By IANS
Kathmandu : With just three months left for the UN’s peace mission in Nepal to end, the government wants the world body to stay on for at least a year more, with the concurrence of the Maoist guerrillas.
Foreign Minister Sahana Pradhan Wednesday said the government would ask the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) to stay on, “tentatively” for another year.
“It is going to be first discussed by the top leaders of the seven parties (the ruling alliance and the Maoists) and then be endorsed by the council of ministers,” she said at the UN’s Nepal headquarters on the occasion of the 62nd UN Day.
UNMIN, headed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special representative Ian Martin, was mandated to manage the arms and armies of both the government and the Maoists and to observe the crucial constituent assembly election. Its tenure ends Jan 23 next year.
The cabinet approval is certain and was conveyed to Martin, who left for New York to attend the UN Security Council meeting Thursday.
UNMIN has already completed storing the arms and ammunition of the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army and verified the number of bona fide guerrilla combatants in four out of the seven main camps where they have been confined since the signing of the peace agreement last year.
However, with the government indefinitely postponing the election, scheduled for Nov 22, the exercise may not be held even by next January.
The UN secretary-general said in his latest report that though he was disappointed at the crucial election being put off, the UN was ready to offer any assistance it could.
Martin has been urging the government not just to announce fresh election dates but also to address the weaknesses in the peace process, especially to implement key agreements like disclosing the fate of people missing still and including the marginalized communities in administrative processes.
A second UN body is also involved in the Nepal peace process.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) set up an office in Nepal in 2005 after signing an agreement with the then government of King Gyanendra to monitor human rights violations by both the state and the Maoists.
Faced with mounting international condemnation of his army-backed coup and power grab, the king was forced to sign the pact in order to avert harsher UN measures.
Though the OHCHR’s Nepal mission was to have ended in April 2007, the current Girija Prasad Koirala government signed a fresh agreement, extending the tenure by another two years.
The UN was asked to help with the peace process at the insistence of the Maoists.
Since then, armed groups in the Terai plains in south Nepal, who too have begun underground movements like the Maoists, are also asking for the UN to be present during their negotiations with the government.