– Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The U.S. could cut off aid to Nepal if King Gyanendra – who declared emergency rule, sacked the government and jailed civil society leaders more than two weeks ago – does not quickly restore basic rights and move toward democracy, the U.S. ambassador to Katmandu said Thursday.

“Assistance to Nepal is at some risk, particularly security assistance,” said James Moriarty, a former National Security Council official who was posted to the Himalayan kingdom by President Bush about seven months ago.

The Bush administration’s tough message to the king, which Moriarty said would be coordinated with U.S. allies, came on the same day that Amnesty International warned that a “human-rights catastrophe is looming” in Nepal after Gyanendra’s sweeping emergency decree.

The current crisis began Feb. 1 when Gyanendra dismissed his third government since 2002 by issuing a proclamation delivered on Nepalese television before cutting off his country from the outside world. Soldiers were sent into the streets, and phone lines and Internet connections were severed, although communications have since been restored.

Also Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Gyanendra announced the formation of an anti-graft commission that his government said would be given broad powers to investigate and jail corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Moriarty, who met with reporters at the State Department, suggested the king could avoid sanctions from Washington if his government does three things quickly: restore constitutional freedoms, release detainees and reach out to opposition political parties.

He said roughly $40 million in U.S. economic aid flows into Nepal each year.

But Moriarty, who was recalled to Washington this week for consultations on the crisis, suggested that cutting aid, much of which is directed at health projects and good-governance efforts, would only hurt Nepalis, who live in one of the world’s poorest and least-developed lands.

Instead, Moriarty said, the United States is looking at the roughly $1.5 million it is expected to deliver this year in arms and other security aid, adding that he was working with his counterparts from London and New Delhi to deliver a unified message.

But the ambassador also said he recognized the difficulty in pressuring Gyanendra, given that many Nepalis support the king’s tough actions in the hope that emergency rule might help the government stem the violence, which has steadily moved from the countryside into the heavily populated Katmandu Valley.

“The public is giving him (the king) the benefit of the doubt, because they do want to see progress against the insurgency,” Moriarty said. “But it doesn’t mean they want to see political leaders detained indefinitely. It doesn’t mean they never want to cast a vote again, either.”

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-17-05 1942EST

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