The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched an armed insurgency in February 1996 that spread across most of Nepal's districts before ending with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of November 2006. Roughly 13,000-17,000 people were killed, the majority by state security forces according to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' Nepal Conflict Report of 2012, which documented unlawful killings, torture and enforced disappearances by both sides and identified more than 9,000 individual incidents. Rural populations left the mid-western hill districts under Maoist taxation, forced recruitment including of children, abductions and executions of alleged informers, and under army and armed-police operations, cordon-and-search and detention; teachers, local officials and landowners were particularly targeted. Estimates of internal displacement range from about 100,000 to 200,000 in official and IDMC reporting to several hundred thousand in NGO figures that include movement to India, which is difficult to distinguish from Nepal's established seasonal labour migration. Nepal established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons in 2015; both have received tens of thousands of complaints and have been criticised by the Supreme Court of Nepal, OHCHR and victims' groups for failing to deliver prosecutions, and the enabling law was amended in 2024.
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Nepalese state security forces drove rural populations from the mid-western hills
UN Population Division estimates put Nepal at about 21.9 million in 1996; the 2001 census counted 23,151,423. Displacement was concentrated in the mid-western and far-western hills - Rolpa, Rukum, Jajarkot, Salyan - where both the Maoists and the security forces drove people from villages.
The lower figure is the count of documented conflict deaths used by the Nepali government and the International Committee of the Red Cross; the higher figure comes from the Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), which maintained the most complete Nepali casualty database and includes cases the state did not record. OHCHR's 2012 report attributes the majority of documented killings to state forces.
The OHCHR Nepal Conflict Report of 2012 documented all of these forms and attributed them to both the security forces and the Maoist party.
Nepal