Memory Against Silence: Why Nepal’s Transitional Justice Demands the Voices of Its Youth

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In Nepal, the past has not ended — it lingers in the silence between generations. Nearly two decades after the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord promised justice and healing, victims of conflict-era crimes are still waiting to be seen, heard, and repaired.

A new transitional justice law, passed in August 2024, was meant to close this long chapter. Yet, for many, it feels less like closure and more like another postponement — a gesture towards justice that stops short of truth.

Transitional justice was never only about the courts. It was also about memory — about naming what happened so that a nation can live with itself honestly. But Nepal’s memory of war has been fragmented by politics and fear.

Many survivors were — and still are — mothers, widows, children, farmers, students, workers. Ordinary people who once believed peace would mean something tangible: the right to mourn publicly, to learn what happened to the disappeared, to receive recognition rather than pity.

Across conflict zones where impunity endures, I have heard a refrain repeated with aching consistency:

“We don’t have the power of authorities. We have each other. And we will not be silenced. And if we are silenced, tell our stories.”

It’s a sentence that travels across borders and decades — from a widow in Rolpa to a mother in Bardiya to a youth protester in Kathmandu holding a tennis shoe with blood stains.

From my privileged position, I know that the duty to carry their voices forward is not symbolic; it’s moral. It is the same duty my grandparents impressed on me when they told me stories of resisting authoritarian regimes during the Second World War — stories they asked me never to forget, “in case it happens again.”

Because it can happen again.

Forgetting is how it begins.

Keeping memory alive is, therefore, a political act.

Memorialization — through truth-telling, storytelling, and public acknowledgment — is what prevents impunity from becoming the country’s new normal. When memory fades, so does accountability. When stories are buried, injustice is reborn in new forms

Since 2006, Nepal’s transitional justice process has been marked by a lack of political will, flawed laws, and commissions that have failed to deliver. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) never issued a final report, never held public hearings, and never earned the victims’ trust.

Amendments have stalled since 2018. The latest bill still allows room for amnesties disguised as leniency and narrows the definition of serious crimes in ways that contradict international law. Behind every legal flaw is a moral failure: the unwillingness to confront the past with courage. Without truth, there can be no reparation. Without justice, there can be no peace. And yet, the story does not end with the failures of institutions. It continues in the streets — where Nepal’s young generation has begun to reclaim the language of justice.

The recent youth-led protests — where demonstrators were met with tear gas and bullets, where another mother cried over another body — are part of a broader moral awakening.

Today’s Nepali youth, the Gen Z generation, were born after or just before the civil war. They did not witness the killing, but they inherited its debris: corruption, unemployment, disillusionment, and a peace process trapped in amber. For them, justice is not a relic of the past — it is a demand for the present.

Their anger is not nihilistic; it is visionary. The question is: what kind of country are we becoming if the same impunity that defined the war years still defines democracy?

When young people chant in Kathmandu streets, they are not just protesting economic decay — they are, knowingly or not, calling for a renewal of the peace process itself.

Nepal’s transitional justice process can still be redeemed, but only if it becomes an intergenerational project. The struggle for truth cannot belong solely to the victims of the past; it must also be carried by those who inherit their silence.

Intergenerational dialogue offers a way forward.

When survivors share their pain with the young, they pass on resilience instead of trauma.

When young activists listen, they transform remembrance into reform.

Such dialogue rebuilds trust, prevents the distortion of history, and strengthens the collective emotional fabric of society. As one human rights advocate said: “All five pillars of transitional justice — truth, justice, reparation, memorialization, and non-recurrence — must stand together.”

The youth can be the missing pillar that sustains them all.

Nepal’s democracy remains fragile precisely because its peace was built without closure. To keep memory alive is not to dwell on pain but to ensure that pain does not repeat itself. Every generation that refuses to forget brings the nation closer to the justice it deserves.

Movements are strongest when they do more than resist — when they build as they resist.

And this is what Nepal’s youth are doing now: refusing silence, rewriting the meaning of participation, dismantling an unjust system from its foundations while sowing the seeds of a fairer one. But their movement is not theirs alone. It calls to each of us — in Nepal and beyond — to take part in the work of memory and repair.

It invites us to connect the unfinished struggles that live within us: the fight for women’s rights, for workers’ dignity, for climate justice, for truth and recognition.

I think back to those children and adolescents, members of peace committees in 2008. They must be grown now, perhaps marching in Kathmandu. Nepal stands at a crossroads again — between memory and amnesia, between performative peace and transformative justice. The youth are showing the way — unafraid. Because being seen, being recognised, feeling heard, being “just” it’s about keeping the present and future human.

And as long as impunity prevails, the struggle for justice will remain intergenerational. Because they know-no justice means no peace. And no peace means no future.

Z. Liew