Go, go dancers

Maoist women keep dance bar owners and police on their toes
ALOK TUMBAHANGPHEY

Dance bars around Nepal attract all kinds of attention. Customers, salacious or bored, looking for a drink and a show. Cops on the take. Women’s rights and labour activists. The moral outrage brigade.

Now these diverse groups are coming together to counter the Maoist-affiliated All Nepal Women’s Organisation – Revolutionary (ANWO-R). In late July the organisation started a “preliminary investigation” into the dance bar, dohori, and cabin restaurant business. The Maoist women seem to have sent the message: “clean up the dance bars, or we will.” When contacted, ANWO-R downplayed the issue, saying it was a small part of its larger political awareness program.

But the dance bar owners and the police are not taking the ‘investigation’ lightly, and neither are labour unions and NGOs, who believe that dance and dohori restaurants come under the purview of ‘civil society’. It’s almost a turf war, and who calls the shots is significant.

Three weeks ago, faced with the ANWO-R investigation, the police sent a letter to owners directing them to stop nude dancing, among other things, or face closure. In response, about 50 dance bar owners got together to figure out how to save their businesses, and formed the Nepal Dance Bar Entrepreneurs’ Association.

They consulted the Nepali Congress (D)-affiliated Democratic Confederation of Nepalese Trade Unions (DECONTU), the Nepal Police, and members of various civil society groups, and came up with a code of conduct. While this motley crew of previously opposed groups wrote the code jointly, it is to be “self-imposed”, says Sameer Gurung, president of the owners’ association.

Though the business has grown enormously in the last dozen or so years, it is all illegal. Bars, even regular ones, may not legally stay open after 10PM. The Hotel Management Sale and Distribution of Alcohol Control Act 2023 also prohibits what it calls “obscene and vulgar dances”. Dance bars started up in Kathmandu in the mid-90s and were tolerated in large part because gentrified versions already existed in the city’s casinos.

The Nepal Police has for years played a cat and mouse game with dance bar owners and dancers, arresting them and letting them go after payment of a fine. Often, the proliferation of dance bars, and what goes on inside them is explained with the argument that many members of the police force have a financial interest in the business.

Owners, police, labour unions, and dancers we spoke to all said the only way to improve conditions is to legalise the business. DSP Pradhumna Karki, who prepared a report on dance bars after ANWO-R’s investigation began, says the only license any restaurant or bar needs is that permitting the sale of alcohol. And even that, he says frustrated, is a bureaucratic trap: “They have to register in four places and we are supposed to ‘follow up’. It’s just not possible for us to stop it, but if we legalise the business, we can monitor the excesses.”

Nude dancing is cited as the worst of the ‘excesses’. Rama Poudyal, chair of DECONTU’s women’s committee, believes in legalisation and better management practices, but says there must also be limits. “Employees in these bars are there to work, not sell their bodies,” she argues.

At a recent meeting, the owners’ group agreed in the short term to stop the nude dances. As of last weekend, not everyone had put this into practice. In the long term, they agreed to try and “make the business more respectable and organised, and bring it under legal jurisdiction.” They say their business is real economic activity, and a good potential source of revenue for the government.

Owners, dancers, women and labour rights groups, and police we spoke to all buy the law enforcement and economic arguments, but the stigma attached to working in—and owning—a dance bar is harder to eradicate. Even as owners say they’re willing to clean up their act if a law comes into effect, nearly everyone we spoke to requested anonymity. A straw poll of some women who do dance suggests that for them, the financial gains outweigh the ‘shame’. Many argued for legalisation to reduce sexual harassment, improve working conditions, and slowly strip away the taboo.

The Maoist women are playing up the decency angle, as a morally superior authority. In fact, the ANWO-R’s ‘political awareness’ plan and investigation are part of a larger Maoist push to occupy increasingly visible and authoritative positions among unions and other professional organisations. Recent microbus strikes and troubles at The Everest Hotel are the work of Maoists in trade unions.

If the drive to legalise dance bars picks up steam there will be public debate, and women’s rights lawyer Sapana Pradhan Malla says the terms need to be expanded if the new laws are to legislate reality on the ground, rather than enforce morality. “It’s easy for radical groups to target dance bars,” she says, “but not all who work there are sex workers, and compared to other underprivileged women they make good money.” Malla says we need to examine our social values, if anything, because “It [dance bar work] is a question of voluntary choice, though as long as there is demand there will be supply.”

Printed in Nepali Times #310 (11-17 August 2006)

Long way home

Nepal’s child soldiers need to make the journey from war to peace, drill to class
NARESH NEWAR

• 15-year-old Abhin from Dhading is a popular composer and singer—of Maoist revolutionary songs that encourage more children like him to join the PLA.
• Yamu Sonu Lama from Makawanpur was 16 when she joined the Maoists and now, at 18, is a section commander.
• Ramu, 18, from Ramechhap has been a frontline fighter in many Maoist military operations.
• The Nepal Army has used children too, as messengers and spies. Not being combatants didn’t protect them from capture and torture by the Maoists.

The insurgency, and the armed forces’ response to it, have had appalling consequences for children. They have been forcefully recruited by the Maoists or tortured for being ‘informants’, and been arbitrarily detained and then ‘disappeared’ by the army and police for alleged involvement in Maoist activities.

UNICEF defines a child soldier as any boy or girl under 18 involved with a regular armed force or group. This definition is not restricted to combatants–it also includes those involved in any other capacity, such as cooks, porters, or informers.

The international children’s watchdog, Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, claims that up to 30 percent of the Maoist forces may be children. Human rights group Insec estimates that around 345 children have died at the hands of the Maoists and the state between 17 February 1996 to June 2006.

Yet children are nowhere in the peace process. Not one discussion has focused on children, and there has been no mention of how child soldiers are to be integrated during discussions on demobilisation, demilitarisation, and reintegration (DDR) of the people’s liberation army. The government has not drafted any plans and policies for demobilising and rehabilitating child soldiers, and the Maoists want to wait until political issues are resolved.

Under these circumstances, child soldiers will be hesitant about leaving the Maoist army, particularly given past experience. During the second round of peace talks in 2003 , a number of children returned to their families. However, no demobilisation and reintegration agreement was discussed between the government and the Maoists, and when the talks broke down, all these children were recalled to the PLA.

“Removing children from any activity linked to armed conflict is essential and should not be dependent on any adult DDR process, peace talks, peace agreements or cessation of hostilities,” stresses Sandra Beidas, chief of the protection section of the UN’s Nepal Office of the High Commission for Human Rights.

The psychological and sociological scars are as serious as the physical, and will only get worse the longer we wait. “Child DDR should start as soon as possible. Early intervention is critical for the normal development of children even without a peace process. If you don’t act now, it could be too late,” explains Rosanna Vega, a child protection officer with UNICEF, which is working with child protection agencies to prepare an action plan for child DDR.

Other countries have dealt with demobilising and rehabilitating child soldiers during a ceasfire but before a formal peace process. In Sri Lanka in 2003, for example, while the peace talks were going on the UN worked with the LTTE to release over 600 child soldiers and develop a plan for social reintegration and education of the returning children. In Sierra Leone, the child-focused DDR process helped to demobilise over 6,000 child soldiers who were then sheltered in interim care centres between 1998-2002. The success of these two programs, UNICEF experts say, came from the fact that the children had access to education and community support.

In the absence of an official child DDR program, a network called Children Associated with Armed Groups and Force has already been set up to help former child soldiers with rehabilitation, social integration and psycho-social counselling. “The immediate step should be to form a national child protection policy to ensure safe return, free education, vocational training and, most importantly, immunity to former child combatants,” explains child-rights expert Bhola Dahal of Save the Children (Norway).

The start of a UN-brokered peace deal could be what’s needed to speed up the process, as UN Security Council Resolution 1314 stresses that national governments in such situations must include provisions for DDR of child combatants in peace agreements.

In the meantime, the agency’s action plan is taking shape, and will be based on the UN experiences in successfully advocating and securing the release of children from armed forces in a number of countries, including Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan.

(Names of the children have been changed to protect their identity.)

Printed in Nepali Times #310 (11-17 August 2006)