Nepal's Maoists teach kids bomb-making skills

Nepalese Maoist rebels rest at Musiriya, about 600km southwest of Kathmandu, on Sunday. The rebels, fighting a decade-old insurgency against the country's monarchy, now have influence in nearly every district of this country of 27 million people, and citizens increasingly are wondering how their life would change if the rebels took power. PHOTO: AP

Fourth-graders in Nepal wouldn't have to study math if the country's communist rebels took control. But they would learn to make bombs and grow vegetables.

Nepal's Maoist rebels, fighting a decade-old insurgency against the monarchy, now have influence in nearly every district of this country of 27 million people, and citizens increasingly are wondering how their life would change if the rebels actually took power.

So a group of Nepalese teachers made a low-profile visit recently to three "model schools" run by the Maoists in the western districts of Rolpa, Salyan and Jajarkot, the rebel heartland where they launched their struggle in 1996.

The rebels say that their schools provide the ideal communist education.

During the visit, the teachers got a peak into what the future could hold for Nepal's estimated 10 million children under age 14, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

"The stress was on military education: What is a bomb? How to blast it. How to carry out attacks. This was the main part of the curriculum in the fourth and fifth classes," said Babu Ram Adhikari, general-secretary of the Nepal National Teachers' Association, Nepal's largest with 72,000 members.

"The stress was on military education: What is a bomb? How to blast it. How to carry out attacks."

Babu Ram Adhikari, general-secretary of the Nepal National Teachers' Association

"Maths is not compulsory until the fifth [grade]. English is also optional. But military science is compulsory," Adhikari said.

The Maoists specialize in hit-and-run attacks, and human rights group charge that children are recruited in large numbers. The insurgents insist the children are only taught ideology, not forced to fight.

Nearly 13,000 people have been killed in the rebellion.

The teachers went to the schools over the past six months after establishing contact with Maoist officials, Adhikari said. He refused to give further details, including the number of teachers who accompanied him.

Other teachers in the excursion declined to be interviewed, fearing government reprisals.

The Maoists say that Nepal's education system is based on feudal values in which only the rich have access to good education, and in most schools learning often means memorizing material from book upon book.

The Maoist student wing, the All Nepal National Independent Students' Union-Revolutionary, demands that government provide free education for the poor and that private schools -- which educate many of Nepal's 5 million students -- slash their fees by 50 percent or close down.

"Education should be compulsory, scientific and accessible," rebel student leader Krishna Duoj Khadka was quoted as saying on a communist Web site. "Students should have physical labor as well."

Currently, he said, "feudal traditions prevail. Most parents don't send daughters to school -- there is over 40 percent illiteracy in the countryside."

At the Maoist schools, a few computers -- a rarity in South Asian villages -- were being run by huge solar panels, Adhikari said. Sports and physical training was also mandatory for all students, who played volleyball and learned aerobics.

The teaching faculty was drawn from several sections of society -- including a trained teacher who taught classroom subjects, a farmer who taught how to grow vegetables like rice and corn and a woman who taught housekeeping.

The visiting teachers also found that boys and girls learned all the same subjects, rare in this part of the world.

"The housekeeping class was for both boys and girls. They learn how to cook, clean clothes and dishes, and other secrets of running a home," Adhikari said.

He said he did not support the bombmaking classes, but saw aspects of the rebels' curriculum worth emulating.

"We don't have to support them, but why can't we grasp some of their good points?" he said, singling out the farming classes as particularly useful in this largely rural country.