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Nepal's
diplomatic scale tilts towards China
Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:43:34 PM,
Sudeshna Sarkar,
IANS
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Kathmandu:
Nepal's diplomatic scale continues to tilt towards Beijing with an
unending procession of high-level visits to the Middle Kingdom
despite ruling parties and the opposition Maoists maintaining they
want to keep equidistance between their giant neighbours, China
and India.
While Nepal's peace process remains in the doldrums with the
former Maoist guerrillas refusing to disband their underground
army, nearly a dozen "commanders" of their People's Liberation
Army (PLA) and lawmakers are on a nine-day visit to China.
These include two former deputy chiefs of the PLA, Barsha Man Pun
Ananta and Janardan Sharma Prabhakar. Both are sitting Maoist MPs
while Sharma is also the former Maoist peace and reconstruction
minister.
Ananta's wife Onsari Ghartimagar, also a Maoist lawmaker, is
member of the team that includes PLA spokesman Chandra Prakash
Khanal Baldev.
The Nagarik daily, which broke the news Thursday, said that though
the Maoist party said the 11 were on a personal visit, they had
met officials of the Communist Party of China as well as Chinese
army officials in Beijing and Shanghai.
Both Ananta and Prabhakar are members of the special committee
that was formed to facilitate the disbanding of the PLA. With the
two Maoist MPs on "vacation", the special committee has not met
even though time is running out for Nepal.
The delay is worrying the UN that is involved in the peace
process.
After Nepal's ruling parties and the Maoists signed a peace
agreement in 2006 to end the decade-old communist insurgency, the
UN was asked to help by monitoring the arms and combatants of the
Nepal Army as well as the PLA.
The UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), the UN agency mandated to monitor
both the forces, is to exit Nepal after Jan 15, 2011, and a
concerned UN has been repeatedly asking Nepal to speed up the
discharge of the PLA.
Nepal remains without a government since June when Prime Minister
Madhav Kumar Nepal was forced to resign due to Maoist pressure.
Since then, the parties have been unable to elect a new premier
despite 12 rounds of election. Now the Maoists, the largest party
in parliament, have threatened to prevent the caretaker government
from tabling the new budget.
The threat to plunge Nepal into a dire financial crisis is a
pressure tactic to make the ruling parties support the Maoists
form a new government under their leadership. The Maoists have
also threatened not to discharge the PLA till their demand is met.
While the peace process languishes, Prachanda is heading towards
China Friday for his fourth visit in two years. He was invited by
the Chinese government to attend the Shanghai Expo 2010.
Nepal's Vice-President Parmananda Jha also leaves for the Shanghai
Expo Thursday while President Ram Baran Yadav will go end of this
month.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)
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