Just when doubts had begun to surface among certain sections of the media and the people that UNMIN’s departure might create a gaping hole in the peace process, Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal inked an agreement that shifted UNMIN’s monitoring role—monitoring of the management of arms and armed personnel of the Nepal Army and the Maoist army—on the Special Committee. This is the best alternative that we had in hand, as we had argued in our Jan 11 editorial It’s getting late, hence we welcome the pact and congratulate our leadership for narrowing down on a reasonable alternative, though not without giving the faint-hearted a scare that the peace process was all set to break asunder.
While our political leadership rightly deserves credit for the pact, we hope that they understand that this is just another beginning of a long and arduous journey ahead. Though UNMIN attracted a fair share of controversy during its tenure here, its departure means that we are now out of the four-year-old comfort zone and that we have to steer the delicate peace process to its logical end on our own. Not that we are not confident that our politicians are not capable of doing that.
As we wrote in our Jan 11 editorial: “Nepal’s peace process is a homegrown initiative and only the determination of Nepal’s political parties can bring it to a successful conclusion.” But UNMIN’s departure has certainly thrust more responsibility on the Maoists and other political parties, mainly the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML. Henceforth, they must display much more maturity and responsibility to steer the delicate peace process forward. But that also means that it is an opportunity for them to take historical credit for a job well done. We hope that they are mindful of this fact.
What is also worth noting in the latest agreement is that the government and the Maoists have reiterated their faith in the Interim Constitution, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the Agreement on the Monitoring of the Management of the Arms and the Armies. That also gives us the confidence that the Maoists and the other parties are committed to writing the constitution by the stipulated timeframe and seeing the peace process through. We hope that the Friday understanding is just the beginning of many others to come, the first among which should certainly be an agreement on the number of Maoist combatants to be integrated into the national security forces. If that can be done in earnest, the parties would slowly but surely be able to sort out other issues and live up to their promises of writing the constitution on time and taking the peace process to its rightful end.
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