KATHMANDU: Yubraj Giri was cycling home after visiting friends in western Nepal when he was stopped by government soldiers, blindfolded, handcuffed and kicked unconscious.
It was April 2004 at the height of a communist insurgency raging through the countryside, and this was the first of more than 100 beatings Giri would endure from security forces who accused him of being a Maoist spy.
“Every day they would torture me in the evening and in the morning for seven months,” said the 29-year-old, once a fit, strong farmer but now unable to work.
Giri’s story forms part of “The Resurrected”, a new documentary by Kathmandu-based film-maker Ganesh Pandey, who set out to put a human face on more than 9,000 instances of human rights abuses during the 10-year conflict.
A farmer from a small town on the Indian border, Giri says he was locked in a tiny, dark, mosquito-infested cell at an army barracks, beaten and told he would be taken into the air by helicopter the following morning and thrown out.
Over the following months he was frequently told he would be killed and was forced at gunpoint to write confessions stating that he was a Maoist and wanted to surrender.
Last year the United Nations, satisfied that he had been the victim of serious rights abuses, urged Nepal to investigate his case and compensate him for his treatment, but no one has been prosecuted and he hasn’t received a single rupee.
A UN report released in October documented thousands of cases like Giri’s perpetrated during Nepal’s civil war, which had claimed 16,000 lives by the time it came to an end in 2006.
AFP
