Both Curzon and I are very skeptical if not downright cynical towards the latest events in Nepal. Despite the King’s abdication and a shakey ceasefire, things aren’t as they seem. The following BBC article takes note of several developments yet fails to see the big picture.

Maoists strive to win hearts and minds

Four months into the ceasefire in Nepal, Maoist rebels and the army are preparing to be confined in camps under United Nations monitoring. The Maoists are refusing to disarm completely. Indeed, there are fresh reports of them abducting and even killing people in some places. But in other locations they are on a drive to win ordinary people’s hearts and minds. They have also started building camps in their own favoured locations.

Building camps? Surely innocuous business.

“The current ceasefire requires a place for us to be together,” says Comrade Seetal, the brigade’s commissar or senior political figure.

[...] the UN monitoring plan will confine the rebels and their big weapons to camps, it does not embrace the smaller weapons held by the Maoist militia (equivalent to their police) or other militias.

In the village camp, the Maoists are filling their leisure time. There are regular literacy classes for their own less educated troops. In the evening light after the rain, a volleyball match.

Given that the Maoists already control a good portion of the country, the current ceasfire gives them de facto rule over it and an opportunity to consolidate control, reorganize and regroup not to mention train soldiers. The situation sounds eerily familiar to Lebanon. In keeping with Mao’s stages of guerilla war, the Maoists are now turning themselves into a conventional army to make the final push into the capital. Like the many so-called ceasefires and agreements during Vietnam, this one is nothing more than a ploy.

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