A team of experts from Norway, who arrived in Kathmandu on Sunday to help solved the armed conflict of Nepal, said they were here to build confidence between the warring groups for negotiation.

Addressing a seminar organised jointly by the Nepal Council of World Affairs and the Norwegian Embassy in the capital on Sunday, the peace initiators stressed the role of civil society in resolving the conflict of the country. They also stressed the importance of a third party to build confidence between the two warring groups to sit for peace talks.

Reports quoted Fredrik Arthur, currently a counselor at the Norwegian mission to the United Nations in Geneva, as saying that government has to rule according to the will of the people and that the rebels are part of its citizens whose issues have to be addressed by the state. The state should be more responsible than the insurgents, he added.

Another member of the team, Tore Hattrem, who is the deputy Director General at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, said the country and the people in responsible positions should identify and address the needs of all armed and non-armed parties in the conflict.

He added that the agitating political parties should also come to the negotiating table. Hattrem further said internal armed conflicts are very difficult to solve and that the conflict won’t end with an armed takeover of the state. It lingers in the society in the countryside, he added.

Addressing the seminar, Norwegian ambassador to Nepal, Tore Toreng, said Norway was ever ready to work for negotiations in Nepal if it is invited by both the warring groups.

Toreng said that there should be willingness in both the warring groups to solve the conflict. It’s up to Nepal to decide what sort of help it wants, the ambassador added.

Norway has been playing an important role in peace negotiations in Sri Lanka and has repeatedly said that it was willing to help Nepal in negotiations. The government has been refusing involvement of third party for negotiations in Nepal’s conflict. The royalists say the involvement of a third party is foreign interference. The Maoists, on the other hand, have said that they were interested in laying down arms in presence of a reliable third party.