The fresh demands have an immediate bearing on a gentleman´s agreement between Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal on a much-awaited formal handover of the Maoist cantonments to the Special Committee for Supervision, Integration and Rehabilitation of Maoist combatants. The handover program scheduled for Tuesday morning has been postponed.[break]
Chairman Dahal forwarded the demands to the prime minister during a meeting at the latter´s office in Singha Durbar on Monday morning, according to PM´s Press Advisor Bishnu Rijal.
Rijal said that the prime minister rejected both the demands, urging Dahal to adhere to the three-point agreements signed by both of them last Friday.
While demanding the reshuffling of the composition of the 64-member arms monitoring mechanism announced on Friday, the Maoists have argued that its army was not treated at par with the government security agencies - Nepal Army, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force.
"We want our army to be treated at par with the government security agencies, as it was done during the monitoring by UNMIN. We want the composition of the mechanism to reflect that," Maoist Vice Chairman Narayankaji Shrestha told Republica.
As agreed in the Special Committee on Friday, the 64-member mechanism has 16 representatives from the Maoist army--eight brigade commanders and vice commanders--while the three government security agencies have a combined 48 representatives. If the Maoists demands were to be met, there would be 32 more monitors from the Maoist army.
"We had agreed to that mechanism as it is only for the time being," added Shrestha.
But the prime minister told Dahal that the mechanism was set up after an agreement between the government and the UCPN (Maoist). "They had demanded the same thing during the negotiation of the agreement and had later dropped the demand for equal representation in the monitoring mechanism," said Rijal.
During the meeting, the prime minister pressed Dahal to give the date and the venue for the proposed formal handover of the cantonments by Tuesday. While emerging out of the meeting, Dahal said his party would finalize the date for handover of the cantonments to the Special Committee by Tuesday.
The prime minister and Dahal also discussed procedures for the cantonment handover and programs to be organized to mark the occasion. Though the details are yet to be finalized, they have agreed that the program would be organized in the presence of international community, civil society and the media.
Talking to journalists after the meeting, Dahal also expressed concern over interpretation of the recent three-point agreement by some Special Committee members that the Nepal Army is out of the purview of the committee.
Special Committee to finalize work plan
Though the secretariat under the Special Committee was supposed to give a final touch to its plan of action for integration and rehabilitation on Monday, it decided to send the document back to the Special Committee for finalization.
Similarly, the committee could not decide on the agenda of setting up a situation center after Maoist representatives in the secretariat opinioned that the issue should be decided at political level, according to a source.
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