Authorities imposed day curfews in two southeastern Nepal towns on Tuesday after violent anti-government protests by ethnic Madhesis which have clouded a peace process aimed at ending a decade long of civil war. Four people were killed and dozens wounded in Monday’s clashes between police and protesters from Nepal’s southern plains who say they have been sidelined by the peace deal that brought former Maoist rebels into the political mainstream.The latest violence in the town of Lahan, 125 km southeast of Kathmandu, was the worst since the November peace deal that ended a decade of killings, abductions and disappearances that left 13,000 people dead.The government held an emergency meeting on Tuesday and called for talks with political groups involved in the conflict, including the Madhesi People’s Rights Forum that had organised the protests.The forum says the peace deal offers little for people living in the Terai, which is the bread basket of impoverished Nepal. “We want a federal structure of government and regional autonomy for Terai . We want elimination of discriminations against the people of Terai including racial, lingual, cultural and economic,” said the group’s president Upendra Yadav.The Terai region, home to nearly half of Nepal’s 26 million people, is a narrow strip of fertile flat land. Its Madhesi inhabitants share closer cultural links with neighboring India than with Nepalis in the Himalayan mountains of the north.The November deal was not in immediate danger, analysts said, but the violence could slow down what was in the past month a fast-moving peace process. The Maoists have joined an interim parliament and started to lock up their weapons.In a boost for international support for the peace deal, the UN Security Council on Monday agreed a new mission in Nepal was expected to include 186 military personnel to help monitor disarmament of the Maoists.The United Nations wants to ensure the army stays in barracks in the run up to planned June elections for an assembly to prepare a new constitution and decide the future of the monarchy, which the Maoists want abolished.“This violence will not derail the peace process,” said Lok Raj Baral, chief of the Nepal Center for Strategic Studies, a private think-tank.“But continued trouble will only make the people disillusioned and adversely affect the peace process,” he said, adding the protests could pressure the multi-party government to consider a federal structure of government.
