Flogging a dead horse: Public sentiment toward the Constituent Assembly has been reduced to widespread hopelessness and disgust.
On September 7, Maoist Supremo Prachanda lost his bid for the prime ministry for the seventh time in two months. The latest fiasco came on the heels of a leaked audiotape, which purportedly captures Maoist Krishna Bahadur Mahara discussing with an unidentified Chinese official the possibility of acquiring nearly $7,000,000 US for the purpose of bribing Madhesi lawmakers to vote for Prachanda in the election.
Maoist Scandal
The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu issued a statement, calling the tape baseless. The Maoists labeled the tape a fake and then upped the ante by accusing the Indian government -- or more precisely, the Indians’ external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) -- of faking the tape and leaking it to the Indian television channel in Nepali, Nepal 1.
“RAW made and distributed the fake news audiotape,” the Maoist mouthpiece Janadisha claimed in its front page article on Sunday, although no evidence to substantiate the claim was provided.
In any case, the Chinese-supported-bribe allegation casts fresh doubts about the Maoists’ honesty, as well as their dedication to ushering in a stable democracy in Nepal – this being the second major scandal emerging recently. The first was the leaked videotape (May 2009) showing Prachanda boasting in a Maoist cantonment that he had deliberately lied about the strength of his combatants during the UNMIN verification process. In the video, he bragged that he had inflated their number five-fold so that ex-guerillas could be inducted into the Nepal Army, and thereby eventually take over national security.
The scandal not only provided ample fodder for anti-Maoists, but for those who questioned the effectiveness of the UN monitoring presence in the first place.
Nepal’s government has been postponing its official request for the UNMIN to extend its presence in Nepal and UN patience is running out. In UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s statement issued at the beginning of September, he warned that he might very well propose termination of the mandate of UNMIN if political parties failed to reach consensus in Nepal:
“Should these discussions [on UNMIN´s mandate] offer neither clarity over the role of the Mission [UNMIN] nor any prospect of consensus among the parties to the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] and AMMAA [Agreement on Management and Monitoring of Arms and Armies] regarding a realistic and time-bound fulfillment of their commitments concerning the armies and the phasing out of UNMIN monitoring, then I will propose alternative measures to the Council, including the possible termination of UNMIN´s mandate.”
Ban further complained that UNMIN had been repeatedly made “a scapegoat for matters that lie beyond its mandate.”
The Nepali government responded by requesting the Security Council to extend UNMIN term in Nepal by three or four months, but – and this is significant – with a reduced mandate. It is an idea gaining in popularity.
“In the updated mandate, UNMIN will be relieved from its responsibility of monitoring the management of arms and armed personnel of Nepali Army,” Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Rajan Bhattarai told the press.
Madhav Kumar Nepal-led government and its coalition partners are reluctant to keep the national army under UN supervision for much longer, saying continued monitoring of national army will affect its training and recruitment process and hamper the organizational capabilities as a whole.
The Maoists, on the other hand, have opposed curtailment of the UNMIN’s mandate. It has warned that the peace process would become a failure if UNMIN were not allowed to monitor the Nepali Army.
The Cost of Political Paralysis
In the meantime, the endless power battle that has left Nepal's political system in shambles has frozen efforts to solidify peace, write a constitution and push ahead with development in this desperately poor nation. With no one in charge, plans to feed the growing percentage of malnourished children in Nepal, to build badly needed rural roads, to increase electricity generation in power-starved cities, to improve education, to provide clean water, to create jobs for a dangerously high unemployed youth, to address the widespread lack of law and order – and all the other elements that need to be in place before a nation can create a stable environment for democracy – all of these things have been put on the backburner so that political parties can keep their respective pieces of the power pie.
Nepal’s government disputes this assessment of course. But the phenomenal distrust between rival parties has not only paralyzed the political process but turned the people (who voted them into power) into cynics, disgusted with just about anything the politicians care to put out there for public consumption. And who can blame them?
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