Despite outward appearances, Nepal is not at peace. Since 1996, an underground Maoist movement has been waging a campaign of violent opposition against the government. As of this writing, the so-called People's War had claimed more than 600 lives; no incidents had involved foreigners, as the fighting has largely been confined to remote rural areas where tourists don't go. However, the insurgency has the potential to escalate into a full-scale civil war.

Before turning to guerrilla warfare, the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) was one of several bona fide factions that participated in the 1990 democracy movement. Dissatisfied with the deals struck by the major parties after the restoration of democracy, extremists in the group went underground; the failure of the 1994-95 Communist government apparently confirmed their belief that change wasn't possible by working within the system. In 1996 they launched the People's War with sporadic attacks on police stations in the midwestern hills, and subsequently expanded the conflict to encompass more than half the districts of Nepal. Intimidation and disruption - kidnapping and assassinating government officials, bombing telecommunications facilities and other infrastructure - have been their main tactics in an effort to undermine support for the status quo, while at the same time playing for the public's sympathies through populist stunts such as raiding banks and destroying loan papers. They're able to call general strikes ( bandh) at will, although it's debatable whether their success at this indicates true support or merely shopkeepers' and bus owners' fear of getting their windows smashed.

True to their name, Nepal's Maoists hope to bring about an agrarian, peasant-based revolution modelled after the one led by Mao Zedong; like China in the 1940s, Nepal is overwhelmingly rural, with relatively few of the urban proletarians glorified in the Marxist-Leninist strain of communism. The insurgents have therefore sought first to consolidate their power in the countryside, recruiting cadres from among the disaffected youth and driving out the forces of the establishment. The plan is eventually to encircle the cities with "liberated" villages and finally to overpower the urban areas.

Successive governments have considered the Maoists terrorists and responded with force. This approach has made dialogue impossible, and has left the underlying cause of the uprising - lack of development in rural areas - unaddressed. And while to its credit the government has so far refrained from calling out the army, it has used the police force to conduct purges that, according to Amnesty International, have included widespread arbitrary arrests, disappearances and extrajudicial killings. It's notable that 500 of the 600 people who have died in the People's War have been Maoists. All of this has helped force the rebels into a position where they feel they have no alternative but to fight, and nothing to lose.

The People's War is essentially a symptom of poverty, unemployment and bad governance - it's a desperate struggle by desperate people. Nepalis are amazingly tolerant of oppression, so by the time they get fed up enough to take up arms the situation is probably very bad, and may be irreconcilable. That's not to say the Maoists have the support of enough of the populace to overthrow the government; what popularity they enjoy seems to be mainly an expression of frustration with the mainstream parties. But the government would do well to heed that message, rather than shooting the messenger