UN mired in deepening Nepal row

By Navin Singh Khadka 
BBC Nepali service

A fresh dispute over the true number of Nepal's former Maoist combatants - which was supposed to have been verified by the United Nations - has cast a deepening shadow over the entire peace process.

The dispute began earlier this month when a video emerged in which the Maoist leader, Prachanda, admitted that he had exaggerated the strength of his forces 18 months ago to have more bargaining power during peace negotiations.

His comments are damaging for the UN because it verified Maoist fighters who are sheltered in a number of camps and are to be either rehabilitated into civilian society or recruited into the security forces.

Prachanda's recent resignation as prime minister following a row with the president over the sacking of the head of the army - combined with the row over the video tape - have made Nepal's rocky journey to a fully-fledged constitutional republic even more fraught.

'Deliberately inflated'

For the UN, that is a worry - because its peace mission in Nepal, UNMIN, might not be able to leave the country as quickly as it wanted to.

In the video footage Prachanda said that 35,000 former fighters were registered with the UN - while the actual figure was 7,000-8,000.

"Had we revealed the real figure then, today we would have only around 4,000 of our fighters verified by the UN," he said in the video.

"Since we deliberately inflated the registration figure to 35,000, we [made a compromise and] managed to get around 20,000 of them verified."

The video was recorded in one of the UN-supervised camps where Prachanda was addressing his military commanders.

Under the peace agreement signed in 2006 at the end of Maoist insurgency, UNMIN has been monitoring the camps sheltering former Maoist fighters and supervising their arms.

Given that it had registered and verified all Maoist ex-combatants, the release of the video became an immediate cause of concern - and no doubt some embarrassment - for the UN.

UNMIN chief, Karin Landgren, has sought an explanation from Prachanda.

"When I spoke to him about it, he said he was speaking to his cadres at a time of extreme uncertainty in the peace process and that it was necessary to boost their morale," she said.

After the leak, Prachanda held a press conference to say whatever he had said in the video was in a "different context" and the figures of the ex-combatants mentioned did not include all the levels within the Maoist ranks and file.

'Look forward'

Regardless of its happiness or otherwise with Prachanda's explanation, the UN does not seem eager to allow the controversy to fester.

"Given that this process - the verification of combatants - was accepted by all sides in 2007, you really have to ask yourself if the best use of time now is to reopen the process the parties were all satisfied with," Ms Landgren told the BBC.

"Is it productive to reopen it now? People have been sitting in the cantonments for over two years now and UNMIN is not going to be here for ever, this exercise must look forward."

That UNMIN needs to pack up as soon as possible is something UN officials including Secretary General Ban Ki Moon have been repeatedly stressing.

At its inception in 2007, UNMIN's mandate was for a year. But that mandate has already been extended three times by six months.

With the current term expiring in the last week of July, UN officials had hoped that the most important part of the peace process - the integration and rehabilitation of Maoist ex-fighters - would be over by then.

But some major parties in the country do not see it that way and have expressed concern over Maoist "dissembling" in relation to the number of ex-combatants.

Leaders of the main opposition Nepali Congress have demanded that the former fighters be re-verified in the wake of the leaked video.

The centrist party's sister organisations have also submitted memorandums to UNMIN demanding re-verification.

Ms Landgren argues that if they want to do that, they will have to work through a committee formed to integrate former Maoist combatants into the national security forces or to rehabilitate them.

The committee has the representation of all the major parties.

But even when the Maoists were in government the committee hardly ever met - and things were much more stable then.

Now that the Maoists have quit the government following the controversy over army chief Gen Katawal - who was sacked by Prachanda but reinstated by the president - they have resorted to street protests, meaning that there is little chance of the committee reaching a consensus in the immediate future.

The eager-to-depart UN was already concerned about the delay in the peace process after the Maoists walked out of the government.

Now that the number of Maoist ex-fighters it verified is in dispute, it has many reasons to believe that departure will not happen in the immediate future.

Tensions threaten Nepal peace process

Fears are growing of a breakdown in the reconciliation between Nepal’s national army and former Maoist rebels now heading the government, threatening the Himalayan state’s three-year-old peace process.

The country is struggling to integrate 19,000 Maoist cadres into the national army, forces which were bitter adversaries during an 11-year civil war and which remain deeply suspicious of one another.

“We are at a serious threat of civil war as the Maoists have shown [their] intention to capture power by integrating their combatants in the national army,” said Sushil Koirala, acting president of the Nepali Congress party.

His party played a big role in bringing the Maoists to the peace process and is now in opposition. “The [government’s] coalition members are likely to withdraw support to the government very soon. If the Maoists [refuse] to step down in that situation, the military takeover is quite possible.”

Disputes have arisen over new recruits to the Nepalese army and the extension of the terms of eight generals. The Maoists unsuccessfully challenged the new appointments in the Supreme Court.

The army, meanwhile, has complained it is being denied resources to counter a regional terror threat and of China’s growing influence in the country.

But in the latest sign of tensions, the army has threatened to withdraw players from events in Nepal’s national games, which begin on Monday, because Maoists are also competing.

So great are the tensions between the government and the army that Ram Bahadur Thapa “Badal”, the defence minister, and chief of army staff Rook Mangud Katwal are not on speaking terms. They rely on Puspa Kamal Dahal, prime minister, to mediate between them.

“Retaliation is very much likely if the Maoist government continues with its current behaviour or tries to irritate us further,” warned a senior general on condition of anonymity.

Analysts say the country’s difficulties with the military integration go hand in hand with political reconciliation and agreement over a new constitution.

“Lack of progress on one of these impinges on the other,” said a former diplomat to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

The diplomat also said that there were practical concerns over the size of the army, which numbers about 100,000 people, and how to equate ranks in the regular army with those in the former guerrilla force.

“A few thousand extra troops will swell the ranks of the army, which is already fairly large for Nepal,” he said.

“The entire 19,000 [cadres] certified by the United Nations cannot be taken in. Only a certain number of those will have to be taken.”

Karin Landgren, the head of the United Nations mission in Nepal, has appealed for the re-establishment of “trust and confidence” between the rival parties, saying reconciliation had come under strain in the past months.

The Maoist government is continuing its fight in the Supreme Court. It has lodged a plea at the court to reconsider its stay order on the state not to obstruct the extension of the eight generals’ terms in office.

The head of the army declined to comment on the challenges facing the force. “The Nepal army is committed to democracy and the rule of law. Our only stand is we won’t carry any one party’s flag,” said Rook Mangud Katwal, the chief of army staff.

The Financial Times

Nepal's Palace Massacre: Skeletons Still in the Closet?

By Ishaan Tharoor for Time

It's a story worthy of Shakespearean tragedy, populated by characters plucked from a farce. There is the beloved monarch, magnanimous and complacent. There is the moody crown prince. There is the prince's cousin — a "playboy" with a belly and a ponytail — who, after years of silence, professes alone to know the truth of his royal family's demise. And in the background are the Maoists, once guerrillas, now rulers, keen to spin this whole set piece to their political advantage.

Nepal's palace massacre in 2001 — when the Crown Prince Dipendra allegedly gunned down 10 members of his own family, including his father, King Birendra Shah, before shooting himself — has, for the most part, receded into memory in this impoverished Himalayan nation. Since then, a Maoist rebellion found its way into power, transformed the kingdom into a republican democracy and abolished the institution of the monarchy altogether last year. Yet the current government, headed by the former rebels, still indulges in periodic bouts of royal-bashing, often to paper over the increasingly apparent shortcomings of their own rule. As fuel lines in Kathmandu stretch more than two kilometers and power cuts ravage the country, the Maoists announced last month their intention to form a commission to revisit the massacre eight years after it happened, tightening the screw on the lingering survivors of the 250-year-old monarchy.

That decision has put some of the chief remaining royals on the defensive. Though investigations in the immediate aftermath of the attack closed the case, pinning the blame on an emotional Prince Dipendra, most Nepalis never quite accepted the accession of Birendra's businessman brother, Gyanendra, to the throne, and balked at his son Paras becoming crown prince. Paras is known chiefly for his penchant for fast cars and liquor, often in combination. But last week he titillated the nation by leaking to a tabloid in Singapore — where he now lives in a luxury home — alleged proof of how his cousin Dipendra had secretly plotted the murder for years, in what could shape up to be a bid to distance himself from the government's renewed scrutiny of the incident and any possible arrest, now that he is no longer royalty.

The established narrative of the tragedy suggests Dipendra was in a drunken fury, irate that his father and family continued to disapprove of his relationship with a woman from a rival clan of nobles. It was supposedly a crime of passion and intoxication — but Paras told Singapore's New Paper: "There was no smell of alcohol on [Dipendra]." According to Paras, the crown prince had intended to take down his popular father ever since Birendra relinquished absolute power after pro-democracy protests in 1990. The loss of that political mandate was made worse for Dipendra after his father scuttled an arms deal with a German rifle maker that could have yielded the prince a windfall of over $1 million. "That was the real trigger," claimed Paras, though former aides to the monarchy have denied such a transaction was ever in the works.

In yet another new twist, Paras also told the New Paper he may return to Nepal and participate in electoral politics, heading up a party of "young professionals and bankers" — but it seems unlikely the deeply unpopular 37-year-old — an embodiment, for many, of royal excess — would gain much from such a venture. "That's what everyone in Nepal is laughing about," says Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times, a Kathmandu-based weekly. "It's remarkable how quickly people here have otherwise forgotten the monarchy," he says.

The Maoists, though, who waged a decade-long war against the royal army, have not forgotten so easily. A recent trip to India by Gyanendra, who lives quietly in a private residence in the capital, prompted howls of outrage from members of government, wary of his dealings with Nepal's influential southern neighbor. The Maoists, observers say, need to raise the specter of royalist nefariousness to boost their own flagging support. "They need to create a sense of threat, of a larger enemy, to distract the people from their failings," says Dixit.

Those failings include the nine-month-old government's inability to provide much-needed development, from infrastructure to energy. This year, Kathmandu has suffered routine 17-hour power cuts, which has led to a drying up of foreign investment. Enduring fuel shortages have sent commodities' prices soaring and the financial downturn has led to thousands of overseas workers — whose remittances comprise some 16% of the national GDP —returning home, unemployed. National security has also deteriorated, partially as a consequence of the government's failure to integrate the roughly 30,000-strong Maoist rebel army, still quartered in remote camps throughout the country, with the formerly royalist state forces. Some frustrated Maoist commanders have even called for the overthrow of their own democratic government.

In the face of this, few in Kathmandu expect much from the inquiry into the royal family's murder. Many other questions remain unanswered from Nepal's decade-long civil war. Over 13,000 died, many of whom were civilians, both at the hands of rebel and government soldiers. But neither the ruling Maoists nor elements of the old royalist regime have heeded calls to investigate charges of war crimes. "Not a single case has been prosecuted so far," says Manjushree Thapa, author of Forget Kathmandu, an award-winning history of the conflict. "As ever," she says, "we Nepalis are not used to finding out the truth."

Nepali PM says to complete peace in 4 to 5 months

By John Acher

OSLO (Reuters)- Nepalese Prime Minister Prachanda said Monday that his government aimed to complete a peace process in four to five months, roughly in time for when the mandate of a U.N. mission expires at the end of July.

A decade-long civil war in the Himalayan nation ended in 2006, and Prachanda's former Maoist rebels head a coalition government after a surprise election victory in April last year.

Nepal is under pressure to complete the peace process, which involves finding a future for former Maoist insurgents now in U.N. camps, before the U.N. mission's mandate runs out.

"I think now we are going to conclude this peace process within a couple of months. We have already decided a timetable to lead this process to conclusion in four to five months," Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who goes by his guerrilla name Prachanda, told a news conference during a two-day visit to Norway.

"We want to see this process to a logical conclusion in such a way that it can be a model of peace, particularly for south Asia," he said.

Prachanda said the country already had a "very inclusive national assembly" and has drafted a constitution that will provide for a federal democratic republic in Nepal, which abolished a 239-year-old monarchy last year.

The constitution is due to be ready by May 2010.

"Federalism is going to be one of the vital issues we will discuss in the constitutional assembly," he said after signing an agreement with Norway on a deal to expand cooperation in areas such as hydropower development and rural education.

An insufficient power supply has been crippling to the Nepalese economy, which relies heavily on foreign aid and remains among the poorest in the world despite the former Maoist rebels' pledges to create a "new Nepal."

The Norwegian firm SN Power, owned by state-owned utility Statkraft and state development fund Norfund, operates the Khimti hydroelectric plant east of Kathmandu, and the company aims to expand its portfolio of hydropower assets in Nepal.

"We have huge hydro (power) potential," said Prachanda, who was scheduled to visit a Norwegian hydropower plant near Oslo on Tuesday. "We want to learn and enhance the level of cooperation in the hydro sector with Norway."

Tibetan refugees in Nepal are scared

As China’s influence grows in Nepal, Tibetan refugees are feeling the pressure, SIOFRA O’DONOVAN reports for Irish Times from Kathmandu.

LIKE MOST other young Tibetans here, Dawa, a teacher in his 30s, does not have legal residence in Nepal. He arrived from Lhasa in 1991. While Tibetans who arrived in Nepal prior to 1989 are eligible for a refugee registration certificate (RC) allowing them to remain in the country, thousands live here illegally.

“I don’t like living here any more,” he admits. “I have to get home by 8pm, to avoid police questioning me.”

Dawa has travelled back to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, regularly since he left, to see his parents. Eventually, he would like to return to Tibet. “I do have hope that Tibet will be free, but I’m not sure how much good demonstrations do for us, in Nepal.”


Tseten Norbu, a businessman and protest leader in Kathmandu’s Tibetan community is from Shigatse, western Tibet, and lives in exile in Nepal. He continues to organise campaigns to free his country from Chinese rule, despite the risk of arrest by Nepali authorities.

Eleven Tibetans were arrested in his neighbourhood before March 10th on charges of anti-China activities and have been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. “We don’t protest against the Chinese people, only the Chinese Communist Party which is opposed to Tibetan religion and culture.”

There is increasing despair among the community here, particularly among the most vulnerable, those without papers. The Nepali government now requires that all Tibetan shops, restaurants and businesses be officially registered. To do that, you need 50,000 Nepali rupees (€500) and proper residence status in Nepal.

“I know a woman with a clothes shop who went there with her RC card and all the money. They refused to accept her documents,” says Karma Dondrup, a refugee living in Kathmandu.
To get round the problem, often Nepali citizens register businesses in their name, to help Tibetans who cannot do so.

The Himalyan Sherpa, Tamang, Dolpo, Mustang and many other ethnically Tibetan Nepali tribes sympathise with Tibetans.

They share the same devotion to the Dalai Lama, and practice Tibetan Buddhism.

Other young Tibetans are working as political activists, independently or with NGOs. Yeshe Zangpo, from Amdo, Qinghai province, came into exile in 1994 to study Tibetan in India, crossing into Nepal over the pass at Solokumbu in the Mount Everest region. “We hid in gorges by day and travelled by night.” It took 26 days to get from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

He has been editor of a political newspaper in Kathmandu since 2008. “I spoke to my brother last week at home, and he told me to stop doing this. He said I should think of their safety.” The Chinese government punishes the relatives of those they see as separatists and members of the “Dalai Clique”. “I am always afraid in Kathmandu,” he tells me, “there are so many Chinese spies here.”

Apart from restaurant, antique and clothes businesses, teaching work and a minority who undertake the more risky work of political activism, the staple work of many Tibetans in Nepal since 1970 has been in the carpet industry as weavers and dyers.

Many of these factories have now fallen victim to the global recession and problems within the Nepal Labour Union and have closed, leaving thousands of Tibetans without work.

Some enterprising young Tibetans, Damdhul and Tenzii Wangdu, have now founded Café Dream Factory, a community project that works to redress the sense of purposelessness that is endemic among the refugee youth.

The group supports young artists and musicians and their office creates employment networks for young Tibetans . While there are some 29 monasteries in the Kathmandu district of Bouda, a Tibetan enclave, only 8 to 10 per cent of the refugees in Nepal are monks or nuns.

Many of the monasteries in the enclave are owned and largely populated by ethnically Tibetan Nepali citizens but the high lamas are usually Tibetan.

Jamyang Geshe la came into exile from Kham in 1985 to study in a monastery in southern India, as most Tibetan refugee monks do. “We could not study Buddhism properly in our monastery in Tibet, there was too much political instruction. Eventually, there will be no monks left in Tibet.” He runs a Buddhist centre in Bouda.

“If we can’t learn Tibetan, we can’t read the scriptures and our religious purpose is stunted,” says Dawa Tsering, a monk who gives regular religious and political speeches in the Kathmandu area.

Asked how he felt about living in Nepal these days, he said: “We have no refugee rights here. We can’t do anything here anymore, without being scared.”

******************************************************************

Nepal: War without bloodshed

Troubles of the peace for the Maoist government

NEPAL’S Maoist prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, or “Prachanda” (fierce), recently said that running a country was harder than running a guerrilla war. He should not have been surprised. The Maoist-led coalition government was formed after the ex-guerrillas pulled off a stunning election victory last April, just two years after they tramped in from the jungle. It faced three giant tasks: to bring better government to one of South Asia’s poorest countries; to help sustain a peace process that followed a bitter, decade-long struggle; and to preside over the writing of a new constitution. Achieving all this, within the 30-month term allotted to a government, was bound to be difficult. Yet there is now a growing fear that failure—in a country that has seen civil war, a royal coup, the abolition of the monarchy, huge protests and an ethnically based rebellion in recent years—may spark a fresh crisis before long.

On its first task, the government has done passably well. With a few able ministers, it has made a better fist of administration than its shambolic predecessor, headed by the main opposition, the Nepali Congress party. The Maoist finance minister, Baburam Bhattarai, promised lots of handouts for the poor. But by making it easier for people to pay income tax, and threatening retribution to those who will not, he has also, he says, boosted the government’s revenues by 38%. If this has not endeared the Maoists to Kathmandu’s well-heeled tax-dodgers, the ex-guerrillas do not care. “Resolutely unclubable”, in the phrase of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, the Maoists rose on the back of popular resentment against Kathmandu’s grip on the nation’s power and wealth.

On the second task, encouraging peace, the news is less good. In Kathmandu on March 22nd, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, declared that without justice for the victims of Nepal’s war, in which 13,000 died, the country’s fragile peace might be doomed. There is as yet no prospect of such justice. The war’s murders and rapes were carried out by two forces that remain at loggerheads: the Maoists’ 24,000-strong People’s Liberation Army, currently corralled under UN supervision, and the national army.

Under the terms of a 2006 peace accord between the Maoists and the main political parties, the Maoist fighters were to be taken into the army, or found other jobs. The army, which backed Nepal’s deposed king, Gyanendra, in a 2005 power-grab, was also to be reformed. None of this has been done. In private, politicians and some army officers agree that a few thousand Maoist foot-soldiers will have to be recruited into the army, and some Maoist commanders given accelerated officer training. Yet the army chief, General Rookmangud Katwal, who hates Maoists, is reluctant to concur. And the Maoists seem unwilling to disband their forces.

This is unsustainable. On March 15th the Maoist defence minister refused to extend the service of eight brigadier-generals, as General Katwal had asked him to. The Maoists were retaliating against General Katwal’s earlier refusal to abandon an army recruitment drive, as the government and UN had said he should. Might the army take over? “Let’s hope that situation doesn’t arise,” says a senior officer. It may not, at least without tacit support from India, and that seems unlikely.

Alas, the Maoists’ third task, presiding over the writing of a new constitution by Nepal’s elected assembly, promises to be the most difficult. Little progress has been made, because of incompetence, political jockeying and fundamental disagreements. Most contentious is the issue of federalism. All the main parties have vowed to support a new federal Nepal, but few, if any, consider this practical or desirable. The root of the problem is, again, widespread resentment of rich Kathmandu and its pampered elite. Yet few regions outside the Kathmandu valley generate much wealth and, even if politically possible, the sort of provincial structures that many Nepalis now expect may be unaffordable.

The issue is already explosive. After a 2006 insurrection in the southern Terai region by the Madhesi ethnic group, all the main parties have pandered to regional sentiments. This has encouraged more uprisings. This month members of another ethnic group, the Tharu, in the western part of the Terai, launched a ruinous two-week blockade of roads across the country. They objected to their classification by the Maoists as Madhesi, whom the Tharu consider interlopers from India. Nepal’s troubles are far from over.

The Economist (Mar 27-Apr 2)