– Kedar Bhakta Shrestha
Nepal’s Former Ambassador to Belgium and the USA
The 1970s and my UN years (1972-77):
The 1970s continued to be a period of Nepal’s increasing diplomatic activities with a host of incoming and outgoing visits at the highest levels from India, Singapore, Yugoslavia, etc. and to China, Kuwait, Cuba (NAM Summit), Japan, Bangladesh.
The marriage of Crown Prince Birendra in 1971 and King Birendra’s coronation in 1975 helped Nepal project its image to the outside world.
Nepal promptly recognized the newly created nation of Bangladesh in 1971.
It showed its courage and ability to arrive at a quick and right decision without any hesitation.
She did so in view of the prevailing ground realities and in recognition of the genuine desire of the Bangladeshi people who had undergone inhumane sufferings and severe atrocities under the erstwhile regime. This was another bold move lauded around the world.
King Birendra’s proposal to declare Nepal a “Zone of Peace” at the time of his coronation created both a surprise and a sensation.
It’s main aim was to let Nepal stay clear of any conflicts, not joining any military alliances or political blocs and focus on peaceful development of the nation.
Although eventually supported by as many as 116 countries of the world, the proposal could not see the light of the day due to India’s intransigent attitude.
It is still a viable and a practical proposal for countries like Nepal if only the powers that be would look beyond their narrow self-interest.
In the United Nations, Nepal continued to play its active role for the causes of the least developed and land locked countries as well as in the fields of disarmament, apartheid and peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Nepal played an active role in the long drawn out Law of the Sea Conference that stretched from 1973 for nine years and were held in New York, Geneva and Caracas.
It was Nepal’s untiring efforts as Coordinator of the group of LD and LDCs, that the rights to free access to and from the sea and also the recognition of the principle of the seas as a common heritage of mankind could be established under the Law of the Sea Convention of 1982.
Ambassador Shailendra Kumar Upadhyaya played a crucial role in the negotiations leading to the successful conclusion of an agreement benefiting the interests of the least developed, land locked and the least developed land locked countries.
A notable achievement for Nepal in 1974 was the start of its greater involvement in UN’s peace- keeping operations.
That year Nepal began to contribute to the UN peace keeping by agreeing to send a 671 strong contingent to UNEF II in the Golan Heights.
It was the first ever Nepal’s involvement in such large numbers compared to earlier involvement with just a few personnel as observers.
This initiative, also taken under Ambassador Upadhyaya’s leadership drew wide appreciation in the UN circle and helped enhance Nepal’s international image considerably.
Nepal at present stands on top in terms of the numbers deployed with the UN peacekeeping missions.
We should continue to enlarge our involvement and try to remain among the top contributors.
One other issue related to the peace-keeping mission was the issue of pay and perks given to the UN peace keeping personnel.
Up until the mid-seventies, salaries and perks of the peace keeping troops varied according to the per capita income of the contributing countries.
Thus, for example, Indian troops engaged in Congo would get US $ 90 per month whereas Swedish or Canadians were paid more than $700 with the logic that the latter countries had a much larger earning capacity and a commensurate higher standard of living.
This was a situation which was not tenable under the principle of equal pay for equal job.
The developing countries like Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria and Nepal took up this case seriously by demanding equal treatment.
I was personally involved in negotiations along with representatives of these countries.
After prolonged negotiations, the developed countries had to give in to our demand for equal treatment and the salaries and perks for countries like Nepal increased manifold.
The current accumulated deposit of Army Welfare Fund, created with some deductions in the troops’ salaries, stand at almost 50 billion rupees.
This is no small achievement.
As part of its increasing involvement in world affairs, Nepal undertook to host the Colombo Plan Conference in 1978. It was the largest ever international conference to be hosted by Nepal.
The smooth manner in which Nepal managed to handle the conference gave a boost to Nepal’s self confidence in managing major conferences in the years to come.
Looking at the 1980s:
By 1980, Nepal had gone through thirty years of diplomatic relations with a wide range of countries and in the process, accumulated quite a bit of experience in bilateral and multinational (lateral) relations.
This provided Nepal with a certain degree of self-confidence and maturity in its external dealings.
She continued to play an increasingly active and appreciative role in fora such as the United Nations, Non-aligned Movement, and Group of 77, least developed and landlocked countries and so on.
In June 1980, I got posted to our embassy in Washington D.C. as the Deputy Chief of Mission, soon to be followed within a month by Dr. Bhekh Bahadur Thapa as ambassador.
President Ronald Reagan was firmly engaged in arms buildup with a confrontational attitude towards the Soviet Union which he dubbed as “the evil empire”.
The Cold War was, in a way, at its height.
Pope John Paul II and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s statements and speeches were severely critical of the Soviet Union and Poland’s Lech Walesa had defied Polish authorities by calling an unheard of strike at the shipyards of Gdańsk.
These acts and events continued to put severe pressure on the Soviet Union.
The trio of President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher and Pope John Paul are credited with being the main actors in the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1990 and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union a year later in December 1991.
A little over a year after his inauguration, President Reagan was shot at in an assassination attempt in March 1981 as he walked out of a hotel in Washington D.C. – A mere 200 meters from our embassy.
Had he succumbed to the injuries at that time, it would have remained an open question whether the Soviet Union would have collapsed as early as it did in 1991.
In the meanwhile, in Washington, we were quietly engaged in enhancing our bilateral relations.
To that end, we felt that nothing could have been better if a state visit from Nepal could be materialized.
A chance reading of an article by Helen von Damme, President Reagan’s powerful Appointments Secretary, expressing her great wish to travel to Nepal Himalayas woke us up to action.
We seized this opportunity and started cultivating her. Ambassador Thapa quietly worked his way up to let the White House agree to such a visit.
State Visits are no easy affairs. They require a lot of consultations and preparations.
Even the President has to be tied up for hours in welcome, meetings and banquets.
After the assassination shooting, Mrs. Reagan had strictly instructed the State Department not to have more than one state visit per month so as not to overtax the physical stamina of the president.
Surely Washington has had more than that many state visits every month.
But the new instructions were there to stay. Normally, state visits were to be deliberated upon intensively and proposals, with priorities, had to be forwarded for approval by the White House.
But in our case, it was the other way round. It was the White House that instructed the State Department that the visit of King Birendra be included in the schedule of visits.
Although Nepal embassy had good relations with the higher echelons of the State Department, it was obviously difficult for them to put Nepal on the top of the priority list for state visits.
Thus it was some sort of a relief for Nepal’s well-wishers in the Department and quite a surprise for others when the orders came from the White House.
King Birendra was welcomed at the White House on 8 December 1983.
It was hard to believe for many State Department officials that Nepal could pull out such a feat.
More than twenty years later, I became the ambassador to the United States in September 2004.
During my tenure there, I was invited to the prestigious Georgetown University in September 2005 to give a talk to the post graduate students.
The coordinator of the program was an old South Asia hand in the Department, Ambassador Howard Schaffer. I was surprised and became proud when he mentioned, while introducing me, that the diplomacy and international relations course there had a subject entitled “Effective practice of diplomacy – a case study of a small country – Nepal”.
It was, undoubtedly, our dealings there during the period 1980-86 that must have been so much appreciated by an institution as prestigious as Georgetown University, that they thought it fit to put Nepal as a case study for the conduct of an effective and successful diplomacy.
During the 1980s, Nepal continued to expand its diplomatic contacts. There were state/official visits to Japan, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, etc.
Seven countries of South Asia held its first Summit in Dhaka and adopted the SAARC Charter on 8 December 1985.
Establishment of SAARC Secretariat in Kathmandu -1987:
The establishment of the SAARC Secretariat in Kathmandu in January 1987 was a feather in the cap of Nepal’s diplomatic achievements.
As an initiator for the establishment of SAARC (although the idea had been floated around for quite some time, including by King Birendra during the Colombo Plan Consultative Committee meeting in September1977), Bangladesh and even Colombo had vied for hosting the secretariat.
But Nepal, with its diplomatic skill and acumen, was able to let all members agree to locate the secretariat in Kathmandu.
It helped Kathmandu to enhance its image as a regional center.
Subsequently, UN organizations like UNICEF and UNFPA as well as some INGOS located their South Asian regional offices in Kathmandu.
Even the US State Department reorganized its regional bureau to include the SAARC countries. Japan’s Foreign Ministry also restructured its organizational structure commensurate with the SAARC membership.
These actions were taken in order to address their policies towards SAARC in a more structured manner, notwithstanding their bilateral relations with individual countries.
But it, nonetheless, brought limelight to Kathmandu.
Nepal hosted the 3rd SAARC Summit in 1987 with great fanfare and ceremony drawing international attention towards Nepal.
It is, however, sad to see SAARC stagnate at present to an extent in which members fail to even have a summit meeting for seven years with no possibility in the horizon.
The blockade imposed by India in 1989 in retaliation of Nepal’s purchase of military equipments from China caused severe hardships to the Nepalese people and was a big setback in Nepal-India relations.
Although India had imposed a blockade in the early 1970s also, this one was of a much severe nature and lasted for many weeks fueling strong anti-India sentiments among the Nepalese people.
In purchasing the equipments from China, Nepal wanted to assert that it was free to buy its military requirements from any source it deemed appropriate.
During 1988-89, Nepal was again elected to the non-permanent membership of the UN Security Council in recognition of its active and positive role in the United Nations.
The 1990s:
The decade of the 1990s started with monumental developments in world affairs – fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Dismantling of the USSR prompted thinkers like Francis Fukuyama to declare and write treatise like “The End of History”.
The world seemed to have suddenly transformed into a uni-polar from a bipolar system. Non-aligned movement and its ideals seemed to have lost its raison d’etre.
These developments began to show their impact around the world. Nepal too could not remain unaffected by them.
Eventually, three decade long partyless Panchayat polity was replaced by multi party democratic system.
In spite of these far reaching changes in the body politic of the country, there were no changes in its foreign policy.
If any, Nepal continued in its traditional policy of foreign relations based on peaceful coexistence, non-interference in others’ internal affairs, principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity, adherence to the UN Charter and non-alignment movement.
During this period, Nepal, as mentioned earlier, continued to practice its foreign policy despite transformation in its body politic with certain priorities.
With the growing awareness that diplomacy need to be oriented towards development, Nepal started to focus on economic diplomacy.
It was increasingly being felt that promotion of trade, investment, tourism and economic cooperation should be the focus of economic diplomacy.
While the transition to democracy had brought about a systemic change in the body politic of Nepal, it also resulted in instability and endless bickering among political parties thereby pushing the agenda of development to the back burner.
The mid-nineties saw the start of the Maoist insurgency which became a full blown conflict for a decade resulting in a great loss of lives and destruction of infrastructures which sapped Nepal’s already weak and fragile economy and pushed back Nepal’s development by several years.
The Maoist conflict also attracted a great deal of international attention.
The collapse of the USSR was presumed to bring along the waning of communist ideology and the ascendancy of liberal market economy.
But in the case of Nepal, communist ideology was gaining ground with the Maoist in control of large swathes of territories.
Foreign powers continued to closely monitor the developments.
In the early months of 1994, I became the Foreign Secretary and continued in that position for 3 years. Maoist movement had not even begun and when started a few months and years later, it did not show the symptoms of a full grown conflict that it did later on.
So it was not high on the government agenda then.
Important visits included King Birendra’s to China in 1995 and also Prime Minister Man Mohan Adhikary’s soon after.
PM Adhikary visited India in 1996 where Nepal officially proposed to revise the 1950 Treaty with India.
It created quite an unease with India. But India was not going anywhere in that matter and remains unaddressed even today. PM Sher Bahadur Deuba attended the golden jubilee of the United Nations in 1995.
The signing of the Mahakali Treaty in 1996 was seen as a good deal for Nepal at that time.
It involved prolonged and painstaking negotiations and resulted in India agreeing to Mahakali River as the boundary between the two countries and hence, also agreeing to the principle of equality in sharing the benefits of the river.
Although ratified by two thirds majority in the parliament, the treaty soon fell into controversy.
In February of 1997, I retired as Foreign Secretary and got appointed as Ambassador to the European Union and also to the Benelux countries.
Our relations with Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg were cordial and free from any controversies.
I was focused on economic diplomacy – tourism and trade.
Transavia, a subsidiary of KLM started its twice weekly direct flights to Kathmandu in 1998 and continued for a couple of years until it had to close down due to low bookings.
Later on, another Dutch company Martin Air also provided services for some time until 2001 but closed down for the same reason.
A group of Dutch investors started the Summit Hotel in the early 1990s and operated it for nearly two decades until they pulled out by selling their shares to the Nepalese businessmen. Started as a boutique hotel amid quaint surroundings, the hotel remains very popular with Dutch and German tourists.
The entire hotel is being demolished to give way for a bigger hotel.
Some Belgian traders have invested in small tourist hotels in Kathmandu.
Another Belgium is engaged in carpet imports from Nepal in a big scale.
A Luxembourg businessman, who later on went on to become our Honorary Consul General there, has the largest carpet showroom in Luxembourg with most of the exhibits from Nepal.
During my tenure in Brussels, the main issue was the derogation from the rules of origin for imports of Nepalese textile products in the European Union countries.
For import of goods and products, the European Union had laid down certain rules of origin for developing countries in order to get duty privileges.
This meant that exporting countries had to value add in the products they would export – by weaving into textiles from the imported yarn and then produce items like garments.
However, for the least developed countries, there used to be a derogation ( relaxation) of the rules by which they could straightaway import textiles and make garments out of them thus eliminating one process of making textiles out of the yarn.
This facility was granted to Nepal for a period of five years only in the hope that in that period Nepal would develop capacity to produce textile out of its imported yarn.
Even after five years, when our capacity to do so was not reached, we had to continue to press the EU for extending this derogation period. This needed lot of negotiations and persuasion to let them agree to the derogation process. We managed to get it extended due to our hard work.
After nearly four and half years in Brussels, I returned to Nepal in April 2002 on completion of my tenure.
By the time I returned to Nepal in 2002, I had put in 38 years of service in the diplomatic service with half the time abroad in our missions. I was looking forward to a retired life after all those years of service but it was not to be.
Upon my return to Kathmandu, I started a retired life after almost four decades of service with the government.
As I greatly loved travel, I made use of my retirement years in extensive travels in South-east Asia and previously unexplored regions of India.
I started a breakfast group with likeminded persons to come together now and then and discuss contemporary issues.
I also started a Bombay Group consisting of persons who were studying there during the mid-fifties – Dr. Mohamed Mohsin, Dr. Dinesh Nath Gongal, Banwari Lal Mittal, etc to reminisce about our Bombay days and exchange ideas.
I also joined the Rotary Club of Patan where I could meet people from different walks of life who had made a mark in their careers.
They had become members of the club driven by an urge to serve the society according to the ideals of Rotary.
Thus, even as a retired person, I somehow managed to keep myself active and busy.
However, nearly two year after my return from Brussels, I had to take up my assignment as Ambassador to Washington, on the death, after a prolonged illness, of the incumbent and my good friend and colleague Ambassador Jai Pratap Rana.
Text courtesy: AFCAN Review, Vol. 2, 2021.
Next week to begin and conclude with “Ambassador in Washington 2004-2006”: Ed.
Upadhyaya.