http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/asia/04nepal.html?hp
JHYALTUNGDANDA, Nepal — Up in the foothills of the Himalayas, the soldiers of Nepal’s onetime rebel army have spent more than three years in camps monitored by the United Nations. Mornings begin with exercise, breakfast and drilling. Afternoons often mean political education sessions on their Maoist agenda for restructuring Nepal’s government.
Skip to next paragraph Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Nepalese Maoist soldiers received blessings from their division commander during their discharge ceremony at a camp in Nawalparasi.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
At a cantonment of Nepalese Maoist soldiers, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a Maoist leader also known as Prachanda, was pictured on a wall poster.
The New York Times
A camp monitored by the United Nations houses Maoist soldiers.
But, more than anything, the Maoist fighters are simply waiting, and Nepal is waiting with them, because the fate of the rebel soldiers will largely determine the fate of the nation.
Within the next four months, Nepal must complete the final and most difficult piece of the 2006 peace agreement that ended the brutal Maoist insurrection by integrating these fighters from the People’s Liberation Army of Nepal into the country’s security forces, including the Nepalese Army.
At the ramshackle headquarters of the Fourth Division of the People’s Liberation Army, soldiers in dingy tracksuits loitered in the compound’s dirt courtyard. Their leader, known as Commander Pratik, smiled when asked if integrating his troops with their enemies would prove difficult. “It is more difficult to fight one another,” he answered.
Perhaps. With Nepal facing a May 28 deadline to restructure its government and approve a new constitution, nothing is posing a greater threat to the peace process than the unresolved task of merging the two enemy armies. Maoist leaders and Nepalese political parties have alternately bickered and dithered, with Maoists stalling the dismantling of their army while negotiations go on about how to revise the Constitution.
As a result, Nepal is grasping for a lasting peace, trying to overcome the legacy of a war that has left it more militarized than ever. The 19,602 Maoist soldiers continue to train, even as they remain quarantined in the United Nations camps, or cantonments. The Nepalese Army is twice as large today, with 96,000 soldiers, as it was when the guerrilla war began, and the number of police and paramilitary police officers has steadily risen to roughly 80,000.
“How can you have one country with two armies?” asked Kul Chandra Gautam, a former United Nations diplomat and native Nepali who has consulted with different parties in the peace process. “A country like Nepal does not need 200,000 security personnel. That’s more than all the country’s civil servants combined, minus teachers.”
Nepal cannot begin to rebuild its tattered economy until the military standoff is eased, which first means finding a solution on integration.
On a recent morning, a ceremony at the United Nations cantonment that houses the Maoist Fourth Division underscored the uncertainty ahead, even if it was a small sign of progress.
Sitting in rows of plastic chairs, 361 male and female soldiers were being discharged from the Maoist army and returned to civilian life. The United Nations had listed them among the 4,008 Maoist rebels deemed ineligible to enter the Nepalese security forces, either because they were minors at the time of the May 2006 cease-fire or had joined the Maoist army after that date.
Pernille Ironside, a child protection specialist with Unicef, said the majority of these “disqualified” soldiers had joined the Maoists as minors, a violation of international law, and had grown into adulthood as guerrilla fighters. Yet unlike many child soldiers in Africa, who are often abducted or coerced into fighting, many of those who joined the Maoists did so voluntarily, making the job of integrating them into Nepalese society a different challenge.
“In some ways, this is more challenging because these children don’t want to leave,” Ms. Ironside said. “They’ve found a kind of family and something to believe in.”
Even though the Maoist soldiers have remained in the cantonments for three years, the terms of the peace deal have tightly restricted access to them by United Nations caseworkers, allowing almost no opportunities to interview or counsel them. Instead, the soldiers have been subjected to regular political education sessions on Maoist dogma, something that may make their re-entry into society even harder.
Under the peace agreement, the Maoists turned over most of their weapons for storage in United Nations-monitored containers, but kept enough to continue training. “During the war, we couldn’t have organized training,” Commander Pratik said. “But since we came here, we’ve been able to train. Now, we are more professional.”
The mistrust surrounding the integration is pervasive on all sides. Many analysts say the Maoists have maneuvered to keep their army intact as a bargaining chip to influence the constitutional negotiations.
At the same time, the Nepalese Army, which before 2006 answered to the king, now deposed, has grudgingly succumbed to civilian control. In January, the defense minister announced that the army was not obligated to accept Maoist soldiers and should be included in civilian negotiations over integration — comments rejected by the prime minister and seized upon by Maoists as evidence of bad faith by the government.
The discharge of disqualified soldiers was supposed to have been a relatively easy first step to begin the integration process. The soldiers being discharged at the Fourth Division ceremony were eligible to leave two years ago, but Maoist leaders rejected the rehabilitation package and demanded large cash payments for every departing soldier.
Those demands were rejected, and Maoists agreed to proceed with the discharges only in late 2009, with caveats. Now departing soldiers must call a United Nations hot line after they leave to personally request a rehabilitation package that includes educational support, business and vocational training, and financial help to start a business.
But many of the departing soldiers derided the package, some saying they were too old to return to school, others saying they were already soldiers and did not need any other training.
Indeed, as the Maoists continue to argue with the government over the terms of integrating the armies, Maoist leaders are trying to keep the allegiance of the 4,008 soldiers now being discharged to civilian life.
“We are connected in our hearts,” Commander Pratik declared in his farewell speech to the discharged soldiers. “Until there is a complete social and economic reconstruction of Nepal, and a complete restructuring of Nepal, I hope you will continue to help in the revolution from outside.”