Breaking point

Many in Nepal find themselves in a position where they can be lynched by vigalantes, abducted by Maoist rebels or tortured and killed by the security forces.

The little girl in the green shawl leaned forward slightly, just enough so the large stone balanced on her head would not crush her feet when it fell onto the Martyrs Road.

• Diverging landscapes
• Classical music wants you!
• Breaking point
• Looking to polls
• What it's like to live on $1 a day

At the end of her walk, a pile of rocks awaited her and the other recruits from her village who, like thousands before them, had been forced to work on this road for seven hours a day, for eight days, for no money, a two-day walk from their homes.

The Martyrs Road, named in honour of Maoist fighters killed in battle, is not even routed through their village.

"Ten," the girl said, when asked how old she was. Gayatri Oli was her name, she said.

Nearly everyone interviewed knew they were being watched and listened to by other workers or members of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), who were making them work on the 5 1/2-mile stretch of a road that Maoist planners say will reach the full 56 1/2 miles to the so-called Maoist capital of Thawang within the next three years.

They were only too happy to help the region's development, they said, repeating a party mantra.

Only one man broke the ideological harmony. He declined to give his name and made sure no one could overhear him.

"It's this way," he said, gazing across the valley and past the low clouds toward his village that he had been forced to leave for over a week.

Nestled between the emerging nuclear superpowers of China and India, Nepal is a country most people think of — if they think of it at all — as the home of the tallest mountain in the world, the mythical yeti monster, the birthplace of Buddha, copious marijuana and plenty of hippie travellers to smoke it.

But it also is teetering on the brink of a collapse that could result in huge bloodletting and international confrontation, according to diplomats, many Nepalis, human rights researchers and other experts.

Among the diplomats, including Americans, there is a sense that the coming year or two will prove crucial in determining Nepal's future. The country's political cocktail is alarming.

The Maoist rebels are convinced of ultimate victory. Nepal's king, claiming he was responding to the growing insurgency and the corruption of the democratic parties, seized absolute power this year in a coup, stamping out dissent with an army that has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Those who would and do dissent — the parties — are considered crooked and almost worthless by most Nepalis.

Under threat from three sides is a population just larger than Iraq's. Nepal has 27 million people who are living in a volatile, fragile habitat. They live in a country where they can be lynched by vigilantes, abducted by the Maoists, disappeared by government security forces and tortured or killed by any of the three.

Many — a million so far — have chosen to flee to India rather than live in a conflict zone.

What makes the situation in Nepal so alarming is this: After almost a decade of increasingly intense warfare and the deaths of more than 12,000 Nepalis, no solution appears either clear or likely.

Even those whom the Western powers, the United Nations and neighbouring India are banking on seem a risky bet at best.

The conundrum for the United States, Britain and India — Nepal's main allies — is this: To support the increasingly autocratic King Gyanendra is hard to justify. To weaken the king would be to strengthen the Maoists, whose victory could usher in a rein of even worse terror.

So, to Western and regional powers determined to help prevent Nepal's slide into chaos, diplomats say, the democratic parties represent the best of three bad options.

To many in Kathmandu, including diplomats and royalists, the Maoists remain a worryingly inconsistent, mysterious force.

Nearly all conversations about them get around to one question: If they took Kathmandu, would they allow multi-party democracy or would they enforce mass re-education, conduct class-based purges and executions, redistribute land and property and silence any opposition with terror? Would they, in other words, emulate their Cambodian forebears, the genocidal Khmer Rouge?

The answer can be found only with the Maoists themselves, so a Newsday reporter and a photographer spent two weeks in June travelling with the Maoists in their heartland of Rolpa, a district in the West of the country, talking with their soldiers, party members and leaders — and the civilians who live in the poor, mountainous district.

The journey followed the mountain path between the village of Tila and the almost-town of Thawang, roughly parallel to the unfinished road.

The path winds for about 53 miles across a dozen pine-covered mountains, along a river valley and through a score of hamlets of mud-walled, mud-floored houses. It is a brutal, three-day trek and can be made only on foot.

The Maoists' forced-labour project is intended to make this route all but obsolete for those wishing to travel North to Thawang and points in between.

From the start of the trip, which began on the then-unfinished stretch of road leading to Tila, one thing became clear: Party members did not take part in the manual labour they supervised. Their shirts and pants remained clean while old people and children scrambled, some of them barefoot, in the dust and dirt.

Working on the road is dangerous. At least two people have died, Maoist leaders said, one of them earlier in June when a huge slice of rock fell on him from the cliff he was ordered to bore into. But not working on the road is not an option.

"We won't kill them but we will make them work," said the region's most senior Maoist official, Santosh Budha Magar.

The Maoists say they are fighting for the freedom of the people. Why should people be forced to work on the road, he was asked. Is that freedom? "That kind of freedom is not freedom," Magar replied.

Nepal's Maoist movement claims to be fighting for equality and liberation from the centuries-old system of master-and-serfs feudalism, but often the Maoists appear to mimic the unjust order that sparked the revolut