KATMANDU, Nepal -- Arrested in a crackdown on civil liberties, politician Ram Mahat was languishing in his jail cell last month when a guard slipped him a daily newspaper. There on the front page, he said, was an article that made his blood boil.
It reported that the U.S. ambassador, James F. Moriarty, had played golf the day before in Katmandu with Crown Prince Paras, whose father, King Gyanendra, was responsible for the jailing of Mahat and hundreds of other perceived opponents of the monarchy.
"Moriarty was planning to play only nine holes, but the royal company spurred him to complete the round," the Katmandu Post reported.
"The ambassador playing golf with the crown prince was a wrong message," said Mahat, a bearded, gangly economist and former finance minister who is a leader of the Nepali Congress party. "It was in very bad taste. We all commented, 'What is this American ambassador doing?' "
Moriarty was traveling in the United States and unavailable for comment last week.
The embassy spokeswoman, Constance C. Jones, said by e-mail that Moriarty "suggested that the crown prince be invited" to play in the annual U.S. ambassador's golf tournament in early May because "he saw this as a good opportunity to get a personal impression of Paras since they had not conversed before."
Like most, though not all, of those imprisoned in the crackdown, Mahat has since been released. Gyanendra, meanwhile, has eased some of the harsher restrictions on press freedom and other liberties that he imposed Feb. 1 in the name of defeating a Maoist insurgency, which has claimed more than 12,000 lives since it began in 1996.
Nevertheless, Nepali politicians as well as human rights workers, lawyers, journalists and other civil-society advocates have expressed disappointment with the United States, which they say is not putting enough pressure on the monarchy to restore multi-party democracy in this impoverished and mountainous land of 27 million people.
In that regard, they say, the United States has stumbled in an early test of President Bush's Feb. 2 State of the Union pledge to make democracy a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy with the "goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Critics also accuse the embassy here of exaggerating the threat of a Maoist takeover in order to prepare the ground for a resumption of arms shipments, known as lethal military aid, which were suspended in response to Gyanendra's seizure of power in February.
"The way to tackle the Maoists is to let the political energy back in our veins," said Kanak Dixit, a U.S.-educated magazine publisher and one of the country's most influential journalists. The U.S. ambassador, he added, "says all the right things about pluralism and democracy, but again and again he is coming down softly on a king who has carried out a regime change."
The State Department has condemned the king's Feb. 1 takeover as a setback to democracy and to the fight against the Maoists -- assertions that Moriarty has repeatedly echoed in Nepal. He also has tried to emphasize U.S. support for democracy by making frequent attempts to meet with senior politicians, including Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who was placed under house arrest during the first weeks of the crackdown.
