By IANS
Kathmandu : Rage glitters in Goma Khadka's eyes as she recounts how she has been passing her days since the Maoists killed her husband Jeevan Khadka who worked for the Nepal Army.
"The Maoists abducted him and kept him their prisoner for a month. Then he was rescued by the army and went back to work," she says with dry eyes.
"One day, they caught him again and this time, they killed him," adds the woman who is amongst the hundreds of victims of Maoist atrocities asking the government for justice.
There is mounting outrage among the victims that while they are facing starvation, the government is not only feeding the Maoists but Monday decided to give guerrilla soldiers a monthly allowance of Nepali Rs.3,000 each.
"Is this justice?" asks Khadka with burning eyes. "I don't have a roof over my head, my son can't go to school while the people who spread terror and killed innocent people are being pampered."
"I am searching for the men who killed my husband," she says. "I want to kill them or be killed."
Widowed with a young son, Khadga ran from pillar to post in her home district Sunsari in southern Nepal to find a way to live.
"There's no place for a married woman at her parents' house," she says. "My in-laws beat me and threw me out. And then the state forced me to flee at night with my child in my arms.
"I have been victimised by everybody."
In desperation, Khadka came to the capital where she was told there were others like her, people who were victims of Maoist atrocities.
Durganath Yogi, whose family ran a small shop in Dang in midwestern Nepal, a Maoist stronghold, saw his elder brother killed by the guerrillas and their property confiscated. He was told to leave the village or face severe consequences.
Yogi too chose to come to Kathmandu.
Like Yogi and Khadka, about 300 people with similar tales of suffering, banded to form the Nepal Maobadi Pidit Sangh – Maoist Victims' Association – and sought to demand compensation and justice from the government.
However, the seven-year struggle has come to naught.
The Sangh says instead of justice, they have been further persecuted by the "democratic" multiparty government.
Three years ago, Maoists killed the head of the group, Ganesh Chiluwal, in one of the busiest areas of the capital. Though several organisations, including Amnesty International, have been asking Nepal's government to punish Chiluwal's killers, nothing has happened so far.
For three months, the victims had been camping on an open plot on the way to the airport, hoping their sit-in would move the government.
On May 17, when they sought to stop traffic on main roads as a protest, a vehicle was torched in the course of the protest.
"Police arrested 18 members," says Nur Prasad Adhikari. "Though the majority were released, four are still in detention. They include a woman, Kalpana Bhandari."
"And the same night, they came and razed our camp and took away all we possessed. The clothes I am wearing are all I have left now."
Ironically, many of the victims' kin who were killed by the Maoists either worked in the army or police, and some were members of Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's Nepali Congress party.
Kalpana Bhandari, who is still in detention, for instance, suffered the killing of her husband Ram Bahadur, who worked for Nepal Police.
The growing frustration and rage among the victims is now making them think of other options.
Adhikari met the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Kathmandu to ask ominous questions about victims' rights.
"Will it be a violation of human rights," the young man asked the UN official, "if the government… forcing us to take the law in our own hands?"