With the joint call to the United Nations, the prospects for 'managing' Maoist arms soon look promising. But what is to be done about 'managing' the political aims and character of the Maoists?
External help in this area is unlikely and unwise. Nepalis must now pull our own weight in decommissioning the false promises and discredited dogma of the Maoists. In between the 12 point, 8 point and 25 point agreements, it is easy to miss the main point: that the Maoists did not win a military victory (for which credit is due to the security forces of the erstwhile HMG) . Yet, are we not close to handing the Maoists a political victory now?
The Maoists are pushing very hard to connect the question of arms management with a broader political settlement prior to constituent assembly elections. The proposed interim government and rules for the elections shouldn't become a backdoor to legitimise the Maoists before they face elections. Mainstreaming the armed rebels should be about them moving to the well-defined middle ground of a liberal multi-party democracy that accommodates everyone, and not the mainstream lurching towards Prachanda Path.
The Maoist agenda at present sits on three main pillars:
. abolition of monarchy
. establishing a federal republic along ethnic identities
. expropriating assets of the landowning class (and apparently of royalists no matter what class they come from).
The Nepali left intelligentsia and the popular press now act as if these are immutable commandments for a new Nepal without undertaking a careful and evidence-based elaboration of the merits or otherwise of these pillars of Maoism.
How will a republic lead to improved food security in Humla? Will ethnic fragmenting help or hinder in making overseas labour contracting a better-managed and more financially rewarding option for Nepal's rural poor ? And how is expropriation, even if limited to agricultural land, going to foster new investment and growth in this era of globalisation? There should be time for an informed and enlightening debate on the whys and wherefores of the constituent assembly election manifestos of all political parties.
The Maoists appear to be testing the water and making ambit claims to only excite and entice the intelligentsia and civil society. For them there is one and only one key issue: retain as much control as possible over an integrated national army that includes their own armed cadres. This confers a lasting right to the Maoists to act as a state within a state until a final and complete takeover is ingeniously orchestrated.
The Maoists appear quite clear about this endgame and so must we. There can be no halfway Maoism. They are not in this game to score points over left-wing rivals such as the UML, or even to upstage the role of Nirmal Lama in the 1991 Constitution with their own new and improved constitution-making process. The logic and indeed the legacy of over 12,000 deaths in the 'People's War' necessarily make the stakes higher.
What a great irony that abolition of the monarchy is now the clarion call of the Maoists when, if left to their own ways, their aim was to create a monstrously authoritarian state along the lines perhaps of North Korea.
An active monarchy was not the issue when fighting started in 1996. Their terrorism was directed against a budding democracy and against potential political competitors. Why has the seven-party alliance and indeed our self-proclaimed civil society leaders forgotten or even forgiven these transgressions?
As the Lebanese tragedy shows, we cannot allow a Hizballah equivalent in our midst to dictate the difficult transition to an interim government and a constituent assembly. The failure of the sovereign Lebanese government to decommission Hizballah's arms and aims after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 has now destroyed the democratic gains of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution of April 2005.
We must ensure the fruits of Nepal's Rhododendron Revolution of April 2006 do not suffer a similar fate in the endgame of the Maoists.
Prem Jung Thapa is an economist based in Canberra, Australia.
