Nancy, Prachanda's dialogue centers Maoist grant on US programme

The United States has cleared that the meeting which US envoy to Nepal Nancy J Powell had with Maoist chairman Prachanda held a week ago were focussed on getting confidences from the Maoists that the new goverment would not do anything to change or obstruct the US programmes supporting Nepal.

In a State Department briefing Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey in an answer to a question said, " The meeting (between Powell and Prachanda ) was principally to focus on and to gain assurances that the humanitarian programs that we have in Nepal, which are focused through nongovernmental organizations rather than the government, would, in fact, be honored and not interfered with.”

“We were pleased to get a response that they did not intend to do anything to block or otherwise obstruct these programs” Casey added.

Stating that the relationship with the Nepal Government will be based on the actions of the individual here, Casey said, whether or not the legal issues involved and the changes that have occurred in the government there are such that it would warrant a change in the status of that party on the terrorism exclusion list is, again, to get back to something I said earlier, something you can get a lot of lawyers in the room together and argue about. But the basic fact is we have many ways in which we are trying to provide support to the people of Nepal, and our principal concern in this meeting was to assure ourselves that the new government was not going to do anything to change or otherwise obstruct those programs."

He also added that the Maoists in Nepal never have been a “foreign terrorist organization,” as designated. They have, however, been on the “terrorist exclusion list.”

That is something that applies to consular issues, visas and other kinds of matters, Casey added.