Among the most iconic images of the Nepal conflict is the photograph of a woman embracing the body of her dead husband on a blood-stained battlefield littered with the bodies of other policemen executed after capture. Grisly as this picture is, it is another picture from Dailekh of a young girl with tears streaming down her cheek that is actually even more disturbing.
That girl is weeping silently as her mother, Laxmi, tells a press conference in Kathmandu in 2005 about the disappearance of her husband, Dekendra Thapa. Like tens of thousands of other personal tragedies of the conflict, the girl’s story would have been forgotten had it not been for the personal crusade for justice of her mother, Dailekh’s journalists and human rights activists. Continue reading »