Nepal’s king faces exile or execution: Maoist chief

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Nepal’s King Gyanendra will
ultimately be exiled or executed because he has closed the door
to any political compromise since seizing absolute power a year
ago, the reclusive leader of the country’s Maoist rebels said.

“The king has taken steps that do not give any room for
compromise,” Prachanda told the BBC in an interview broadcast
on Monday. “It would be correct to say that the path that he
has taken is the road to hell.”

The Maoists have been fighting since 1996 to overthrow the
world’s only Hindu monarchy and install communist rule, a
revolution that has killed more than 13,000 people and
shattered the tourism-and-aid dependent economy.

Prachanda, who has lived an underground existence for more
than two decades, last year forged a loose alliance with the
main political parties to topple the king and restore
democracy.

“I believe that it (Nepal) will be a republic state in less
than five years,” Prachanda said in the interview, which the
BBC said was the first he had ever given for television.

“The king, I think, will either be executed by the people’s
court or he might be exiled. For the king, today’s Nepal has no
future. We don’t see a future for him and the Nepali people
don’t either. The king might be finished or he might leave.”

It was not clear where the salt and pepper-bearded
Prachanda, who was wearing a Western jacket and an open-neck
shirt, was interviewed. Sitting against a black background, he
spoke in Nepali through an interpreter.

MILD-MANNERED, SHY

BBC reporter Charles Haviland said the face of Prachanda,
whose name is a nom-de-guerre meaning ‘The Fierce One’, was
until a few weeks ago known only through a single photograph
taken in rural Nepal in 2001.

“The 52-year-old man I met … was mild-mannered, shy,
joking, laughing nervously — more humorous than intimidating
and without the overt charisma of some revolutionary leaders,”
Haviland said on the BBC’s Web site
(www.bbcnews.com/southasia).

Asked if the Maoists could take Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu,
by force, Prachanda said they had originally thought they
could.

“But later, when countries like the U.S. the U.K. and India
started supporting the royal army militarily against our
people’s war and the revolt of the Nepali people, that …
posed some difficulty,” he said.

“Today’s reality is to move forward both politically and
militarily, with a balance of the two.”

He said the Maoists’ recent commitment to multi-party
democracy was not just a tactic, as some have charged, and he
was not pressing to become head of state himself.

“If need be, and if necessary for the Nepali people, I am
of course ready for it. But I also want to clarify that from
the lessons of the 20th-century communist states we want to
move to a new plane in terms of leadership, where one person
doesn’t remain the party leader or the head of state.”

Prachanda, who studied at an Indian university, said he was
saddened by the deaths of children in Nepal’s conflict but
denied the Maoists deliberately recruited children as soldiers.

Last year, the European Union slammed the Maoists for using
children as soldiers. Prachanda said this was not true.

“In village militias it might be true but in the People’s
Liberation Army, that’s not the situation,” he said.

The Maoist leader, who is reported to have drawn
inspiration from Peru’s Shining Path rebels, said his group was
not actively supporting left-wing extremists in neighboring
India.

“We do not have a working relationship with the Maoists (in
India),” he said. “Since they are communists and we are
communists, we have an ideological relationship.”