Who are the 4,000 or so persons that CPN (Maoist Center) wants to pay Rs 200,000 each to from the state coffers?
The Maoists claim that these 4,000 persons are combatants who participated in the armed conflict. They were due financial package as per the spirit of the peace agreement. But they were not provided the package by labeling them disqualified on different pretexts and they suffered injustice. They could neither be integrated in the Nepal Army (NA) nor were paid by the state. It is, therefore, necessary to pay them even 15 years after the peace agreement as per the spirit of the peace process.
The Cabinet meeting on March 20 decided to provide Rs 200,000 each to them and has sent the decision to the Home Ministry. Home Secretary Binod Prakash Singh has told the Rastriya Samachar Samiti that the ministry is preparing a working procedure for distributing the money.
Some of the Nepali Congress (NC) leaders say that they have been told by Prime Minister (PM) Pushpa Kamal Dahal that such a decision has not been taken. PM Dahal himself, however, has not spoken publicly about the issue. It can, therefore, be understood that the process of distributing relief has moved forward.
Are the 4,000 persons that the Maoists want to pay with the taxpayers’ money really combatants? We have to look at the background of the peace process to understand that.
The seven political parties and the Maoists on November 8, 2006 had agreed to keep Maoist combatants in the main cantonments at Kailali, Surkhet, Rolpa, Palpa, Kavre, Sindhuli and Ilam districts, and that the combatants would be verified and monitored by the UN to hold peaceful and fair Constituent Assembly Election without any fear, and democratization and restructuring of the Nepal Army as per the spirit of the 12-point agreement, 8-point agreement, 25-point code of conduct, and the five-point letter sent to the UN on August 9, 2006.
The peace agreement signed on November 21, 2006 after that had agreed to keep the Maoist combatants and their weapons in the cantonments.
The agreement for monitoring of management of the weapons and combatants on December 6, 2006 then set standards for Maoist combatants. A person must have joined the Maoists before May 25, 2006, and be born before May 25, 1988 to qualify as a combatant during the verification process.
The cut-off date of birth was kept to be prior to May 25, 1988 to ensure that they would have completed at least 18 years on the cut-off date for joining the Maoist army. An agreement, in other words, was reached that a minor younger than 18 years would not be recognized as a combatant. Using child soldiers in war is a crime even under international laws which deem those leading such wars to have committed a crime.
The Maoists sent a total of 32,350 persons to seven main cantonments and 21 sub-cantonments spread across the country saying they were combatants after the agreement for monitoring of management of the weapons and combatants on December 6, 2006.
The United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) then started the verification process to determine who out of them were combatants, and who were not. Most of them were not combatants and had left the cantonments even before verification.
A total of 8,640 of those in the cantonments did not even turn up for the second stage of interview for verification of combatants.
UNMIN finally verified 19,602 of them to be combatants. Only 17,076 of them were present in the first stage of reclassification.
A total of 15,630 Maoist combatants then opted for voluntary retirement and returned home with Rs 500,000-800,000 while 1,422 were integrated in the Nepal Army. The 4,008 persons who UNMIN verified were not combatants left the cantonments without any payment. Because no agreement said that they would be paid after being found that they were not combatants.
How had they reached the cantonments then?
The number of combatants who had fought in the Maoist armed conflict was actually very low. A video of Maoist supremo Dahal talking about the numbers during a speech in the Shaktikhor cantonment had become public back then. Dahal had conceded in Shaktikhor that the Maoists actually had only around 7,000 combatants and taken pride in having been able to keep 30,000-35,000 persons in the cantonments fooling the state.
The 4,008 expelled by UNMIN included their thousands of cadres and their children who were sent to the cantonments by the Maoists saying they would get relief package from the state.
Many of those 4,008 expelled by UNMIN saying they were not combatants had not completed 18 years until May 25, 2006. A total of 1,973 were below 18 years while 1,035 others could not prove that they had joined the Maoist army before the cut-off date of May 25, 2006 for joining the Maoist army even though they had completed 18.
UNMIN did not even investigate whether the 1,973 minors had joined the Maoist army or not. It first investigated age, and said that those who were underage were not eligible to become combatants without checking when they had been recruited.
It was difficult to go there even for UNMIN because verifying that child soldiers were recruited by the Maoists would have meant that the Maoist leadership had committed the crime of using child soldiers. That would have attracted international laws. UNMIN, therefore, did not venture there, and the Maoist leadership was freed from the accusation of using child soldiers for then.
If the Maoist leadership now insists that they were indeed combatants and participated in the armed conflict and hence should be compensated, that would establish that the Maoists had used child soldiers in the conflict. Is the Maoist leadership ready to face the consequences of accepting to have used child soldiers in the conflict?
UNMIN had not strictly investigated even the adult combatants then. Those who could answer a few simple questions were verified to be combatants. Over 19,000 were, therefore, verified to be combatants even though Dahal had conceded in the Shaktikhor video that the Maoists actually had only around 7,000 combatants. The state spent around Rs 20 billion in their management and integration. There was embezzlement of billions in the name of running the Maoist cantonments. The advance of Rs 460 million taken by Maoist leader Krishna Bahadur Mahara for the combatants at cantonments was never reimbursed.
Everyone turned a blind eye to that to establish peace in the country and bring the Maoists into the mainstream. How necessary that was would perhaps be evaluated by history.
But the way the Maoists have continued their efforts to dole out taxpayers’ money to their cadres even after joining mainstream politics and 16 years after the peace deal is condemnable.
This is not the first time that attempts have ben made to give those 4,000 persons Rs 200,000 each. The Maoists had first made the attempt in 2012 when its leader Baburam Bhattarai was PM. It was made again when there was a coalition government including CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center) in 2016.
Finance Minister Bishnu Paudel in the then KP Sharma Oli government had allocated Rs 840 million to pay Rs 200,000 each to the disqualified combatants and to those who had opted for voluntary retirement but had not received the lump sum in the budget for the fiscal year 2073/74.
That distribution was stopped when a few NC cadres and conflict victims moved the Supreme Court (SC) against the decision.
Dahal has now become PM for the third time. It has already been 15 years since he first became PM. It may not have been unnatural for him to have more rebellious attitude and less responsibility toward the state. But the determination showed by Dahal to try to pay his cadres from the state coffers when he has become PM for the third time is irresponsible. It shows that he has failed to understand the sensitivity of current times and his responsibility toward the general public.
The country is currently in a difficult economic situation. Not only Nepal, the whole world is affected by recession. In South Asia, all countries except India are going through a difficult economic situation. Those countries, including Nepal, have taken assistance from the International Monetary Fund to sustain the economy.
The recession has also affected the market and the general public. Many businesses have not been able to pay salaries on time. Many have furloughed their staff. The businesses themselves are in a tight spot as they are not able to pay the bank’s interest. Then there’s the mental stress of those with fixed income who have to pay installments to banks. The government has not been able to collect revenues due to the recession. If the situation worsens further, a situation could arise where it would be difficult to provide salaries to employees and to service debts.
What message will it send to the general public when the PM wants to dole out nearly a billion rupees from the state coffers to his cadres in the name of combatants at a time when he should be leading the job of extricating the country from this economic challenge?
What do coalition partner NC and NC leaders who are ironing their daura-suruwals to join the government say about it? On what basis will NC, which was against it when it was in the opposition in the past, support it now? Maybe it will now be opposed by UML, which had tried to provide Rs 200,000 each to these 4,000 people to appease the Maoists by including it in the budget itself. Trust in parties has deteriorated almost to a point of no return because of this double standard.
Let’s call a spade a spade, whether in the government or in the opposition.
The Maoists won’t be able to justify in any way the rationale behind their plan to distribute the tax money collected from the public’s hard work to their cadres. There has been no agreement in the past to provide money from the state coffers to those who were not combatants. The Maoists should put a stop to such attempts at recklessly imposing a burden on the state coffers and splurging on its cadres in the name of peace agreement.
