Baisali Buda and her four children lived on the edge of poverty in Mugu\'s Birat VDC. They had just a little land, but their remote, rugged village was home. Then Maoist cadres started coming around, making increasingly unaffordable demands. Eventually, four years ago, Buda and her family fled to the relative safety of the city.

But life in the tiny shack in the camp for internally displaced people in Rajhena is even harder. "I wish we'd settled in India and never returned, though it is not easy there either" says Buda.

There are nearly a quarter of a million internally displaced people in Nepal, says the international Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). Buda and many like her were innocent bystanders who just gave up, or refused to support the armed rebels. But an equal number of internally displaced people are former political workers of the NC, the UML, and the RPP. Their safe return will be a factor in whether all parties can campaign fairly for elections to the constituent assembly.

"The local Maoists locked our houses and took away our farms, and they will kill me if I go back," 72-year-old Kesar Bahadur Shaha from Jajarkot told us. A Nepali Congress worker, Shaha was constantly harassed, and his 45-year-old wife Ganga was abducted and severely beaten up. His young daughter couldn't handle living with the constant Maoist threats and intimidation, and succumbed to heart disease.

Over 200 people living higgledy-piggledy in the camp are waiting for the local Maoist leaders from Mugu, Dailekh, Jajarkot, and other surrounding districts to come to them and give them written assurance that they will not be harmed in any way. The Maoist leadership publicly says that internally displaced people should be reintegrated unconditionally in their home villages. But camp residents are far from convinced that the local Mugu-based cadres, used to extortion and living on other people's property, will welcome them warmly.

"We hear all the time of displaced families being further victimised by both the local Maoists and sympathisers in the villages," said Durga Debi Shahi, whose home is in Tholaregar, a two-day walk from Jajarkot\'s district headquarters Khalanga.

The SPA government never gave directives to the CDOs or DDC offices on how to deal with internally displaced people. The run up to last week's preliminary peace deal addressed the return of IDPs, as they are called, but there were few concrete proposals put forward.

Some people in the camps have negotiated their return home, only to be turned back at the last minute. Last month, some 45 UML cadres decided to return home to Dhading en masse when the peace talks had stalled. In Rautahat, over 40 political workers who tried to follow their example were denied re-entry by the Maoists. Some returnees have been taken to indoctrination camps, made to pay 'donations', and tried in kangaroo 'people's courts'.

Most movable property taken from internally displaced people has been either sold or destroyed. While district-level Maoist leaders say that, barring papers destroyed in government raids, they do keep records, few internal refugees believe they will be compensated. People in camps like this one now want the government to make restorations.

Organisations that work with internally displaced people say the only way to ensure a smooth, safe return is to decentralise the process and have the government work closely with Maoist cadres on the ground.

"Rule of law and order needs to be restored at the local level," says Hanne Melfald, an IDP advisor with the United Nations. The government has to work fast to make the VDCs functional, and police offices have to return to the villages from which they have been absent for over six years. Fundamentally, say experts like Melfald, the return of internally displaced people must be handled as a matter of human rights.