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Surendra Phuyal in Kathmandu
The underground Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist has invited King Gyanendra for peace talks, indicating a desire to end a bloody rebellion plaguing the Himalayan kingdom.
Prachanda, chairman of the CPN-M, made the offer in a public statement that appeared on Friday, three weeks after King Gyanendra sacked a democratically elected government led by Sher Bahadur Deuba.
But he also warned the rebellion might continue indefinitely if the king did not agree to hold an all-party meeting to form a new constitution and end the insurgency.
The nearly seven-year-old Maoist insurgency is modeled after Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement.
In the statement Prachanda presented the monarch two options. "We think that there are two ways that could provide us an exit from the present situation: first, the issue of formation of the constituent assembly and new constitution through talks between our party, and all the other major political parties of the country including the intellectuals and the king. For this, the king needs to demonstrate the kind of sacrifice which could ultimately benefit the nation and the people.
"Second, the people at large would be left with no option but to go ahead with our decisive and historic struggle if the king continues with his reactionary stubbornness and deploys Royal Nepal Army to suppress the people."
Like most parties that reappeared in the Nepal's political spectrum after the popular and prolonged movement of 1990 that restored multiparty polity, CPN-M has castigated the king's sudden assumption of executive powers through the October 4 televised address.
A week later, on October 12, the Hindu monarch put together a handpicked government headed by Lokendra Bahadur Chand.
The Maoist party, which is active in more than two-dozen districts mainly in the hills of west and east Nepal, went underground in February 1996, vowing to overthrow monarchy and establish a republican state.
Over 5,000 people, most of them Maoists, have died in the 'people's war' since then.
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