As the 54-year old former adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs is heading for Burundi next week to take up her new responsibility as the Special Representative of the Secretary General in Burundi, Republica’s Kiran Chapagain talked to her about her views on UNMIN’s stay in Nepal for four years, her experience in Nepal, issues related to the UN mission and the peace process. Excerpts: [break]
How will UNMIN’s exit impact the peace process?
We should look at the immediate short-term impact and the potentially longer-term impact. In the short-term, as the Secretary General said in his latest report, the timing and conditions of UNMIN’s departure are not the best. The parties have not come to fresh agreements on monitoring yet. And the monitoring task is not, objectively, finished. The task of integrating and rehabilitating the Maoist army has not progressed. The promised actions in the Nepal Army (NA) [democratization and right sizing] too have not taken place.
How do you see the withdrawal of UNMIN without the completion of the peace process?
There are challenges ahead. One is around immediate monitoring issues and how that would be negotiated. There is an obvious perception of risk if things are left unmonitored. But monitoring is not simply a technical matter of getting someone else into minding the CCTVs. That is the obvious immediate issue with our withdrawal, and the longer term issue is what form the international community’s support to the peace process will take.
What does it mean for the United Nations to wind up a mission with the peace process unfinished?
We would like to see our end coinciding with the end of a need for monitoring. So the work that is now being done by the parties around monitoring ideally should have come much earlier; the whole integration and rehabilitation process should have gotten off the ground much earlier. It comes back to the question of what we have been mandated to do. Certainly one of the lessons I am taking away is that the mandate was not shaped to fit the needs on the ground. We were left doing the monitoring without the capacity to influence its conclusion.
In your opinion, who should be blamed for this premature withdrawal of UNMIN?
Blame is a very emotive word. So, I would not use the word myself. UNMIN is here at the request of parties, and, last September, the parties themselves entered into a four-point agreement, which said that it was the mission’s last extension. Clearly, the Security Council has also been frustrated by many six-month and four-month extensions that have usually been accompanied by promises from every government that before the end of the next mandate period the process would be completed. At certain points, you realized that this was not going to happen in another four-month or six-month extension. So I think the bigger question is: Why has the process not moved further in what is now almost three years since the elections?
So, why did the peace process not complete even three years after the elections?
Some of the assumptions made at the beginning of the process about the timeframe were unrealistic. But the slowness of the process is also a reflection of the weak architecture of some parts of the process. For example, mechanisms that were foreseen to oversee the peace process commitments and their implementation as a whole were not set up, and there has never been a reliable and routine high-level dialogue mechanism, which the parties could turn to systematically to resolve issues in the manner of the Joint Monitoring Coordination Committee (JMCC). There is no such mechanism for parties. That is a gap in the process. I believed that has slowed down the whole process.
How do you look back at UNMIN’s tenure in Nepal?
I look back at it very positively. I would say there are many lessons in this experience for the United Nations and its other missions around the world. Take the issue of monitoring – monitoring that is done by a very light presence, as requested by the parties, by unarmed monitors in civilian clothes has not been tried before. This is a new experience and this has been a major success here coupled with the mechanism of JMCC. It is somewhat unsung as a success.
Some people say UNMIN could not play an effective role?
UNMIN completely performed the task that it was given. We played our part fully. There are many successes, from the beginning of electoral support to the mine action team, which was originally a part of UNMIN; the monitoring with very limited violations, and the discharge of disqualified combatants. What you say about the expected role is true, however. Expectations were greater than mandate. There were expectations that UNMIN would monitor the peace process as a whole and would support implementation of the peace process as a whole. And, of course, those expectations went unmet because they were not part of the mandate.
There was also confusion about the mandate itself. I have been asked by one very senior political leader: What is UNMIN doing for the displaced persons? So this confusion prevailed and I wonder if we could have done more to explain the limitation of the mandate without sounding defensive. There was also widespread public misunderstanding of the nature of UNMIN monitoring. We were at times accused of failing to “control” Maoist army personnel. If we had been given a mandate to control movement and enforce regulations that would have required putting thousands of people on the ground. The parties had agreed that UNMIN should have a light presence, and there was never a mandate of control. The parties also explicitly agreed that the armies remained under their command and control. So, that was one widespread misunderstanding.
A second misunderstanding pertained to UNMIN being explicitly tasked with the monitoring of both the Maoist army and the NA under the terms of the arms monitoring agreement. Now what the Maoist army and the NA were permitted to do or restricted from were not identical. But there was a clear agreement about this two-sided monitoring, at the end of the war that neither party lost. And there were increasingly political accusations that UNMIN was placing both the armies at par with each other. But our monitoring role was the product of an agreement between the parties. This is a nationally-owned and driven peace agreement, which we were asked to monitor.
UNMIN was above controversy until May 2009 when the Maoist government stepped down and the present government came to power. But why was it dragged into one controversy after another after that?
I would place the timing of controversy, as you call it, a bit earlier – toward the end of 2008. If you recall, the issue of recruitment by the NA came to a head then. So I do not think it began in May 2009. But certainly May 2009 was a period of high drama and I agree that is when, let us say, the controversy level started to step up. It seems to me that the broader story is about the regret that was being demonstrated by some political actors on the terms of the peace agreement. Many senior politicians have told UNMIN “we should not have agreed to this or that aspect of the peace deal in 2006”. That had played out in different ways. UNMIN was closely associated with Nepal’s successful conduct of the elections. That at the core did not satisfy everyone, and that has also had consequences in terms of how UNMIN was perceived.
In May 2009 the Shaktikhor video also came out, revealing UNMIN’s weaknesses in verifying Maoist army. Do you think that this video changed the perception of other parties toward UNMIN?
For many, the Shaktikhor video was shocking. I tried very hard to get to the bottom of the numbers, including talking to experts about their information on the size of the Maoist army at different times. In terms of the verification exercise, in May 2009, I went back over all the details of that process and was satisfied that it was conducted as thoroughly as it could have been conducted.
Remember that the outcome of the verification was accepted by the political parties. It was not a simple process and it did not become controversial until May 2009, a year-and-a-half after it was completed.
What are the weaknesses of the peace process?
In addition to the lack of mechanisms at various levels, we have seen in the past several years the parties’ own internal processes becoming more open and democratic. At the same time, the parties had internal political issues, and the leadership issues have come to dominate at the expense of the core peace process matters, at the expense of attention to integration and rehabilitation, at the expense of focus on the constitution. Somehow attention needs to be shifted back to making the peace process work.
What is the most memorable experience you are taking with you? How about the bitterest one?
In terms of positive experiences, I would single out the experience of the review meetings we conducted starting March last year. We sat down around a small table with top leaders of the three main parties and just talked for hours in a quiet and open atmosphere. I found that remarkable, the readiness to put issues on the table. I am tempted to tell you: Watching the pink sunset at dusk on Langtang, something I will not forget easily.
My saddest and most profound memory is of my last meeting with Girija Prasad Koirala. Mr (B Lynn) Pascoe (UN Under Secretary General of Political Affairs), Mr Samuel [Tamrat (Head, Asia and the Pacific Division of Department of Political Affairs)] and I went straight from the airport in March to his house at Maharajgung. He was sitting up in bed, gesturing with a passion about the need for the peace process to continue, the need for the UN support to continue and underlining his faith in the UN. That was very dramatic for me. He was gone 10 days later. I will always remember him as a champion of the process.
Any plan to return to Nepal in future?
I will never let go of Nepal. I am going to continue to follow developments here. I will absolutely return.
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