Activists of the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the ex-rebels who fought an armed revolt for 10 years, gathered in main intersections of Katmandu to enforce the strike. Schools and colleges remained closed and markets were shut. Drivers kept their vehicles off the streets for fear of attacks by the strike organizers. Police said at least three vehicles were vandalized by the protesters in Katmandu for defying the strike call. A local leader of the communist league was found dead a few days earlier in Katmandu, and police are still unsure how he died or who was responsible. The communists claim it was a murder by a rival group and are demanding the authorities quickly arrest those involved. The youth league of the ex-rebels the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has been blamed for several violent attacks in the past. There have been repeated calls from rights groups to disband the Young Communist League. US officials have even set disbanding of the youth league as one of the main conditions to removing the Maoists from its terrorist blacklist. The Maoists gave up their armed revolt in 2006 to join a peace process. Since then they have joined mainstream politics, winning the most seats in last year's parliamentary elections. However, they have been blamed for several recent violent attacks. Three years after war ended in Nepal, these former Maoist guerrillas remain in a U.N.-monitored camp and are among the biggest threats to the Himalayan nation's fragile peace. “We don't want to go back to war, but we might have to,” said a 35-year-old Maoist military commander who still goes by his nom de guerre, Pratik. He spent years fighting what the Maoists called the People's War, leaving his family to disappear into a bloody insurgency that cost Nepal some 13,000 lives and crippled the economy in an attempt to abolish the monarchy and usher in a communist state. “It's a fluid situation. Maybe we'll fight, maybe we won't,” he said, smiling. His former foot soldiers- there are more than 19,000 in UN-monitored camps scattered across Nepal are far blunter. “We spent years fighting for the people. Now the government should be helping us with jobs, houses, everything. But they've already forgotten us,” said a young woman who joined the Maoists at age 15 and now lives in a disarmament camp in Dastratpur, in the foothills of western Nepal. She spoke on condition that her name not be used, fearing retribution from her commanders. Karin Landgren, the head of the UN. mission in Nepal, warned the UN Security Council last month that the lack of progress on the Maoist fighters was an “Achilles' heel of the peace process.” The camps “were never intended to last this long,” Landgren said in an interview.
