Nepal King Sacks Government, Assumes Power

Nepal's King Gyanendra today dismissed the Sher Bahadur Deuba government and assumed power in the Himalayan Kingdom.

The monarch has accused the Deuba government of failing to restore peace and conducting parliamentary elections in the country.

"I have decided to dissolve the government because it has failed to make necessary arrangements to hold elections by April," the King said in a televised address to the nation.

The King maintained that the Deuba government had failed to protect democracy and sovereignty of the people.

King Gyanendra had appointed Deuba as Prime minister last year and asked him to conduct parliamentary elections and hold peace talks with the Maoist rebels.

Earlier, the King had sacked Deuba in 2002 for failing to hold elections, but asked him to form the government last year as the rebels stepped up insurgency in the Himalayan kingdom.

Nepal's King Gyanendra has announced on state television that he has sacked the government led by Sher Bahadur Deuba.

He said he was taking over direct power because the administration had failed to fulfil its mandate.

Mr Deuba had been reappointed Nepal's prime minister last June, two years after King Gyanendra sacked him for failing to contain a Maoist insurgency.

The rebels recently failed to respond to a 13 January deadline set by Mr Deuba to hold peace talks.

The Associated Press reports that soldiers have surrounded the prime minister's residence and the homes of other government leaders.

"I have decided to dissolve the government because it has failed to make necessary arrangements to hold elections by April and protect democracy, the sovereignty of the people and life and property," the king said in his announcement.

The BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu says the announcement has plunged Nepal into uncertainty.

"This will restore peace and effective democracy in this country within the next three years."

King Gyanendra also said the government had failed to restore peace with the Maoist rebels.

He accused the country's fractious political parties of behaving selfishly and of giving no thought to the Nepali people and the welfare of the country.

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Nepali King Gyanendra sacked the government and assumed power himself Tuesday, saying the leadership had failed to hold elections or restore peace amid an escalating civil war with Maoist rebels.

Indian television channel NDTV said the king had taken power for the next three years and placed many politicians under house arrest.

"I have decided to dissolve the government because it has failed to make necessary arrangements to hold elections by April and promote democracy, the sovereignty of the people and life and property," the king said in an address on state radio.

Shortly afterwards telephone and mobile lines were apparently shut down in Kathmandu and communications links closed between the country and the rest of the world.

The strategic Himalayan nation sandwiched between India and China is locked in a bitter three-way struggle among the king, the Maoist rebels and political parties who are often bitterly divided among themselves.

The king is often accused of overstepping his powers, and reappointed Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba only last June, two years after sacking him for the same reasons he cited this time -- inability to tackle the long-standing revolt against the monarchy and failure to call an election.

In January, Deuba had promised to go ahead with the election despite the civil war and the refusal of the Maoists to come to peace talks by a Jan. 13 deadline.

But many members of Deuba's own cabinet were known to be unhappy with the election plan on grounds it was unrealistic in a country where the rebels control much of the countryside.

The rebels have been fighting since 1996 to replace the monarchy with a communist republic in a revolt that has cost around 11,000 lives.

The king himself had promised that elections would begin by the start of the Nepali new year in mid-April. Indian television said he accused political parties of factional fighting.

This is the fourth time the king has sacked a prime minister in less than three years. Nepal has had no parliament since 2002. Nepal is one of the world's poorest nations and its only Hindu kingdom. Many people still view the king as a reincarnation of the god Vishnu.

But the monarchy's reputation nosedived in 2001 when the crown prince, Dipendra, killed his father, the popular King Birendra, and several other royals in a palace massacre. He then turned the gun on himself.

Gyanendra was crowned king after the massacre, but has never been as popular as his brother Birendra.

Tens of thousands of tourists visit Nepal each year as it has eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest.

"My hatred for Communism is second only to my hatred of jihadist Islam"

The Soviets pretty much invented modern Islamic Terrorism

The KGB's Man
Moscow turned Arafat into a terrorist.

Wall Street Journal

BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, September 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington--as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day--believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called Falastinuna ("Our Palestine"), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him--the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day War, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel--over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.

In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Mr. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."
Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his--all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.

"the Russians funded secular Muslims like the PLO - we in the West funded the jihadist versions"

Unfortunately, the PLO has received and still recieves funding from the West/UN. Still, as I said before, the Soviets invented modern Islamic Terrorism.

Terrorists in Muslim Disguise

Inside Story World Report (1994)

Now that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is beginning to defeat Israel, it is pulling out one of its most powerful terrorist weapons to finish the surrender process. That weapon is commonly known as "Islamic fundamentalism."

On Monday, July 18 [1994], a powerful car bomb exploded in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina. The target, a seven-story Jewish community center, was completely destroyed, leaving nearly 100 dead and another 100 wounded.1

Eight days later, another car bomb was detonated—this time at the Israeli embassy in London, England. The embassy and other adjoining buildings suffered damage, and 14 people were injured.2

Authorities in Israel and elsewhere immediately blamed Muslim "extremists" for the terrorist attacks, and specifically named the group Hezballah (meaning "Party of G-d"). For the PLO, this was a convenient dodge allowing it to disclaim responsibility.

But more importantly, the PLO is now using these attacks as an excuse to accelerate the surrender of Israel. The logic is chillingly simple: according to news accounts of the second bombing, British authorities "presumed it to be an attempt to disrupt the peace process," and "Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel... said Islamic extremists were seeking to disrupt the Arab-Israeli reconciliation process."3 Thus peace on any terms must be made quickly with the PLO, lest the "extremists" succeed in stopping the "peace process." The PLO provides the carrot, while "Muslim fundamentalists" provide the stick.

A myth has been engineered in the last several years regarding "Islamic fundamentalism." According to this idea, the PLO and its main factions have become moderate, willing to recognize Israel and negotiate a compromise solution. However, radical Muslims, including Hezballah, Islamic Jihad, the Amal Militia, and Hamas, are said to oppose such compromises violently. Every time these extremists carry out another terrorist attack, Israel is pressured to make more concessions to the PLO.

In reality, this is a classic example of dialectical strategy at work. Writing in Commentary magazine, Jerusalem Post editor David Bar-Illan exposed the clever strategy: "[Israeli] government spokesmen prefer to pretend that the killers are not operatives of the 'moderate' Arafat, supporter of the peace talks, but 'enemies of the peace process,' such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and PLO radicals... The not unreasonable assumption behind this charade is that the public might resent continued talks with proxies of the 'mainstream' PLO in Washington while its gunmen are killing Israelis back home."4

Just as the PLO does not represent palestinian or Arab interests, the "Islamic fundamentalists" are not religious in nature. Rather, all these organizations have been created, supported, and directed by the Communists, operating on orders emanating from Moscow.

The terrorist group Hezballah, and its official sponsor, the government of Iran, provide a case in point.

Because of media distortion, the Ayatollah Khomeini was seen in the west as a fanatic religious leader. But the Iraqi family of the Grand Ayatollah Muhsen Hakim-Tabataba'i, which in the 1960s and 1970s exercised leadership over the Shi'ite movement of Islam, opposed Khomeini so thoroughly that they worked closely with the Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein, the Soviet-backed dictator of Iraq, murdered the family at his first opportunity, thereby eliminating Shi'ite opposition to Khomeini.5

Khomeini's revolutionary movement was known as "Islamic Marxism," a movement begun from within the Russian Bolshevik Party in 1916.6 During the 1970s, the Soviet Union mobilized its resources to organize a revolution in Iran, with Khomeini as its official leader. Khomeini's brother was serving time in prison as a member of the Tudeh Party—the Communist Party of Iran; Khomeini's intimate advisor, Sadegh Ghothzadeh, was an affiliate of the French and Italian Communist Parties. Soon the Soviets were broadcasting pro-Khomeini propaganda into Iran, while they began publishing a well-funded revolutionary magazine entitled Navid, meaning "Good News." KGB agents working among the 4,000 Soviet personnel in Iran coordinated the protests and riots, and the Tudeh Party, acting on Soviet orders, openly backed the "Islamic" revolution and created a broad coalition of the Left to support Khomeini.7

Moscow also mobilized the PLO to back Khomeini. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by self-proclaimed Marxist Leninist George Habash, supplied training and weapons to the Feda'iyin-e Khalq, the Iranian Islamic-Marxist terrorist group that began the revolution to overthrow the Shah. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization trained and armed the Mujahedin-e Khalq, another main pillar of Khomeini's revolution, and it trained future members of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, including the Minister of the Guards later appointed by Khomeini.8

Once Khomeini seized power in Iran, Arafat brought a large delegation of PLO officials into the country, where "he was formally given the Israeli consulate building and, raising the Palestinian flag over it, opened the first PLO office, also appointing a PLO 'ambassador' to Iran."9 The Soviet Union and Communist China have since continued to arm Iran with weapons.

Khomeini immediately created Hezballah as an international terrorist wing of the PLO-trained Revolutionary Guards. Inside Iran, Hezbellah worked closely with Iranian Communist organizations in consolidating the regime's power. The terrorist training camps in Iran have been supervised by Mostafa Chamran Savehi, a follower of Trotskyite Communism who, as a student in Berkeley, California during the 1960s, founded such Islamic-Marxist groups as Red Shi'ism and the Muslim Students' Association of America. The instructors at the Iranian terrorist camps have been Communist experts from North Korea and Syria, as well as Iranians trained by the PLO and the Communist government of Iraq.10

The organizer of Hezballah in Pakistan and Lebanon, Abbas Zamani, was also trained by the PLO and has been identified as a probable agent of the KGB.11 In Lebanon, Hezballah's terrorist mastermind has been Immad Mugniyeh. For years Mugniyeh was a leading member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17, an arm of Fatah. When the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced the PLO to leave, Arafat had Mugniyeh and other members of Force 17 switch over to Hezballah, allowing these terrorists to remain in Lebanon. Mugniyeh quickly became the effective head of Hezballah, and has coordinated Hezballah-PLO terrorism to this day. On Arafat's orders, the PLO transfers weapons, money, and terrorist units to Hezballah, while Hezballah has provided intelligence and other logistical support to the PLO—including helping PLO units infiltrate into Lebanon.12

In short, the "Islamic fundamentalists" are not religious at all, but are Communist fronts adopting a Muslim mask.

The "schism" between the PLO and "Islamic fundamentalists" has been staged as a clever ploy to force Israel into surrender. Now that Israel is indeed yielding to its implacable Communist enemies, it is only natural that terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets are being accelerated worldwide. By blaming the attacks on "extremists" who allegedly oppose the "peace process," the PLO can disavow the terror acts in which it participates, and can maintain an image of moderation for the West. In the face of this intensified pressure, Israel is likely to make concessions even faster than before. Watch for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to begin placing the remainder of the strategic West Bank, and even Jerusalem itself, on the bargaining table.

On the other hand, the financing and political pressure for the PLO takeover is coming almost entirely from the United States, and President Clinton is now accelerating the process. If Congress chose to stop the President, Israel could take back the West Bank and Gaza, and could soon destroy the PLO and its allies.

1 Parks, M., Los Angeles Times, "Rabin links Hezbollah to Argentine blast," SF Chronicle, 7-20-94, p. A10. 2 "Israeli embassy in London bombed," SF Chronicle, 7-27-94, pp. A1, A13. 3 Ibid. 4 Bar-Illan, D., "Israel's New Pollyannas," Commentary, Sept. 1993, p. 30. 5 Taheri, A., Holy Terror, Adler & Adler, Bethesda, MD, 1987, p. 163. 6 Ibid., p. 217. 7 Rees, J., "How Jimmy Carter betrayed the Shah," The Review of the News, 2-21-79, pp. 31-48. 8 Alexander, Y. and Sinai, J., Terrorism: The PLO Connection, Crane Russak, New York, 1989, pp. 72-73. 9 Ibid., p. 73. 10 Taheri, Op cit., pp. 77-79, 88-105. 11 Ibid., p. 177; Laffin, J., Holy War: Islam Fights, Grafton Books, London, 1988, p. 79. 12 Livingstone, N.C. and Halevy, D., Inside the PLO, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1990, pp. 267-275

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