A report on a workshop held in New York on 2 - 3 November 2009 at the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations
Teresa Whitfield
February 2010
Executive Summary
This report summarizes a workshop held in New York on 2-3 November 2009 to address the lessons that could be learned from the experience of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), a special political mission established by the UN Security Council in January 2007 initially for a year and since extended through four successive sixmonth periods to January 2010, and then for a further four months.1
The workshop revealed UNMIN to be unusual in several respects. It sought to provide assistance to a peace process that was a national achievement, centered upon a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) reached in November 2006 without international mediation. Against a backdrop of a tendency towards the authorization of UN peace operations with increasingly broad responsibilities, its mandate had only a limited focus, being concentrated on the provision of assistance during a critical election of a constituent assembly to determine the country's political future. The elements of its mandate were the monitoring of arms and armies, technical assistance to the electoral process, and support to the monitoring of the broader aspects of the ceasefire. For a mission with military responsibilities its arms monitoring component was unusually light, consisting of unarmed arms monitors (serving and retired officers) in civilian attire deployed with the cooperation of the parties.
That UNMIN was established at all was a consequence of careful political work by the UN during the three years preceding the signing of the CPA, as well as the successful deployment of an Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Nepal in mid-2005. Both benefited considerably from the persistent work of individuals within the diplomatic community and the efforts of individuals and organizations within Nepali civil society who served as important enablers of their country's peace process. The continuity of personnel involved in the UN effort was noted and UNMIN commended for the high caliber and dedication of its staff. UNMIN was recognized as broadly successful with regard to its core responsibilities for arms monitoring and the provision of assistance to the constituent assembly elections held in 2008.
The workshop also identified a number of challenges the mission had encountered. These included an understanding that while UNMIN had been privileged in the circumstances of its start-up, it had still faced complex bureaucratic hurdles with regard to recruitment and procurement, and as it sought to introduce innovations distinct from usual UN practice. This experience warranted further consideration by UN headquarters with a view to introducing greater efficiency to the planning and launch of future missions.
The limits of UNMIN's mandate and role had been a persistent concern. For a special political mission, UNMIN's mandate was defined too narrowly in technical terms, mainly because of the reservations that India - the regional power and a neighbor with both significant interests in and major influence over Nepal - and some Nepali political actors held about a "political" role for the UN. The narrowly defined mandate emerged as the core weakness of the mission and the source of much ambiguity and confusion about its role.
Participants agreed that the mandate remained poorly understood by Nepali interlocutors. This created a situation in which high expectations of the UN's contribution were inevitably disappointed, even as some of those opposed to a more active UN role pushed back against UNMIN's initiatives. Meanwhile, a central problem for Nepal's peace process, and UNMIN's engagement within it, was an absence of structures to oversee implementation of the commitments agreed to within the CPA. With time, and given the multiple political pressures and processes in which Nepal's political actors had become involved, these commitments had slipped from a central position in the country's political agenda to such an extent that one participant wondered whether it was proper to speak of a peace process at all.
Arms monitoring in Nepal had represented a broadly successful experiment for the UN, yet over time it had suffered from the isolation of the structures established to support it from the wider political process. Further study of UNMIN's experience in this area was encouraged as a means to develop a dedicated UN capacity for arms monitoring. UNMIN's electoral activities, meanwhile, had been complicated by persistent delays of the election as well as ambivalence surrounding the extent to which Nepali interlocutors required the technical assistance that UNMIN provided. Like UNMIN's office of civil affairs (OCA), its electoral assistance office (EAO) struggled to reconcile what one participant described as a "visibility dilemma": a desire for a visible presence at the district level to help build confidence and prevent local conflicts that was countered by concern that a too visible presence suggested unwarranted outside interference. The UN's political good offices were not specifically mentioned in UNMIN's mandate, but such a role is inherent in missions headed by a representative of the Secretary-General. Although some of UNMIN's initiatives in this area encountered resistance, the mission remained able to pursue discreet and useful good offices through bilateral engagement with all sides.
UNMIN made a determined effort to reach out to Nepali society, and particularly its marginalized groups, through its public information strategy, in its own hiring practices and in the work of the OCA. This was facilitated by its establishment of five regional offices in addition to its Kathmandu headquarters. Yet UNMIN faced the constant challenge of "right-sizing" its public information interventions as it pursued a profile appropriate for the size and mandate of the mission.
The OCA encountered particular difficulties in calibrating its role. These were partly a consequence of a lack of an institutional counterpart engaged in ceasefire monitoring, which it was supposed to assist in line with the Nepali wish to keep such monitoring a national responsibility. But its work was also complicated by fragmentation within Nepal's civil society, which proved less robust in its support for the peace agenda than the critical role it played in forcing change through the people's movement, or jana andolan, of April 2006 had suggested would be the case. Several participants expressed regret that UNMIN had not been bolder in its use of its civil affairs' capacity, noting that the information OCA provided to UNMIN headquarters had not been as fully utilized as they had hoped. The work of UNMIN's translation unit, as well as the success of the mission's efforts to promote diverse recruitment, were singled out as being particularly important, representing experience that should be drawn upon in other situations.
UNMIN was not established as an integrated mission or with a mandate for peacebuilding, yet it sought to adopt an integrated approach to its responsibilities and engaged with other actors in the UN system on this basis. Participants described a mixed experience, with different views, for example, expressed on the advantages and disadvantages of the human rights presence remaining outside UNMIN. The development of a peacebuilding strategy had been inhibited by a variety of factors. These had reinforced awareness both of the need for strong leadership from the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) in this area, and of the difficulties inherent in forging a common approach between donors and the national government in a fragile period of transition.
That the workshop took place at a difficult political juncture in Nepal sharpened perception of an increasing disconnect between UNMIN's mandate and role and the challenges now facing the country. Participants noted that UNMIN's original mandate had been designed with the horizon represented by the election of a constituent assembly in mind. The election eventually held in April 2008 had seen the Maoists emerge as the largest party and the end of cooperation among the major parties, had transformed Nepal's political landscape, and with it the context of UNMIN's involvement. Urgent measures needed to be taken to unblock the current political impasse and move forward to the drafting of a new constitution and the integration and rehabilitation of Maoist combatants.
Participants urged UNMIN to be creative in engaging the international community in encouraging such an effort, even as they recognized the limited leverage of UNMIN itself. They also expressed concern that, as UNMIN was in no respect mandated or resourced to address a deteriorating security situation, Nepal's uncertain future put UNMIN's credibility, and that of the United Nations behind it, on the line.