A meeting of the UN Security Council is reported to be approving the extension of the United Nations Mission to Nepal (UNMIN) that monitors and reports about the ongoing peace process in Nepal. Media reports in Kathmandu confirm that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is recommending the UNMIN’s extension to the Security Council today.
Nepal government had recently requested the UN to extend the UNMIN’s stay in Nepal for six more months since the peace process has not yet reached a logical end.
Meanwhile former Prime Minister and Nepali Congress President Girija Prasad Koirala have said that Maoist rebels must not be integrated into Nepal Army. He gave this remark following a similar remark by the Army Chief Rookmangud Katwal a few days ago.
As per the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed on 21 November 2006 between the Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist (CPN-M) and the Seven Party Alliance—states in point 4.4, “The Interim Council of Ministers shall work to supervise, integrate and rehabilitate the Maoist combatants.”
According to the peace accord, Maoist fighters remain in seven cantonments with scanty physical infrastructures. From within their cantonments, they have repeatedly warned the state that they would not like to end up as detainees there but would like to come back to normal life. However, the Nepali Congress and other rightist parties have vehemently objected to the integration of the Maoist ex-guerrillas.
Former Maoist rebels have accused the current coalition government led by the UML as an Indian ‘puppet’.
The Nepalese still fear the restart of civil war as the current government has begun its reversion campaigns against Maoist insurgency and the April 2006 mass uprising that paved the way for the abolition of monarchy and replacement by a republic on 28 May 2008. Many political analysts in Kathmandu thinks that Nepal may go back to days of armed violence if the current government reverses democratic changes which was aimed by the decade-long Maoist armed insurgency and people’s mass uprising in April 2006.