REFUGEE

KATHMANDU: In an unusual turn of events, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose government this year crushed a nearly three-decade-old

Tamil insurgency, arrived in Nepal on Thursday and held a 30-minute-long discussion with Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, whose guerrilla army led a successful 10-year-old civil war in the Himalayan nation.

After the meeting in the tightly guarded Soaltee Crowne Plaza hotel in Kathmandu, where Rajapaksa is staying with his wife, Shiranthi Rajapaksa, Prachanda told the media that his party wished to learn from the Sri Lankan experience in the wake of the LTTE movement, especially about the rehabilitation of the Tamil Tigers.

Prachanda's Maoist party is currently at loggerheads with the coalition government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal over the rehabilitation of over near 20,000 combatants of the People's Liberation Army, who want to join the national army but are being opposed by the army as well as some of the ruling parties. The delay in the rehabilitation as well as the Maoist failure to discharge child soldiers, has caused the UN to express repeated concern especially as the UN agency supervising the PLA faces the end of its tenure in January.

From November 1, Prachanda's party, once underground like the LTTE, has announced it would start anti-government protests, including a day-long blockade of Kathmandu valley and the country's only international airport, in a bid to force the dissolution of the ruling alliance and form a new one under their leadership.

Prachanda also said that his party was interested in learning about education and healthcare from Sri Lanka.

Rajapaksa, whose May visit in Nepal had to be terminated abruptly due to the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, has returned to Nepal to undergo the abandoned visit to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. He will fly to the southern city Friday to inaugurate a monastery in Lumbini built by the Sri Lankan government.

The 70-member jumbo delegation will return to Colombo on Saturday.