which at least three people died, amid reports that Nepali troops opened fire on demonstrators.
Tuesday’s protests came shortly after a global day of prayer for stability and peace in the impoverished Himalayan country on April 8 and April 9, organized in cooperation with evangelical churches in the world’s only Hindu Kingdom.
There has been mounting pressure on King Gyanendra to end his crackdown and re-establish a democratically elected government, who he fired last year.
King Gyanendra says he was forced to take absolute power as politicians failed to quell an insurgency by Maoist rebels who seek to establish a Communist-run state in a revolt that has killed over 13,000 people since 1996.
CEASEFIRE NOT HOLDING
But his Royal Nepalese Army’s efforts to end the Maoist insurgency appeared to have failed after a brief ceasefire agreement — a development has worried Nepal’s Christian minority.
"Many Nepalese Christians have suffered greatly as a result of the Maoists uprising," said MK Henderson, the founder and director of US-based Brand New Images, an organization supporting needy women and children in Nepal and other Southeast Asian nations.
"Churches in the villages have little protection from Maoist soldiers who see them as a symbol of American Imperialism," Henderson added in a statement.
Christian investigators say several Christian leaders by Maoists while other pastor were taken into Maoists prison camps and tortured. Recently "a village pastor and missionary who had pioneered several churches was brutally murdered as he was returning to Kathmandu, when the bus he was riding was forced to stop by Maoists welding hand grenades and other explosives," said Henderson who investigated the situation of churches in Nepal.
PASTOR INSTANTLY KILLED
"This pastor was instantly killed, leaving his wife Sabina and children to struggle alone. Missionaries depended upon his quick wit and intelligence to translate gospel materials and an entire book into the Nepalese language," added Henderson.
In addition dozens of Christian congregations were reportedly closed down. Even without the Maoist insurgency, Christians are facing persecution, as evangelization is not allowed, American diplomats suggested.
"Some Christian groups were concerned that the ban on proselytizing limited the expression of non-Hindu religious belief," said the United States State Department in a recent human rights report. Hindu authorities are believed to fear the expansion of evangelical Christianity in Nepal.
The Church in Nepal has grown steadily from about 50 known believers in 1960 to roughly half a million Christians, according to church estimates. Evangelical Christians are now almost two percent of the over 28-million strong population despite difficulties, observers say.
MORE FREEDOMS DEMANDED
On Tuesday, April 11, the US State Department urged the Nepalese monarch to allow more freedoms.
"The king’s continuing failure to bring the parties back into a process to restore democracy has compounded the problem," said the States Department Spokesman Sean McCormack in Washington, news reports said. “The United States calls upon the king to restore democracy immediately.”
Rights group Amnesty International urged the royalist government to rein in the security forces, saying it feared an ncrease in violence in the coming days. But the state-run newspaper Rising Nepal said the campaign was not peaceful and Maoist rebels had infiltrated the protests to create trouble, a charge the political parties have denied, Reuters news agency reported.
So far, more than 300 people have reportedly been wounded and about 1,500 protesters detained during protests. Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said 97 journalists had been detained and 24 wounded across the country. The current king, Gyanendra, came to power in June 2001 after a palace massacre in which his brother king Birendra, the queen and eight other members of the royal family died. (With reports from Nepal, BosNewsLife Research and BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos).
