Nepal: The Maoist Farce
By Sudeshna Sarkar for ISN
Around this time last year, a former village school teacher who had led a rag-tag army to a 10-year dogged war against the government with astounding success became the new hero of Nepal when his formerly underground party swept elections.
But nine months later, the first Maoist government of Nepal, headed by yesteryear’s revolutionary Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as “Prachanda” (awesome), has not only been forced to resign but is under fire over a damaging video tape that raises grave doubts about his commitment to peace and democracy.
Dubbed “external pagePrachandagate” by the media, the video tape mysteriously surfaced a day after Prachanda resigned as prime minister, showing him telling his People’s Liberation Army (PLA) guerrillas how he had duped political parties and the UN.
In the video, the 55-year-old Prachanda tell his fighters that contrary to the understanding that their strength had been diminished after a decommissioning verification conducted by the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), the PLA was actually five times stronger than before.
“We were small in numbers,” he tells the guerrillas. “There were about 7-8,000 people [in the PLA]. If we had stuck to that figure, [the PLA] would have been reduced to 4,000. But we claimed we were 35,000. So now, we have 20,000 combatants [after the UN verification]. In addition, we also have our [youth organization], the Young Communist League (YCL). It creates complications but still is part of our might.”
In the video, made two years after he signed a comprehensive peace agreement and a year after UNMIN undertook a laborious headcount of the PLA, Prachanda also tells his Maoist soldiers that once his party comes to power, it would jettison the verification. He also boasts that the money his party extracted from the government to pay “allowances” to the PLA fighters would be partly used to buy weapons and take the revolution further.
“We need money,” he says. “No one supplies [weapons] for free.”
The tape was leaked after the Maoist party tried to external pagesack the chief of the state army, General Rookmangud Katawal. However, the move was external pagethwarted by the constitutional head of the government, President Ram Baran Yadav, who reinstated the sacked general thereby drawing himself into the row.
The move boomeranged on the Maoists. Its own coalition partners opposed the dismissal and quit the government, causing it to fall. Now Nepal is back to the chaos it faced after last year’s election, when though the nation voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy it refused to provide a simple majority for any single party.
“Actually, it’s a worse mess,” Nepali editor Kishor Shrestha, whose Jana Aastha weekly has sources in the army and judiciary, told ISN Security Watch. “It exposes the Maoists as an authoritarian party and their long plotting to capture absolute power. They tried to control the media first, then the judiciary and now, they are trying to meddle with the army.”
Shrestha points out that before firing the army chief, the Maoists attempted to retire eight brigadier-generals. However, they were thwarted once more when the generals sought a stay in a court of law.
“The Maoists want senior positions in the army vacant so that they can put their PLA commanders there,” Shrestha said. “The army chief stopped them, as he had done in the past, preventing the en masse induction of the PLA into the national army. So they sought to sack him, even though he is only months away from retirement.”
Back on the streets
The Maoists are back on the streets again, this time training their sights on the president.
“The president followed in deposed King Gyanendra’s footsteps and committed a coup against the constitution,” senior Maoist leader and Finance Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai told ISN Security Watch.
“By reinstating the army chief who was sacked by an elected government, he prevented us from establishing civilian supremacy over the military and went against democratic norms. We will keep up our protests till the president corrects his unconstitutional step and the army chief goes.”
Besides street protests, the Maoists have prevented Nepal’s interim parliament from convening. Though the president last week called for a fresh election in the house to choose a new prime minister, the process has not moved forward as the house remains paralysed.
Now the opposition Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), a former ally of the Maoists, are trying to form a new government – a challenging task. The new coalition would have to secure a simple majority in the 601-member house. While the NC has 114 legislators, the UML has only 109 and the Maoists are the single largest party, with 238 seats.
To cross the half-way mark, both sides would need the support of the regional parties from the southern plains, who together have over 80 MPs. But even if a new government is elected, the video tape raises fresh fears about the Maoist game plan, the actual size of their army and arsenal and the fate of the PLA, whose members are becoming restive in their barracks.
UNMIN under scrutiny
It also raises questions about the credibility of UNMIN, which scrutinised the PLA two years ago to ascertain the number of child soldiers, recruits inducted illegally after the signing of the peace pact, and the number of bona fide combatants eligible to join the state army.
In his report on Nepal tabled before the UN Security Council, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently stated that the Maoists have 19,602 bona fide combatants while their number of arms, according to UNMIN, is 3,428.
Two years ago, when UNMIN announced what it saw as the official resources of the PLA, it was met with widespread scepticism. However, Prachanda defended the low number saying much of his army’s weapons had been destroyed by fire and floods. Now, with the disclosure that the Maoists inflated their number of combatants, it is also feared that they downplayed the number of weapons, which are still with their cadres, ready to be used again.
Nepal’s main opposition party is calling for fresh verification of the PLA troops. It is also questioning UNMIN’s neutrality. NC leader and former deputy prime minister Ram Chandra Poudel has indicated that his party believes that UNMIN may have capitulated to the Maoists partly due to pressure and partly due to its wish to have its tenure and mandate extended in Nepal.
From Monday, the youth wing of the NC began a protest against UNMIN asking for fresh verification of the PLA troops. The Nepal Tarun Dal is also calling for a halt to the PLA’s allowances, saying only 8,000 fighters should get it, as per Prachanda’s admission.
The official who had headed UNMIN during the controversial verification, Ban’s special representative Ian Martin, was sent to the Gaza Strip this year on a different assignment. However, with the eruption of the controversy, Martin is back in Nepal in what UNMIN described as a private visit.
UNMIN, now headed by Karin Landgren, who was appointed this year, is facing the accusations stoically.
“The PLA verification was done in consultation with the seven major parties,” UNMIN spokesman Kosmos Biswokarma told ISN Security Watch. “The procedure, the questions asked, all these were drafted on the basis of consensus. Also, the Joint Monitoring Coordinating Committee that supervised the work included a representative from the Nepal army.”
UNMIN says that if the major parties are united about a re-verification, their demands would be met. But the Maoists, predictably, oppose any such process, saying “it’s not even on the agenda.”