NEPAL: UN to Ensure Army, Maoists Stay in Barracks

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Suman Pradhan

KATHMANDU, Aug 15 2006 (IPS) - With the Nepal government and Maoist rebels agreeing to begin the process of arms management, all eyes are now focused on the United Nations to manage a difficult and touchy issue in Nepal’s peace process.

But many here hope, given its experiences in conflicts around the world, the global body’s involvement will eventually bring peace and stability to this troubled Himalayan nation which has been buffeted by a 10-year-old Maoist insurgency.

“It is not going to be easy, but the U.N. is the only body capable of managing this sort of peace process,” says Naresh Bhatta, an electoral affairs specialist who has served in U.N. missions in global hotspots, including Cambodia and Afghanistan. “Its involvement here will eventually lead to peace, provided all sides are serious in achieving peace.”

After weeks of back and forth negotiations, mediated by U.N. diplomat Staffan de Mistura, the Nepal government and rebel Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) on Aug. 9 agreed to invite the U.N. to assist in five major areas – arms management of both the government-controlled Nepal Army (NA) and Maoists’ Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA), expanding human rights monitoring, assisting and observing the electoral process to elect a new constituent assembly and monitoring a ceasefire between the two warring sides.

The agreement was contained in two separate but identical letters addressed to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and was signed by Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda.

The main point of the agreement, however, deals with the arms management issue. While the Nepal government and U.N. both wanted the rebels to agree to a separation of their arms from the PLA, the Maoists insisted that official army be placed under similar conditions. The compromise now is that both the NA and PLA will be housed in separate barracks and camps, and their fighters and weapons will be subjected to monitoring by civilian U.N. personnel.

“It is cantonment and confinement,” said Koirala’s advisor Suresh Chandra Chalise. Maoist chief negotiator Krishna Bahadur Mahara said, “The important thing is, we have made progress. We can now turn to the political issues of the day.”

The agreement came just in time for de Mistura to include it in his report to Annan. The secretary general’s job now will be to ask either the U.N. General Assembly or the Security Council for an expanded mandate on Nepal. Up to now, he had been using his “good offices” channel to mediate in Nepal.

Whichever way it goes, it is certain that the U.N.’s job in Nepal will be different from its more recent mandates elsewhere. Neither the government nor the Maoists want any foreign troops arriving to enforce the peace. “It will essentially be a civilian monitoring mission, though there will be ex-military and ex-police personnel with the expertise in verification and monitoring,” says a U.N. diplomat.

With the U.N.’s enforcement role non-existent, that job will fall on the government security agencies, a fact that will likely be a bone of contention between the two sides. The Maoists have, for this reason, no intention of disbanding their “peoples’ militias” which they claim are essentially similar to the police.

There is concern now that the Maoist militia, which is separate from their PLA, could emerge as a potential destabilising force in the peace process. Though officially defined as a logistical support and policing group, the more than 100,000 militias nationwide also carry out military functions. They are often armed and serve as enforcers to the Maoists’ numerous party committees at all levels. The recently signed agreement does not mention these militias.

“The abundance of arms in the civilian population (such as the militias), could spell trouble,” says Natalie Hicks of International Alert, a London-based conflict-analysis think tank, who has previously worked in Cambodia and Vietnam. “They have to be managed very carefully.”

Hicks argues that local knowledge and expertise will be a key to the peace process. The trouble in Cambodia, where the U.N. was massively involved during 1993-96, was that too many international experts with little knowledge of the country were brought in to assist in the disarmament process, she says. “Learning from that experience, the best U.N. can do in Nepal is to rely on local expertise, cultivate civil society and strengthen the local capacity of Nepali players.”

Advisor Chalise, however, says the militia issue will be discussed in future rounds of negotiations. “This is only the first step. There will be many rounds of negotiations as we go along where this militia issue can be raised,” he says.

The militias though are not the only potential spoilers here. During the royal dictatorship of King Gyanendra, the royalist army armed several village defence groups in Nepal’s southern Terai region to combat Maoists. Along with farmers who traditionally have kept guns to deter banditry in the agricultural south, these too are seen as potential destabilising factors.

But there is a solution. Bhatta, the electoral affairs specialist said: ”What we have seen in Cambodia, Afghanistan and elsewhere is that, donors have stepped forward to finance a weapons buy-back programme aimed at removing small arms from the civilian population. Similar programmes should be carried out here.”