The UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), which is monitoring the country's peace process, began withdrawing Thursday after domestic political squabbling prompted the United Nations to bring it to an end next week, DPA reported.
UN arms monitors and support staff began leaving camps set up for former Maoist guerillas after the 2006 end of Nepal's decade-long civil war. A minimum amount of staff was left behind to continue to monitor the former combatants, officials said.
"We have started to withdraw some of our arms monitors and other staff starting today," mission spokesman Kosmos Biswokarma said Thursday, "but UNMIN will continue to have its presence in Nepal till its last day, which is January 15."
Seventy-two arms monitors from 18 countries are spread out over seven Maoist camps, home to more than 19,000 former fighters, as well as a weapons storage site in a Nepal Army barracks.
Their mission began its work in 2007. Its mandate had been extended six times, but last year, the Maoists, who joined the political process after laying down their arms, and the Nepalese government began bickering over what the job of the UN Mission should be and whether it should monitor the military as well as the former rebels.
The dispute and the resignation in June of the prime minister of Nepal - which continues today under a caretaker administration because the political parties have failed to agree on a new premier - prompted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to say in September that the political parties were unable to share power and the peace process had stalled.
He said the UN Mission had been made a "scapegoat" for the failure of the government and Maoist forces to settle their dispute, and as a result, its mandate was not extended.
During a meeting late Wednesday between caretaker Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the premier flatly refused Dahal's request to place an official plea for the mission's extension before the UN Security Council.
The Maoists' battle to establish a communist state in the Himalayan nation resulted in the loss of nearly 14,000 lives.