Nepal gets new leader, but future still jittery - Christian Science Monitor

Kathmandu, Nepal

Nepal got a functioning prime minister after seven months of leadership vacuum on Thursday, but analysts refused to call it a breakthrough and remained jittery about the future of the country’s stalled peace process.

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Jhala Nath Khanal, the chief of a moderate communist party, Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), was elevated to the post after 16 rounds of voting. He got last-minute backing from the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which fought a 10-year war against state forces until 2006.

While a step forward after months of embarrassing votes, the formation of a government is just a small step toward political stability in Nepal, which confronts the serious challenges of settling the future of some 19,000 Maoist combatants and drawing up a new constitution. And analysts say that the new coalition threatens to cause a left-leaning polarization and an escalation of ambitions of the Maoists, who are now in a position to oust the new prime minister at will.

The previous government was backed by the moderate Nepali Congress party and several ethnic parties, making it less receptive to Maoist demands. Those demands include radical land reforms, subservience of the judiciary to the legislature, and a constitutional provision of banning "antinationalist’" political parties.

Mr. Kanal is considered far more sympathetic to Maoist agendas.

“The coalition might trigger a fragmentation in Nepal’s politics,” warns Yubaraj Ghimire, political commentator and former editor of the Kathmandu Post. “Depending on how the Maoists behave, a tussle between Nepal Army and democratic forces on the one side, and the ruling coalition on the other side, is possible,” he adds.

Others are even gloomier in their assessment.

“The only achievement of Thursday’s election is that the parliament replaced a caretaker prime minister with a functioning prime minister,” says Bhimarjun Acharya, a columnist and constitutional lawyer. “I don’t expect the formation of a new government to inject any momentum into the constitution writing effort."

The Nepali Congress party said on Friday that it felt betrayed by UML forming an alliance with the Maoists. The previous government was supported by the Nepali Congress, which had expected UML to support to their prime ministerial candidate.

The future of ex-combatants and a new constitution was supposed to have been resolved by last May. But a power struggle that has gripped the country since a special assembly was elected in April, 2008, hindered progress.

The assembly’s life was extended, and just four months remain before the extended deadline expires. A UN mission that was monitoring the combatants, who are corralled in 28 camps, left the country Jan. 15.

Mr. Acharya, the lawyer, terms Thursday’s surprise coalition announcement unnatural. “It was just an expression of anger and frustration of the Maoists. After being unable to gather support for getting elected himself, Maoist chairman Prachanda wanted to teach India a lesson by elevating someone not favored by India to power,” he says.

Prachanda admitted while addressing the parliament on Thursday that he had decided to withdraw his own candidacy and support Khanal to prove that Nepal can make its own decisions, a clear reference to Indian influence (often termed here as interference) in Nepal’s politics.

His support could complicate Khanal's ability to function. Khanal's UML party leadership is dominated by liberal communists who do not want to promote the Maoist agenda. Khanal will face the twin challenge of tempering the liberals in his own party and continuing to get support of the Maoist party.

Narayan Wagle, editor-in-chief of Nagarik, a leading Nepali daily, echoed similar concerns in an opinion piece published Friday. “The success of the new government will depend on whether the Maoists use Mr. Khanal as their puppet," he wrote, "or help him complete the peace process and constitution writing.”

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Three possible scenarios for Egypt's future - Washington Post

As the Egyptian political crisis grows more violent and uncertain, analysts have begun to turn to historical parallels for answers. Will an Islamist movement or a new strongman - or both - emerge to seize control, in an eerie repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution? Or will Egypt's secular tradition and powerful military allow for a messy transition to democracy, as happened in Indonesia in 1998? Or will it be something in between, such as the initial outcome of the Romanian revolution of 1989?

Even in the age of Twitter, the final result will probably not be known for weeks. It took four months for the shah of Iran to leave after the shooting of demonstrators led to popular outrage. In Egypt, no real move to democracy can be assured until several changes in law and the constitution are enacted. The next presidential election is now scheduled for September, but a careful process of reform would be needed to ensure a transition to democracy.

Among the key changes required: altering Article 76 of the constitution, which imposes onerous requirements that effectively prevent any opposition candidate from running for the presidency; lifting the emergency law that empowers the security services to detain without charge anyone deemed a threat to the state; reinstating judicial supervision of elections, including the presence of judges at every polling station; and making sure the machinery of the state (such as television) is in the hands of more neutral people than the ruling party.

Those reforms, of course, would not ensure a result that is beneficial to U.S. interests. Drawing from history, here are the three possible scenarios most discussed by analysts.

The Iranian outcome

Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak today, was an anchor of U.S. power in the Middle East who maintained relations with Israel. He was socially progressive, with a largely secular approach. But when he was ousted in a popular revolution, a theocratic clique led by the long-exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power and smothered a movement originally led by students and moderates. Moreover, the outcome was deeply damaging to the United States, with Iran the major backer of anti-Israeli militants in the region.

The parallel is imperfect - there is no Egyptian spiritual or religious leader living in Paris awaiting a triumphant return to Cairo - but some experts are concerned about the possibility of an Egyptian Islamist movement grabbing the reins of the uprising. The Muslim Brotherhood has long been an illegal but semi-tolerated force in Egyptian politics.

Mubarak clamped down on moderate opposition forces and used the Muslim Brotherhood as a foil to fend off Western demands for greater freedoms. "If they do gain control, it's going to be almost impossible for the people to take it back," says former State Department official Leslie Gelb, referring to the Brotherhood. Ian Johnson, a journalist who has written on the movement, quoted its former leader as saying he "still wants to impose Islamic law, or sharia, in Egypt, but says he would do so slowly, building up support at the grass-roots level rather than imposing it from above, as was done in Iran."

Others discount the Muslim Brotherhood's strength, however. Anthropologist Scott Atran says it can count on only 100,000 adherents out of a population of more than 80 million.

The Indonesian outcome

In 1998, President Suharto's 32 years of authoritarian rule came to an end. He was another longtime U.S. ally whose departure was deeply feared in the White House. But in the end, the world's most populous Muslim country made a messy and long transition to democracy - and remained a key partner of the United States.

Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points to Indonesia's experience as a more likely scenario for Egypt than the Iranian outcome, though he warns that the path will still be difficult. But there are similarities between Egypt and Indonesia: a relatively secular tradition, a strong military that has (thus far) refused to repress protesters, and an uprising led by a mix of youth and civic society.

Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch also thinks the Indonesia scenario is more likely than an Iranian outcome, because the restoration of political freedom in Egypt would allow more moderate political forces to emerge, just as in Indonesia, with the military possibly helping to provide stability during the transition.

The Romanian outcome

Romanian revolutionaries overthrew dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 - and killed him - but within months the military and Communist elite had engineered their survival, with the designated president, a former ally of Ceausescu's, winning 85 percent of the vote in a May 1990 election

Egypt's security services - army, paramilitary, National Guard and the like - are about 1 million strong. It is quite possible that the country's ruling elite would slowly squeeze the life out of the opposition by making Mubarak a transitional figurehead and enacting a few cosmetic reforms that give the illusion of change. State control of the media would not be lifted, and elections would still be manipulated to ensure the election of a president beholden to the current power structure.

What saved Romania in the end was that it wanted to become a member of NATO and the European Union, and so eventually a more democratic system of government emerged. But such incentives are not currently available for Egypt.

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