[LINK] "Nepal Waits as 2 Armies, Former Foes, Become One"

[rfmcdonald]

Jim Yardley's New York Times article explores an interesting phenomenon--the integration of guerrilla forces into the national miltary it once fought--that bears strong similarities to the creation of the South African National Defense Force out of the apartheid regime's South African Defense Force and the various anti-apartheid guerrilla movements. The difference in Nepal's case is that the integration isn't working so well.

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.”

[. . . T]he 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.