UN REP. AND BRITISH AMBASSADOR DEALING WITH

C O N F I D E N T I A L KATHMANDU 003062

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/17/2016
TAGS: PGOV PTER MARR PREF UN UK NP
SUBJECT: UN REP. AND BRITISH AMBASSADOR DEALING WITH
NEPAL'S MAOISTS AND PEACE PROCESS


Classified By: Ambassador James F. Moriarty. Reasons 1.4 (b/d)

Summary
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1. (C) On November 15, the UN Secretary General's personal
representative Ian Martin and UK Ambassador Andrew Hall gave
their views on the Maoists, the peace process and challenges
for Nepal to Assistant Secretary Boucher and the Ambassador.
Martin was not willing to wager on the Maoist intentions but
described the UN role as one of setting up structures to
monitor their behavior and test their willingness to comply.
Maoist Supremo Prachanda was well-suited, he thought, for the
media age. Martin stated the passage of a UN Security
Council resolution on arms management/monitoring would be
essential. Assistant Secretary Boucher and Ambassador Hall
discussed the different planned approaches to the Maoists
once they entered an interim government. Bhutanese refugees
were also addressed. End Summary.

What About Maoist Intentions?
--------------


2. (C) Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian
Affairs Richard Boucher met the UN Secretary General's
Personal Representative to the Peace Process, Ian Martin, and
UK Ambassador Andrew Hall on November 15 to discuss the
challenges for Nepal as the Maoists prepared, in theory, to
move into democratic politics. Martin, who has met
frequently with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
leadership since his appointment in October, said he honestly
did not know what Maoist intentions were. He described his
UN Mission's role as setting up mechanisms to monitor Maoist
behavior as their combatants moved into cantonments and
locked up their weapons. The UN planned to test their
willingness to comply. Ambassador Hall described how the
Communist Party of Nepal - United Marxist Leninist had gone
through its own democratic transformation into something
approaching a social democratic party starting with an end to
armed action in the late 1970s. That party, he conceded, had
never been as violent as the Maoists. Or, as the Ambassador
pointed out, as close to gaining total power.

Who Is Prachanda?
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3. (C) Martin said Maoist Supremo Prachanda was an avuncular
former schoolteacher, very different from his deputy Baburam
Bhattarai. Prachanda spoke good English (although it was not
as good as Baburam's) and was good on TV. He was well-suited
for the media age. Ambassador Hall pointed out that, unlike
Baburam, Prachanda had never participated in parliamentary
politics. (Note: Prachanda has said publicly in recent days
that he and Baburam will not participate in an interim
government.) The Ambassador explained that Prachanda and
Baburam had done a role reversal in 2005. In late 2004,
Baburam had openly criticized the Maoist party Chairman for a
failing policy of an armed struggle instead of a negotiated
path to power. Prachanda had taken advantage shortly after
the King's seizure of power in February 2005 to lock Baburam
up and make himself the "good cop" with Baburam henceforth
the firebreathing "bad cop." Martin noted that you never saw
one without the other.

Still Wedded To Old Ideas
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4. (C) Ambassador Hall, who did field research in Nepal in
the late 1970s and was in Kathmandu as the British Deputy
Chief of Mission in the early 1990s, and Martin, who served
from 2005 to 2006 as the head of the Nepal Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, agreed that the Maoists
claimed to be seeking an end to social exclusion. In other
words, they wanted to see an end to the country's domination
by upper-caste Hindu Brahmins and Chettris. The leading
Maoists, however, were also upper-caste Hindus. "Feudalism"
was another one of the Maoists' rallying cries, Ambassador
Hall remarked. In reality, however, modernism had largely
wiped out feudalism in Nepal. As long, however, as there was
a King and his relatives, the Ranas, in place running much of

the business community, the Maoists would continue to rail.
The problem was the Maoists did not have any ideas on whom to
replace the Ranas with. They would face similar challenges,
he noted, in filling the 73-plus seats they were promised in
the interim parliament under the November 8 peace agreement.

Deadline for Formation of Interim Government Can't Be Met
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5. (C) Martin spoke of the many challenges still to be
overcome before the Maoists could enter an interim
government. He said it was obvious that the November 8 peace
agreement's deadline of December 1 would not be met.
Although joint Government-Maoist-UN teams had now visited all
seven divisional sites, there were two that had not yet been
agreed upon. And there were still differences about the
locations of the 21 satellite sites. The Maoists were
proposing that some of these be two hours away from the
divisional sites. This, the Ambassador stressed, was in
violation of the plain wording of the November 8 agreement
which said those sites should be nearby. According to the UN
rep., the infrastructure for the camps, in many cases, did
not exist. Wells would have to be dug. Electric lines laid.
This would, he emphasized, be the responsibility of the two
sides, not the UN. The Maoists, Martin noted, had nowhere
near the 35,000 People's Liberation Army troops they claimed,
but those they did have would have to be registered, fed and
entertained.

Foreign Assistance Available?
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6. (C) Ambassador Hall indicated that EU Ambassadors had
discussed what they could do with the visiting EU troika
earlier in the day. There were a number of expressions of
willingness to contribute, with election monitoring, for
example, but no firm offers. The EU had, Martin remarked, a
Rapid Action Mechanism that had been put to good use in Aceh,
Indonesia, but he said he was not aware of the terms of
reference for that mechanism. Hall also did not know how it
worked. The UN rep. said that one solution was for the
Maoist combatants to do much of the camp construction work
themselves; this would keep them occupied. The Ambassador
replied that Finance Minister Mahat had made the same point
at a donor's meeting the day before.

UN Security Council Action Needed
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7. (C) Martin stated that the UN Secretariat had looked into
the issue and determined that a mission with the functions
and size of Nepal's would require UN Security Council action.
An exchange of letters between the Secretary General and the
Security Council, he said, would not suffice, although that
could start the ball rolling. A UN Security Council
resolution would provide the UN mission with the ability to
tap resources and personnel to staff an arms management and
monitoring mission. A subsequent Security Council resolution
could handle the other aspects of the UN Mission such as
election monitoring. It would have been helpful to have had
more time for the parties to work out the details of the arms
management regime first, with more UN input, but that was not
absolutely necessary. The UN, he said, had already
approached 17 countries (none in South Asia) seeking arms
monitors.

Status of Peace Talks
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8. (C) The UN rep. stated that he anticipated getting a call
at any time from the parties, perhaps in the middle of the
night to come to the hotel where the negotiators were holed
up trying to agree on the comprehensive peace agreement by
the November 16 deadline. He said that Prachanda was
scheduled to leave for the Hindustan Times leadership
conference in New Delhi in the afternoon which added to the
pressure to reach a deal. Prime Minister GP Koirala's nephew
Shehkar Koirala called during the meeting to tell Emboff that
the negotiators had made good progress and still hoped to
reach agreement in time, but that talks would have to resume


on the morning of the 16th.

Dealing With the Maoists
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9. (C) Assistant Secretary Boucher explained that when/if the
Maoists did come into an interim government that the United
States had already made a policy decision to allow necessary
contacts with their ministers. If you had a health issue
which required speaking to the Health Minister, the Embassy
would be authorized to speak with him or her. What the
United States did not want, however, was to see Maoist
ministers using U.S. assistance to build up their party's
standing. Generally speaking, however, the United States,
Boucher stated, would want to see something like six months
of a change in behavior, an end to Maoist violence and
extortion (which we had yet to see) before it would consider
having normal relations with the Maoist party. In contrast,
Ambassador Hall said that the UK intended very soon to begin
having normal relations with the Maoists. The United
Kingdom's view was that it was important to draw the Maoists
in, to give them a chance to prove themselves responsible
once they were in government. A Maoist minister might do a
better job than a Nepali Congress minister. In six months,
if they proved to be a diehard revolutionary party,
Ambassador Hall added, the UK would reconsider. He conceded,
however, that Maoist abuses had gotten worse in recent
months, not better.

The Terai and the Madhesis
--------------


10. (C) Ambassador Moriarty stated in a response to a
question from the Assistant Secretary that another problem
Nepal faced was having too many people on land that could not
support them. It had been obvious on a recent flight he had
taken from Nepal's border region with India, the Terai,
inland to the hills. In the Terai one could see lots of
flatland, suitable for farming, covered in forests, not being
actively utilized. In the hills, the Ambassador said, where
there was not enough land, farmers had cut terraced fields.
The Terai was a complicated mix. On the one hand, a
successful USAID-funded anti-malarial campaign had had the
unintentional consequence of displacing and impoverishing
some of the original malaria-resistant inhabitants of the
Terai. Upper-caste Hindus from the hills had taken their
land. On the other hand, the Ambassador and Ambassador Hall
emphasized, there was a large population of so-called
Madhesis, many of them immigrants from India who had been
agitating for citizenship. The Government of Nepal and the
Maoists had agreed in the November 8 peace deal to grant
citizenship to those born in 1990 or afterwards, which was
generous.

Bhutanese Refugees
--------------

11.(C) Assistant Secretary Boucher, who flew from Thimphu to
Kathmandu November 15, spoke positively about the democratic
changes that the King of Bhutan was in the process of
implementing. He said that they had also discussed the
question of the Bhutanese refugees and their desire for
repatriation. The Assistant Secretary said that he agreed
the Bhutanese had reasonable fears of becoming a minority in
their own country and would not be able to take all the
refugees back, but they could certainly establish a principle
by taking back some. The King had indicated that they had
another 100,000 ethnic Nepalis or so whom they described as
some sort of temporary workers, but he had assured Boucher
there would be no more expulsions. Ian Martin stated that he
had visited Bhutan in 1992 when he was serving as the
Secretary General of Amnesty International. He had conducted

SIPDIS
interviews at that time and it was apparent that most of the
people who had ended up in the refugee camps in Nepal had
come from Bhutan.

Comment
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12. (C) The Government of Nepal and the Maoists have

postponed their deadline of a comprehensive peace deal from
November 16 to November 21. Meanwhile, their other dates,
notably the establishment of an interim government with
Maoist participation, no longer seem feasible. That is the
case, at least, as long as Prime Minister Koirala sticks to
his bottom line that Maoist combatants must be in camps with
their weapons locked up first. With the UK, which is one of
the relatively hawkish members of the EU openly stating that
it plans to deal with the Maoists on a normal basis very
soon, the gap between U.S. and UK policy toward the Maoists
looks likely to widen, not narrow. Nevertheless, post will
continue to engage with the UK and the rest of the EU, as
well as the UN, to maximize what influence the U.S. has to
bring about a peace process that holds the Maoists to account
and creates the possibility of free and fair Constituent
Assembly elections in 2007.


13. (U) Assistant Secretary Boucher has cleared this message.
MORIARTY