Maoist fighters to enter Nepal government. posted by Richard Seymour

The Nepalese government is to dissolve parliament and set up an interim government that will include the country's Maoist rebels.
The move was announced in the capital, Kathmandu, after landmark talks between rebel leader Prachanda and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala.

Prachanda said he wanted the new government set up within one month.

Friday's talks in Kathmandu were the first such meeting between the government and the rebels.

The deal certainly doesn't include the demand to get rid of the King, which was crucial to the revolutionaries' demands, but it is significant that the government has felt it necessary to bring them into a power-sharing arrangement - it is also significant that this is exactly what the 'international community', most recently the EU, has been urging the government to do. I suspect that some will see this as a sell-out, but my guess is that their moderation at this stage has to do with them reaching the limits of their strategy of rural mobilisation. The limited role of the working class in their purview meant that they did not mobilise among or connect with the uprisings in the urban centres, particularly Kathmandu.

Now, the demonstrations are ongoing. Earlier this week, students were out protesting about the Prime Minister's suggestions that Gyanendra could stay on as a 'ceremonial' monarch. Nepalis aren't having it - the abolition of the cruel, corrupt and theiving monarchy has been a central demand of the movement since its latest inception. Only when this form of political power is destroyed can they begin to get land reform, redistribution of wealth and socialism.