Climbing Through Nepal's Civil War

November 2005: I huddled in the darkness of my tent high on the Southwest Ridge of Ama Dablam (22,494 feet), a fairy-tale peak just south of Mount Everest. With temperatures dropping, I was grateful that Kami Chirring, a world-class climbing sherpa I’d met lower on the mountain, had agreed to join me.
The following afternoon Kami and I took our final steps onto Ama Dablam’s immaculate summit cone. Our majestic 360-degree panorama of 7,000- and 8,000-meter peaks was crowned by snow plumes racing off of Everest’s black
pyramid. The peaceful beauty of that summit view will forever be frozen in my mind’s eye.
My euphoria soon gave way, though, to thoughts of the more than 12,500 people who, since 1996, have died in Nepal’s bloody civil war — a war that could swing so many ways. The fate of the Nepali people hangs in the balance between volatile political and ideological forces. Somewhere between the Maoists’ guerrilla-style insurgency and the failure of Nepal’s King Gyanendra successfully to establish a legitimate democracy, thousands have died in a bloody conflict that is defining a new Nepal. As I descended Ama’s windswept summit, I feared that the countryside below might become Asia’s next killing fields.

April 2005. In the back of a dimly lit restaurant tucked away in Kathmandu’s quiet Lazimpat district, I pulled up a chair next to Pete Athans and joined my Cholatse team for the first time. Athans had trepidation written all over his face — a stark contrast to his otherwise calm demeanor. A veteran of more than 25 Himalayan expeditions, he was visibly rattled: I knew it had to do with the Maoists.
Athans wasted no time presenting the unsettling news. “Two days ago, a caravan of Russian climbers was hit with a grenade on the road to Jiri,” he exhaled. We were scheduled to travel the same road early the next morning to assist cataract surgeons in two separate eye camps in eastern Nepal’s mountainous outback, and then attempt Cholatse, a challenging 21,128-foot peak near Everest. “One of the guys is in the hospital — apparently, his leg is mangled,” he added. “Doctors removed more than 20 pieces of shrapnel, but they left more than a hundred — a harsh souvenir of their sabotaged expedition.”
The Russian climbers had been riding in the last vehicle of a large convoy just 30 miles from the Tibetan border, en route to Everest, when they were jumped by three Maoist guerillas who mistook them for a Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) military transport. This marked the first time, to my knowledge, that climbers had been caught in the 10-year crossfire between Maoist rebels and the RNA.

It would be one thing if the Maoists were a student group preaching the doctrine of Karl Marx, peacefully moving the masses toward “revolution,” but they are far from this ideal. The Maoist-influenced Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) is an outspoken member of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a radical, global organization whose guiding ideologies are Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism.
Angry at being treated as second-class citizens by the new government, Nepal’s Maoist leaders, in the early 1990s, became self-proclaimed champions of the rural poor and gained quick momentum in pockets of the country’s rugged outback. Led by Pushpan Kamal Dahal, or “Comrade Prachanda,” the Maoists began to use force as early as February 1996, when they sacked six government stations for weapons in western Nepal. In the last decade, the Maoists have become a military organization whose army boasts 15,000 guerrillas, earning a reputation so radical and dangerous that they have been compared with Peru’s Shining Path and Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. As a result of the conflict, upwards of one million people have been displaced, and nearly 13,000 people have been killed — including the Royal Family.