Maoist guerrilla chieftain takes power in Nepal

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

-    Mao Zedong

Former rebel leader Prachanda smiles in the Constituent Assembly after being elected prime minister in Kathmandu August 15, 2008. Lawmakers elected a Maoist who led a decade-long insurgency against the Hindu monarchy as Nepal’s new prime minister on Friday, marking the Himalayan nation’s radical change into a democratic republic. REUTERS/Gopal Chitrakar (NEPAL)

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BBC | Aug 15, 2008

Members of Nepal’s parliament have overwhelmingly elected the Maoist leader Prachanda as the country’s new prime minister.

The 53-year-old won 80% of votes to defeat his only rival, the Congress Party candidate, Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Maoists won a surprise victory in April elections, and two other key parties supported Prachanda in the vote.

Last month, Nepal swore in a mainly ceremonial president, Ram Baran Yadav, after the monarchy was scrapped in May.

‘Lenin or Napoleon’

It is only two years since Prachanda emerged from more than two decades underground as a militant communist leader.
“I am very happy and very emotional,” he said as he left the constituent assembly after the vote, reported AFP news agency.

What the Maoists called their “people’s war” had left 13,000 people dead, tens of thousands displaced and much of the country’s infrastructure destroyed.

The BBC’s Charles Haviland in Kathmandu says that now the former guerrilla will be the most powerful politician in the Himalayan country, after 464 lawmakers gave him their vote and only 113 rejected him.

The Maoists’ deputy leader, Baburam Bhattarai, said: “Today is a day of pride and it will be written with golden letters in the history of the nation.”

He predicted earlier that Prachanda would be a leader “for a new era”, comparable to Lenin or Napoleon.

Friday’s ballot ends months of political deadlock that had followed the sacking of the unpopular King Gyanendra and the abolition of the 240-year-old monarchy.

Our correspondent says that Prachanda’s elevation had long seemed inevitable after his party scored its convincing win in April.

Prachanda was almost guaranteed victory because he had the support of three parties – his own, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) and the MJF (Madheshi Janadhikar Forum).

The Maoists’ Congress Party rivals accused them before the vote of plotting to set up a totalitarian communist regime, a suggestion they strongly denied.

A former agricultural science teacher-turned-revolutionary, Prachanda was originally named Pushpa Kamal Dahal, but he still uses his guerrilla nom de guerre.

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

- George Santayana

Pol Pot (L) was elected prime minister of the new communist government in 1976

Pol Pot and his army, called the Khmer Rouge, came to power in Cambodia (Kampuchea) in 1975. He was named prime minister of the new communist government in 1976 and began a program of violent reform. The Khmer Rouge abolished currency, religion and private property and evacuated cities in the hopes of creating a Maoist agrarian society free of Western influence (though, like Mao, Pol Pot had studied the works of V. I. Lenin and Karl Marx in Europe). Under his regime, forced labor, executions and famine killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians (more than 20% of the population

Pol Pot is frequently named among the baddest guys in history, along with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler… He was also referred to by his followers as “Brother Number One”… the countryside of Cambodia was dubbed “the killing fields” because of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Cambodia’s Murderous Mystery Man
Philip Short writes in his superb, authoritative account of the man and the madness that transformed Cambodia, almost overnight, into hell on earth. “Individual rights were not curtailed in favor of the collective, but extinguished altogether. Individual creativity, initiative, originality were condemned per se. Individual consciousness was systematically demolished.”