Nepal's political crisis:

Maoist fighters in limbo

As a commander in Nepal's Maoist army, Ram Lal Roka Magar led his soldiers in more than 50 battles against the state security forces.

But for the past four years, the 38-year-old father of two has been biding his time in a military cantonment in a remote part of western Nepal as he waits for the country's warring politicians to decide his fate.

Magar is one of thousands of former fighters in the Maoist People's Liberation Army (PLA) still living in UN-monitored cantonments set up across the country after the war ended in 2006.

The arrangement was intended as a temporary solution pending a merger of the PLA and the national army.

But it has dragged on because the Maoists, now the main opposition party, and their political rivals have been unable to reach agreement on the issue.

The former fighters are free to leave whenever they want, and thousands have drifted away in the intervening years, ditching their PLA uniforms to return home to their families.

But thousands more have chosen to stay in the cantonments, where they still wear their PLA uniforms and take part in military training, and they are growing increasingly frustrated.

"We didn't fight with the PLA just to go back home and become farmers again," Magar told AFP at the Dahaban cantonment in far western Nepal.

"I missed seeing my children grow up. We have all sacrificed so much time and energy for this cause, and we are trained fighters. I am a military commander - where would I go, if not into the army?"

Integration is regarded as the key to lasting peace in Nepal four years after a bloody civil war that began in 1996 as a rebel movement to oust the monarchy and went on for 10 years, killing at least 16,000 people.

But the army, a bastion of Nepal's former ruling elite, has proved fiercely resistant to the idea of accepting into its ranks a group of people it once fought against and still sees as politically indoctrinated. Army Chief Chhatra Man Singh Gurung warned this year that wholesale integration of the PLA combatants could damage his 96,000-strong force, which is planning to recruit new members in contravention of the peace agreement.

A cross-party committee set up to settle the problem has not met for months, and the issue has been firmly on the backburner since the collapse of the government in June.

"The peace process will not be completed until these former combatants are rehabilitated and integrated," said Kul Chandra Gautam, a former UN assistant secretary-general who now advises Nepal's caretaker government on such issues.

AFP