Word: civil
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...live in a broken state," says Mandira Sharma, a leading human-rights activist. For the past five years, she and her NGO, Advocacy Forum, have investigated hundreds of cases of disappearances that took place during the decade-long civil war. To Sharma, both the Maoists and the Nepal Army are guilty of a catalog of atrocities, from forced recruitment to extrajudicial killings. Attaining justice for the victims (and compensation for the nearly 200,000 displaced) ought to be as important to the country's push toward democracy as elections. "But human rights don't seem to be anyone's priorities...
...permanent state of transition," says Bojraj Pokhrel, chief of Nepal's Electoral Commission. Now, Pokhrel will have to manage a staff of over 230,000 election workers spread across the mountainous country, some in polling stations miles away from local roads. Highways and bridges were routinely bombed during the civil war, making transportation in a nation with woeful infrastructure difficult at the best of the times. Still, Pokhrel is confident Nepal has the means to carry the elections out. "The people are all hungry for this," he says...
...they don't, the international community must do more to safeguard elections and move the peace process forward. Nepal's giant neighbors, India and China, both backed the monarchy during the civil war, supplying it with weapons and aid. India, which has close ties with virtually every faction in Nepal, eventually shepherded the peace process along, forcing the main political parties to come to terms with the Maoists. China has remained a bit more circumspect, letting India flex its geopolitical muscle while building bridges with the Nepali Maoists it shunned until not long ago and beefing up its hydropower investments...
WASHINGTON MEMO They may be dreaming of control over Congress and the White House in 2009, but Democrats on the Hill first have to deal with a recurring nightmare: a seemingly unwinnable political battle pitting civil liberties against national security...
...cave by moderate Democrats who face tough re-election battles this fall. "She's going to push very hard to not have immunity," says a top Pelosi aide, but "it just depends how much leverage she has." To outsiders, that sounds like a walk-up to folding, and civil-liberties groups are pressuring Democratic House chairmen to push back. "It's completely in her hands," says Michelle Richardson of the ACLU. "Nothing can force her to have the House vote on complete immunity...