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Nepal's king faces exile or execution: Maoist chief

Posted on: Monday, 13 February 2006, 00:12 CST

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."

Source: REUTERS

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