Kathmandu, December 27

A group of conflict victims, who were associated with the Conflict Victims Common Platform, today formed a splinter group Conflict Victims’ National Network for Justice.

A press release issued by CVNNJ said a charter released recently by the CVCP was perpetrator-centric and thus it formed the splinter group. It also alleged that the leadership of the CVCP was misled by the perpetrators in an attempt to bring division among conflict victims. “We, the founding members of the CVCP, announce our dissociation with the CVCP but pledge that all justice-seekers and conflict victims will unitedly move ahead without deviating from the goal of achieving justice,” CVNNJ stated in its release.

It stated that all the mechanisms formed thus far with the aim of ensuring justice for the conflict victims were political whether those were peace committees or the two transitional justice mechanisms – Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons.

“We would like to remind an ‘advisor to the president’, who identified himself as representative of conflict victims and stressed that political mechanism was the only option to resolve our problems, that all mechanisms formed from the community to the central level so far in the course of transitional justice process were political mechanisms,” CVNNJ said.

CVNNJ said that it was saddened and anguished by the meaningless participation of conflict victims in peace committee formed earlier.

“How is it possible to deal with the past by putting this bitter reality aside? We condemn the attempt of so-called representatives of conflict victims to reconcile the perpetrators and victims,” the release stated, adding the charter funded by a Swiss project in the name of a political mechanism was a ploy to let the perpetrators off the hook by destroying the complaints filed against them.