Nepal's leaders meet to avert crisis

Nepal's ruling parties were Thursday locked in urgent talks with opposition leaders to try to resolve disagreements over an extension of parliament, which is due to expire this week. Nepal's parliament was elected in 2008 to fulfil the terms of the peace agreement that followed a long civil war and to draft a new constitution, but it has been unable to complete either task despite a one-year term extension. On Saturday, the three-year term of the parliament, or Constituent Assembly (CA), will come to an end, threatening to plunge the troubled country into a legal limbo. The coalition government has put forward a bill to prolong the parliament's life by a further 12 months, but the main opposition Nepali Congress (NC) party has said it will only vote for the bill if certain conditions are met. "We will not support the extension of the Constituent Assembly's tenure under the current circumstances," Ram Sharan Mahat, a senior leader of the centrist NC party, told AFP. "We want to ensure that the extension will lead to the completion of the constitution-drafting process. We don't want a repeat of last year's extension, which was agreed but did not result in any progress." Mahat said his party wanted the Maoists -- the junior partner in the ruling coalition -- to surrender their weapons to the state before it would agree to support a fresh extension, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass. The Maoists fought a bloody, decade-long insurgency against the state before agreeing to lay down their arms under a 2006 peace agreement and transforming themselves into a political party. After the conflict ended, thousands of former Maoist fighters were placed in camps around the country, where their weapons were kept in locked containers under the supervision of UN monitoring teams. Officially, the weapons still belong to the Maoists, even though they can no longer use them, and the NC says they should be handed over to the state -- one of several conditions the former rebels have not yet agreed to. A spokesman for President Ram Baran Yadav said he had urged the leaders of all three parties -- the ruling Maoist and UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and the opposition NC -- to reach agreement. His comments came after UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday expressed concern about the situation in Nepal, urging the parties to "show leadership and carry out the necessary compromises to preserve the peace process".