 "Photo: AP")
KATMANDU, Nepal - An outburst of bloodshed that killed eight people cast a shadow on an election set for Thursday that is meant to cement Nepal's peace deal with communist insurgents, stoking fears of more violence on voting day.
The voting for a new assembly is intended to usher in sweeping changes for this long-troubled Himalayan country, and will likely mean the end of a centuries-old royal dynasty.
But with one candidate gunned down, a protester shot dead by police and six former rebels slain in a clash with police, it was clear that fashioning a lasting peace in this largely impoverished, often ill-governed and frequently violent country won't be easy.
"For the peace process to be successful, the election needs to be credible," said Yubaraj Ghimire, editor of the newsweekly Samay. This week's violence "raises a lot of questions about how credible the election will be."
The demonstrator was killed Wednesday after police fired on a mob smashing shops and vandalizing buses to protest the slaying a day earlier of a candidate in the mountainous Surkhet district, the area's police chief, Ram Kumar Khanal, said. Police did not have any suspects in the candidate's slaying, he said.
A curfew was imposed in the remote district, and authorities said they would delay voting in the area by at least a week while the election would go ahead elsewhere.
Dozens of parties, from centrist democrats to former Maoist rebels to old-school royalists, were competing for seats in a new Constituent Assembly, which will govern Nepal and rewrite its constitution.
The vote is the first in the two years since King Gyanendra was forced to end his royal dictatorship and the Maoist movement gave up its decade-long fight for a communist state that left about 13,000 people dead.
For the 27 million people of Nepal, wedged between Asian giants India and China, the vote brings a promise of peace and an economic revival in this grindingly poor land that often more resembles a medieval fiefdom than a modern state.
But after weeks of near-daily clashes between supporters of rival parties and a handful of small bombings‚ including two in Katmandu on Wednesday that caused no injuries‚ the mood on election eve was one of ambivalent optimism.
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