Kathmandu (AFP) – Beaten and raped by police officers as a child, “Mira” was among the many victims of sexual violence during Nepal’s civil war — and is now one of the few to recount her ordeal. Guerrilla attacks and forced disappearances were daily facts of life on both sides of the Himalayan republic’s decade-long Maoist insurgency. The conflict ended in 2006 with a peace deal that brought the Maoists into government and promised justice for those who had suffered in the fighting. Sixteen years after the war ended, only two convictions have been handed down for civil war-era crimes in civilian courts, while rape survivors are frustrated that their own traumas have been met by official indifference.
