepal's monarch, King Gyanendra, seized absolute power and suspended civil liberties -- including freedom of the press and freedoms of expression, assembly and association -- on Feb. 1, saying his actions were needed to control a Maoist rebel insurgency. Pahadi, the former chairman of Amnesty International Nepal and the founding chairman of Nepal's Human Rights and Peace Society, was imprisoned after he helped to organize a protest against the king's seizure of power. He will speak at 8 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 101. The talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Brown's Amnesty International student group. Nepal -- sandwiched between China and India, and described in the CIA World Factbook as "slightly larger than Arkansas" -- has 28 million residents, about 80 percent of whom are Hindu. On June 1, 2001, in a bloody incident that shocked the world, the country's crown prince, Dipendra, killed his father, King Birendra, and nine other members of the royal family before taking his own life. Gyanendra, Birendra's younger brother, took power three days later. In October 2002, he dismissed the prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and dissolved parliament. He reinstated Deuba in June 2004, but the Maoist rebellion escalated with a weeklong blockade of Kathmandu in August last year. After Gyanendra dissolved the government in February, more than 3,000 political prisoners were detained, according to Amnesty International. The BBC News has reported that the Maoist rebellion has killed an estimated 12,000 people since 1996, but that a three-month ceasefire -- the first since peace talks broke down in 2003 -- began in September. |