KATHMANDU: The meeting of the Special Committee (on supervision, integration and rehabilitation of Maoist combatants) scheduled for today was put off again after Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal, who heads the panel, took ill.
“As PM Khanal was running a fever, today’s SC meeting had to be put off,” said PM’s press adviser Surya Thapa.
It is the fifth SC meeting postponement in a row. The SC was supposed to meet every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday following the latest renewal of the Constituent Assembly tenure by three months.
Earlier meetings of the SC were called off because of the Maoists’ absence and lack of consensus on integration and rehabilitation issues.
The SC has adopted a timebound calendar, which demands handing over of Maoists’ arms and categorisation of all combatants into two groups — integration or rehabilitation — by August 27.
Of late, the Maoists have refused to execute the understanding regarding arms handover, claiming that integration and rehabilitation process will not gain momentum before August 31, when the renewed tenure of the CA expires.
Snail’s-pace in the integration process has marred the hiring of 120 surveyors for profiling and categorisation of the combatants.
The SC Secretariat already collected forms from applicants, but could not select the surveyors in the wake of parties’ failure to reach an understanding regarding integration modality, number, rank, and rehab packages.
“Without the agreement, we could not deploy survey teams,” said Sanadan Prasad Kurmi, a Secretariat member from the Madhesi Janaadhikar Forum-Nepal.
The Cabinet has decided to recruit surveyors for only three months.
The SC Secretariat has not appointed surveyors fearing that the categorisation process could take longer than three months.
As per the calendar, the SC had to decide on such issues by June 19 and should have deployed the surveyors to the cantonments by June 27.
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