UN doubts Nepal will meet deadline on Maoist guerrillas

KATHMANDU - A top UN envoy who visited Nepal earlier this month to assess the republic’s halted peace process has expressed doubts if the political parties can decide the fate of the Maoist guerrilla army by mid-January, after which the UN agency supervising it will exit Nepal.

B. Lynn Pascoe, UN undersecretary-general for political affairs, issued a press statement from New York Friday, advising Nepal’s political parties to give priority to integrating and rehabilitating the combatants of the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who remain corralled in their cantonments even four years after the communist insurrection ended, so that the camps can be closed.

The existence of the 28 camps where nearly 19,500 Maoist fighters reside is the gravest bone of contention between the Maoists and the other major parties and has been threatening to derail the peace process with the former guerrillas making one excuse after another not to disband the camps.

“If the parties fail to manage their differences in order to complete this common agenda, it is they and the people of Nepal that stand to lose,” Pascoe said.

The UN sent Pascoe on an assessment visit to Nepal earlier this month after the Maoists and the caretaker government signed yet another peace agreement in August, agreeing to draw up a time-bound plan to discharge and rehabilitate the PLA.

Though the plan was to have been formulated before Pascoe’s visit, it was put on hold with the Maoists now demanding another agreement on power-sharing and the formation of a new government before they discharge their guerrilla army.

Now with Nepal celebrating its biggest religious festival Dashain, everything remains closed till Monday and negotiations will not resume till next week.

The UN concern comes as the UN Security Council said the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), which is overseeing the arms and fighters of the PLA as well as the state army, will exit from Nepal Jan 15, 2011 without any more extensions.

“It is still possible for the parties to meet their targets in time but it will require translating this new-found sense of urgency into decision-making and concrete action,” Pascoe said.

The statement comes a day after Pascoe briefed the UN Security Council.

The official said during the briefing that the implementation of the peace pact, that ended a decade of civil war in 2006, and the pledge to draft a new constitution by May 2010, had encountered serious difficulties as unity had frayed among the major parties, due to differences of ideology, perspective and the challenges of balancing the rules of competitive democratic politics with the need for sharing power.

The same differences has seen Nepal remain without a government for three and a half months with the warring parties unable to elect a new prime minister even after 12 rounds of unprecedented elections.

There is now growing doubt if the parties will be able to close the Maoist army camps by January and promulgate a new constitution by mid-May 2011.