Clock ticks for Nepal to settle its future

Kathmandu: For anyone living in a country where reforming health care is regarded as an insurmountable challenge, consider the political calendar in the struggling Himalayan republic of Nepal. By May 28, or roughly four months off, the entire country must be reorganized.

First, a new constitution has to be drafted to define fundamental rights for Nepalese citizens, restructure the national government and create states in a country where none previously existed. The positions of president and prime minister (the king has been deposed) must be clarified: Should the country have a directly elected, powerful executive? Or should a parliamentary system prevail?

Then there are the armies. Two of them. One is the Nepalese army. The other is the People's Liberation Army controlled by the country's Maoists. For a decade, the two sides fought a savage guerrilla war. Now the peace plan stemming from a 2006 accord calls for blending them together, except no one can agree how to do it, so both armies remain intact, resistant to civilian oversight and increasingly testy.

There is so much to do - the docket includes establishing affirmative action policies, redistributing land and recognizing several new official languages - that few people consider the May 28 deadline realistic. For months, the process has been deadlocked by lingering bitterness between the Maoists, now a political party, and other parties. Yet missing the deadline could push Nepal into the unknown: The interim constitution expires on May 28 and no one is certain what will happen on May 29 if a new constitution has not been approved.

"The public has put its faith in this new constitution," said Kanak Mani Dixit, the influential editor of the magazine Himal Southasian and the newspaper Nepali Times, who has close ties to Prime Minister Madhav Kumar. "If the constitution is not written on time, it is possible people will lose heart. The Nepali public hasn't had experience in democracy, but they understand it and they have been fighting for it."

The fragility of the situation, and the potential for deepening political instability, has ramifications for the rest of Asia as well. Nepal is a strategic buffer between China and India, and it controls the headwaters of rivers providing water for hundreds of millions of people in the region.

India's military chief and minister of external affairs have paid visits in the past two weeks, as has Patrick Moon, the U.S. diplomat responsible for South Asia. The U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, recently warned that the peace process could collapse.

"The brinkmanship and confrontation between the Maoists and the government, accompanied by a sharp and dangerous hardening of positions, is making a negotiated solution significantly more difficult," Ban warned in the most recent quarterly U.N. update on Nepal. "The country is now entering a crucial period."

In Katmandu, the capital, the deadlock has loosened slightly in recent days. After calling a three-day strike in December that paralyzed the country, Maoist leaders canceled plans for a new, indefinite strike that could have shut down the constitutional debate. Meanwhile, a committee comprising leaders of the three dominant political parties, including the Maoists, has been convened to try to broker a deal.

The immediate pressure point is the effort to integrate the two armies. Under the November 2006 peace agreement that ended the civil war, the Maoists agreed to place their weapons under U.N. monitoring and temporarily station their soldiers in different quarters while politicians negotiated the details of integration. More than three years later, however, the 19,000 soldiers in the Maoist army remain inside the cantonments, still training, after efforts by the United Nations to expedite integration stalled during 2009.

January brought the first small sign of progress. The Maoists agreed to release from the cantonments 4,000 former combatants who had been deemed ineligible for integration into the Nepalese army, including many who fought for the Maoists as minors.

"It was all supposed to be solved within six months," said Kul Gautam, a former top U.N. diplomat now retired to his native Nepal. "Now it has been three years. Finally, something concrete is happening."