By Rabi Raj Thapa

Jamie Malamud Goti who taught ethics and political and legal philosophy at the Universidad de San Andres and the Universidad de Buenos Aires published a book, “GAME WITHOUT END” in 2006. (republished by Adarsha Book in India in 2008), in which he elaborately analyzed the nature of the State of Terror and the Politics of Justice. Jamie Malamud Goti was the same person who worked as a legal advisor to political prisoners in the opposition to the 1976-83 military dictatorship in Argentina who was also one of the two members of Argentina’s elected President Raul Alfonsin’s cabined who organized the trial against the perpetrators of the human right violations. 

The backflip of the book reads: “During the ‘DIRTY WAR’ of the 1970s, the military junta that controlled Argentina was responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and killing thousands of people. Then the democratically elected president in 1985, Raul Alfonsin decreed that former commanders of the dictatorship be tried for human rights abuses. In the book, Jamie argues that prosecuting only certain violations randomly without a fair legal and transparent way only helped politicize the national judiciary, whose duty was to implement democratic principles.

Jamie Malamud's account depicts the pivotal moment in Argentinian history that demonstrates how trials failed to treat all citizens as equal before the law and thus perpetuated the culture of the “US versus THEM” mentality that enabled the JUNTA to establish authoritarian rule in the first place. That is what Nepali people are that painful experience day-by-day in Nepal.

Introducing the book, Libbet Crandon-Malamud, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colombia University writes, “Latin Americanists celebrated the area’s transition from dictatorship to democracy…in Brazil, Nicaragua, in Chile and Argentina. Today, we Nepalis too think and believe that we are going through a long and cumbersome process of monarchical dictatorship to democracy. But the ground reality is showing just the opposite. In the 1970s, Argentina was the first country to dare to conduct such civil self-examination of human rights violations through trial. At that time, Jamie Malamud himself was the secretary of state; one of the two architects holding those trials. But later on, paradoxically, he himself criticizes the trials - not from a political perspective what other critics believed that, - such trials destabilize democracy by inciting people to rebel. That may be the reason TRC has been intentionally kept in for decades by the successive governments in Nepal too.

There is a stark difference between Nepal and Latin American countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Chile where military junta ruled the country. That scenario may come closer to Pakistan and Bangladesh where the military ruled the country for decades. Unfortunately, major political parties of Federal Nepal have also started to behave the same way as the junta governments of Latin American democracies today. Only the difference is that powerful brokers and deep-states, not military juntas like that in Latin America.  

Jamie Malamud’s focus on structural perspective and processes is very valid and important. He argues that the Argentinian trials weakened, rather than strengthened the judiciary, and strengthened, rather than weakened, the very authoritarianism that led to their dirty war. His sincere effort led him to live through the terror of death threats for himself. Then he concluded the logical consequences of those threats and terror of the authoritarian government to continue to become – “A GAME WITHOUT END – WHICH IS NOT YET OVER, AND MAY NEVER BE”.

The moral of the writing about the Nepali people is that Nepal is also going through a never-ending political morass.

Today, people’s voices of conscience are being suppressed. Those people are being put on trial with almost fictitious allegations of treason and organized crimes. The autonomy of judiciary, law and order instruments is gradually weakened, losing credibility and rendering real democracy almost impossible.

Today, only the effective means and solution seen on the horizon is “DEAUTHORITARIANIZING” of the government instrument which is possible only by dismantling their decade-long syndicate of Nepali polity as early as possible.

Today, Nepal is not embroiled in that type of dirty war, but it is endlessly enmeshed in “dirty partisan politics”.