E-Kantipur

Karin Landgren, Representative of the Secretary General in Nepal made a passionate defence of UNMIN’s record in her recent briefing to the UN Security Council, which has caused quite a stir, upon her return from New York on Monday. As she explained in her statement, the controversy was caused by not reading her briefing in its entirety. In what was perhaps her last press conference as the head of UNMIN, she said that UNMIN had fulfilled the terms of the mandate it was given. When asked to grade and assess UNMIN’s achievement, she said “I am going to resist your invitation to grade us from 1-10, but as I said to the Council, this is an experience of which UN can be proud.”

No doubt, UNMIN played a very positive role up to the elections in 2008 that the world body can be proud of. But after the UN mission’s downsizing in July 2008, it began sitting on its laurels with utter complacency—perhaps deterred by both Nepal’s government and its neighbour’s objections. This is not to belittle the tremendously important role it played at the Joint Monitoring Coordination Committee (JMCC) in creating trust between the two former opponents. It is not my intention to cast aspersions on the relatively successful job the UN has done here. To be fair, UNMIN has received little credit for the technical expertise it has brought to the peace process.  But it is also equally important to review what could have been done better.

The issue of UNMIN’s mandate is central to any discussion on what UNMIN could have done differently. Many in the UN would argue that UNMIN did exactly what it was asked, and there are others who would say it could have done more. Did the mandate limitations actually constrain UNMIN from using its good offices?

If you look back before July 2008, UNMIN in fact expanded the scope its work. UNMIN ventured into issues of social exclusion, marginalisation and even reached out to armed groups in the Tarai, which were, strictly speaking, not within its mandate. But it was interpreted as such to incorporate gender and social units within the mission. There was some resentment from political quarters, including India, but to a large extent it didn’t stop UNMIN from doing what it did, except in the case of dealing with the armed groups. Regardless of the constraining hands of the limited mandate, there was tremendous scope for UNMIN to use its good offices to facilitate an environment to help the parties bridge their differences, even after July 2008. At the local level, its civil affairs unit sporadically used good offices to resolve conflicts among the parties. But this didn’t quite happen at the central level, or at least the consequences weren’t reflected in the public domain. Soon, the power-sharing debacle among the parties following the Constituent Assembly elections where the Maoists emerged as the largest party led to sharp polarisation. And those who opposed the Maoists saw UNMIN as inadvertently providing a safety net for rhetorical belligerence and inaction of the former rebels.

Leverage is not about statutory power.

It is about being aware of exactly how to use one’s influence with maximum effect. In that regard UNMIN utterly failed in the post-July 2008 period.

There were multiple factors contributing to the stagnation of the peace process in the last two years. Both sides were equally guilty in letting the situation slip and create this huge trust deficit. But general perception among the non-Maoist parties is that the Maoists were reneging on their commitments, especially those concerning the future of PLA combatants.

There is no doubt that the 2006 peace framework was largely a marriage of convenience for both sides. But the fear among non-Maoist parties was that the Maoists were using it as scaffolding to ‘capture’ the state. The UN bashing has its roots here. Many believed that UNMIN was simply creating an enabling environment for the Maoists to do so. To them UNMIN’s presence only provided a cushion to the Maoists. The idea of UNMIN’s presence as symbolic deterrence to both parties clearly ‘only applied to one side’: the state and its old vanguards.

It was clear from the start that the Maoists needed UNMIN the most. Other parties, including India had reluctantly agreed. This meant that UNMIN had the most leverage over the Maoists. Non-Maoist parties have argued the UN’s failure to nudge the Maoists to be more forthcoming only provided the Maoists some comfort in their inaction. What began as a hunch among many Nepali Congress and CPN-UML leaders soon became a conviction that UNMIN must go in order for them to extract concessions from the Maoist. Though the hardliners have more cynical intentions, even the moderates are convinced that until UNMIN leaves, the Maoists are simply going to dilly-dally. As the prospect of UNMIN’s exit nears, Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has announced plans to take ‘bold’ steps that will bring the Maoist combatants under the Special Committee Secretariat, regroup the combatants into two groups (integration and rehabilitation), and hammer out the norms and modality of the integration. The parties are reportedly close to an agreement to seek a one-month technical rollover of UNMIN. In any case, UNMIN’s critics will feel vindicated if any agreement on the fate of combatants comes through coinciding with the mission’s exit.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is safe to say that UNMIN failed to envision its political role beyond the symbolic deterrence it offered in the period post-July 2008. Its mandate may have tied its hands, but the mission could have served the foreign taxpayers and Nepalis well by thinking out of the box.

john.parajuli@gmail.com

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