Nepal Rebel Vows Not To Disarm Before Vote On Charter

The New York Times

May 21, 2006

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

The voluble chief of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas on Friday rejected the notion that his troops would disarm before elections, as many insurgent armies have done across the world. He demanded instead that his troops be sequestered and kept under international supervision, but only if the Royal Nepalese Army agreed to the same treatment.

"We are not exactly an armed group like in other places in the current world," declared the leader, known as Prachanda, or the fierce one. "How can you think we are only a small rebel group and the R.N.A. is legal and legitimate?"

His comments, made in a wide-ranging interview on Friday night in an Indian city that he insisted remain unidentified, signaled one of the central challenges facing the peace process in Nepal: How to carry out credible elections to redraft the country's constitution, as the new government has promised, without compelling the rebels to put down their guns.

But Prachanda's comments also hinted at a deeper, less tangible concern: Less than a month after helping to dislodge King Gyanendra's royal government, the Maoists, it seems, are worried about being slighted or sidelined in the new political landscape.

That landscape is nothing that this country has seen before. In late April, faced with three weeks of debilitating street protests started by Nepal's principal political parties and backed by Prachanda's organization, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), King Gyanendra ceded control of the state to an interim government.

That government in turn ordered the arrests of five of the king's most prominent former cabinet ministers and last week approved a far-reaching measure to diminish his power. The government declared Nepal a secular nation, stripped the king of his authority over the military and excised references to "His Majesty's Government" from government institutions.

On the face of it, these are important victories for the Maoists, who for the last 10 years have been fighting for the creation of a secular, republican Nepal and an army answerable to an elected government. And yet the Maoist leaders are complaining of being left out of the process, and — cranky as it may sound from the underground leader of a feared revolutionary army — of not getting the credit they deserve. Clearly, a deep distrust still lingers.

"Now they want to marginalize us, they want to bypass us, and they want to minimize the role of the Maoist movement," Prachanda said of the politicians. "That's why we are seriously concerned."

The Maoists can hardly argue with the substance of what the politicians have done; indeed, the measures seem to have been lifted straight out of the Maoist playbook.

Their problem is with the process. The interim government, Prachanda said, should have immediately begun negotiations with the Maoists, dissolved the old parliament and assembled a new national body that would in turn organize elections for the drafting of a new constitution.

Whether the apparently procedural dispute will bog down efforts at real reconciliation between the government and the rebels remains uncertain.

Prachanda said the negotiating team he planned to lead is ready to start immediately.

According to a Reuters report from Katmandu, the capital, the government on Saturday named the leader of its negotiating team, the home minister in the new government, Krishna Prasad Sitaula. No dates for talks have been announced yet. They would be the first such negotiations in three years. Prachanda said he wanted the United Nations or a team of independent third-country officials to broker the talks.

Prachanda, 52, a former agricultural sciences teacher whose real name is Pushpa Kamal Dahal, called the measures to restrict the king's powers "a partial victory," expressed skepticism about the intentions of the interim government and wondered aloud whether they were reacting to foreign pressure to distance themselves from the Maoists.

He also delineated what he said were his bottom-line demands for a new Nepal: a federal structure that offers greater rights to Nepal's ethnic minorities, a new constitution that scraps the monarchy, and "revolutionary land reform" along the lines of Mao Zedong's principle of "land to the tiller." The last of those demands is sure to invite significant resistance from Nepal's political and economic elite.

Prachanda's revolution began in 1996, two years after his breakaway Communist faction was denied a chance to run candidates for elective office. Ten years and 13,000 deaths later, the Maoists say they no longer seek to establish a one-party Communist state. In a radical turn, they have linked arms with the parliamentary politicians they once hunted down without mercy.

They say they have accepted the principle of a multiparty democracy. They say they will accept the verdict of Nepalese voters on whether the nation should remain a constitutional monarchy.

Whether they will keep their promises remains a dangerous gamble for Nepal.

It is on the question of disarmament that Prachanda has thrown down the gauntlet. So long as the Royal Nepalese Army is not disarmed before elections, his People's Liberation Army will remain as it is. Ultimately, he said, a new national army would have to be cobbled together. The current army, he said, can not be trusted not to interfere in the voting for a new constitution.

Elsewhere around the world, there have been instances of insurgent groups refusing to disarm before elections. They have left a mixed record. In East Timor, ethnic rebels, who were not nearly as militarily powerful as Nepal's Maoists, held on to their weapons through the referendum of 1999. In Angola, Unita rebels refused to be disarmed before elections in 1992; when they lost at the polls, one of the bloodiest chapters of the Angolan war began.

"We want to show a new example from Nepal," Prachanda insisted. "What is the reason for not trusting us?"

"We are not the problem for the country and for democracy," he added.