The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has worked for more than three years to politicise Nepalโs Gen Z youth and train them in anti-government protestingโbefore protests led by young people toppled the authorities last month, a leaked document reveals.
From 2022, the CIAโs soft-power spin-off spread a story that China and India were manipulating Nepalese politics, with no evidence, to justify its own multi-million-dollar political meddling programโsimilar to what happened in Bangladesh with the same funds.
In April of that year, a NED division, called the IRI, set up numerous projects in Nepal to finance the growth of anti-government activism among the youth, said the leaked IRI document, revealed today by Sputnik India.
The operation was successful, escalating over the next three years to culminate in protests which led to the violent overthrow of the government last month.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who had created a positive relationship with China, was removed on September 9.
US wanted to choose leaders
The US also wanted to select future leaders for the Nepalese people, the document indicates.
The 2022 IRI youth operation would โconduct an analysis of barriers to youth participation in the political process that will help design content for the Emerging Leaders Academyโ. The Academy would then help NED groups train political chiefs to run the country.
This clearly worked. Many of the new โinterimโ leaders of Nepal today have direct links with NED operations, investigative journalist Brian Berletic revealed recently.
Trained to protest
The leaked document specifically mentions training young people to protest.
โThe IRI will train the youth activists and political leaders to advocate concerns on political turmoil, government corruption and national policymaking manipulated by countries like China and India to political party leaders through advocacy campaigns and protestsโฆโ
Sounding innocent
IRI staff wrote that their aim was to achieve โdemocratic changeโ, explaining that: โThe Institute will achieve this through developing networks of youth activists and political leaders and providing them with skills, resources, and platforms to build connections and advocate concerns.โ
As usual, the US operations are phrased in ways that make them sound entirely innocent, saying the aim is to position youth โto raise awareness of democratic values and pressure Nepali political institutions to become more accountable, transparent and citizen centredโ.
Blaming China and India
In line with this, the NED unit presents its usual bizarre logic that any political interference by outside nations is a bad thing.
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China and India โfrequently manipulate its [Nepal’s] internal politics for their own strategic aims,โ the document alleged, in a textbook example of the US technique of assigning its sins to others, with zero evidence provided.
The internal document came from the International Republican Institute, the NED-financed operation assigned to โdemocracy promotionโ (ie, political interference) in Nepalese politics.
Dated April 19, 2022, it gives details of strategy and partial financing for a key element of a regime-change operation that would eventually blow millions of dollars of US taxpayer dollars to empower politicised youths to topple the government of Nepal violently.
Big bucks for regime change
The political interference body also spent cash in 2022 to fly IRI staff from Washington DC to Kathmandu (US$40,000) and pay a consultant (US$9,135) to research youth access to political power.
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While this 2022 budget document showed spending of US$350,000 specifically on politicising Nepali youth, data from other NED accounts show US spending on Nepal closer to US$2 million a year.
Yet NED cash, some of which is revealed publicly, is the soft power โicing on the cakeโ; so much larger sums would likely have been spent on the Nepal project by other divisions of the US government, including by some of its 18 intelligence agencies, by the US State Departmentโs USAGM division, and other overseas-focused units.
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