OneWorld.net (U.S.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul 13 (OneWorld) - International agencies must take immediate steps to protect people fleeing Nepal's nine-year guerilla war or they will see the country engulfed in a humanitarian crisis, refugee advocates have warned.

''The humanitarian situation in Nepal is not yet a crisis. The situation will worsen, however, unless an effective strategy to protect and assist the displaced is developed and implemented,'' Washington, D.C.-based Refugees International said in a written assessment based on a three-week mission to the Himalayan kingdom.

Estimates of the numbers of Nepal's internally displaced people (IDPs or refugees who have not crossed international borders) vary widely, from 200,000 to 500,000, with at least 400,000 and possibly as many as two million more having crossed into India to flee the conflict, according to Refugees International analysts Michelle Brown and Kavita Shukla.

Nepal's population stood at 24.7 million people in mid-2004, according to the U.S.-based, non-governmental Population Reference Bureau.

Refugees International's warning comes as the United Nations gears up to raise funds next month for all its activities in Nepal, scene of fighting between the government, Maoist rebels, and government-supported vigilantes.

The organization urged governments to provide critical funding, particularly to plug a $2 million budget gap at the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights so it can deploy 50 staff members across the country.

However, it also urged donors to ''reconsider the effectiveness of providing funding to the government of Nepal and increase direct funding to U.N. agencies and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to provide basic services in both government and Maoist-controlled areas.''

''The government of Nepal has a responsibility to assist and protect all people living within its borders but its actions make clear that the IDP problem is not a priority. Its brutal treatment of members of the Maoist Victims Association, who protested for recognition as 'internal refugees' in May 2005, raises questions about the government's commitment to IDP protection,'' Brown and Shukla said in their assessment.

''Basic services throughout Nepal were poor even before the conflict but now the government has even less ability or interest in providing services to people. In rural areas, most government officials have fled to district centers,'' they said.

Refugees International further called on Nepal's government to ease restrictions on NGOs.

During the war's early years, the Maoists forced large landowners, people affiliated with the central government, and political party members to leave their villages if they did not swear allegiance to the Maoists. ''This group of people has been able to go to district centers or larger cities and buy property, and most of them are not in need of economic assistance,'' the organization said.

''But in recent years the dynamic of the conflict has changed. The brutality of both the Maoists and the government security forces, as well as the collapse of economic and social structures in villages, is forcing larger numbers of more vulnerable people to flee. They tend to move in with relatives or friends, or move to slums on the outskirts of cities,'' it added.

This has complicated the job of counting and helping the displaced as they often appear indistinguishable from ''equally vulnerable urban poor living throughout Nepal,'' the assessment said.

Compounding the problem, international staff rarely travel outside Kathmandu, much less to Maoist-affected areas, so there is little information about what conditions are actually like outside the ''Kathmandu bubble,'' said Brown and Shukla.

''Agencies acknowledge that there has been greater movement to urban areas and that the population in some of the hill areas has markedly decreased, but there is little concrete information on the conditions in which IDPs are living and what their needs are, partially because most IDPs are reluctant to identify themselves out of fear of retaliation by one side or the other. For this reason, registering the displaced is currently not a possibility,'' they added.

Sanitation and basic infrastructure is being overwhelmed in the areas to which the displaced move, the report said. The displaced often do not know they have a right to health care and education. Many lack documents required by the government so they are denied these services even if they ask for them.

''It is particularly disturbing that children are denied access to schools, given that some families choose to move to district centers because schools are no longer functioning in their villages,'' the report said. ''In addition, both sides have used schools for military purposes, and military attacks on schools have increased children's vulnerability.''

King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah came to power in a Feb. 1 military coup that has since been followed by a wave of human rights violations under a palace-decreed state of emergency, according to rights group Amnesty International.

Gyanendra seized power from an elected government with support from the Royal Nepal Army, saying this was necessary to restore political stability and defeat a nine-year Maoist insurgency. Nearly 11,000 people are said to have died in that conflict, in which the Maoists have vowed to overthrow the monarchy and establish a socialist republic.

Despite some cooling off earlier this year, the guerilla war has continued. The government and Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPNM) have not agreed on a mutual human rights accord to prevent abuses against civilians, a key demand of Amnesty and other watchdogs.

The administration of President George W. Bush has called on Gyanendra to restore democracy. But it sees the Nepal insurgency as a domino in its international war on terrorism and has argued that the country could become a ''failed state'' and haven for terrorists, according to Foreign Policy in Focus analyst Conn Hallinan. The State Department has placed the CPNM on a terrorism watch list.

''There are suspicions in the region that American involvement is also part of an overall U.S. plan to ring China with military bases and regimes friendly, or at least beholden, to Washington,'' Hallinan said in a recent report.

To break the bloody stalemate between Maoists and Royalists, some Scandinavian governments and the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission have proposed United Nations intervention and independent mediation.

In April, senior U.N. humanitarian adviser Dennis McNamara urged action to prevent a humanitarian crisis, saying the plight of Nepal's internally displaced people was of major concern.

Even as Nepal's violence is said to spawn a new humanitarian crisis, the country hosts some 110,000 refugees from neighboring Bhutan.

They took refuge in Nepal after they were evicted from Bhutan in the early 1990s when the Bhutanese government introduced discriminatory citizenship policies targeting ethnic Nepalis. Bhutan said they were not Bhutanese nationals, classified them as voluntary migrants from Nepal, and forced them out.