TIME ASIA MAY 13, 2002/VOL. 159 NO. 18
ASIA
Return to Year Zero
Nepal's Maoist rebels are murdering, beating, bombing and lootingâall
in the name of 'protecting the people'
BY ALEX PERRY KATHMANDU
http://www.nepal-
dia.de/Aktuelle_Lage_/maoisten/pt_return_/pt_return_.html
Even with knives as sharp as razors, it takes time to skin a man.
After 35 minutes, flesh was hanging from Ram Mani Jnawali's shoulders
and cuts crisscrossed his legs, ribs, arms, hands, ears and chin. His
legs were shattered at the shins, broken stumps marking where the
bones had been smashed across the steps of his house. But he was
still breathing. And yet his teenage tormentors kept questioning
him. "Why don't you leave the Congress party?" screamed one
interrogator. "How much do you earn? Where are your daughters?" But
the 54-year-old, whose only offense was that he belonged to the
ruling Nepali Congress Party, was beyond speech. Eventually his
torturersâa crowd of 60 girls and boys in Maoist uniforms and rebel-
red bandannasâgrew tired. Selecting a sharpened kukri (a small
machete), one of them stepped forward and sliced halfway through
Jnawali's neck in a single blow. And that's how his wife and son
found him, cut to pieces, head partly severed, when they dared to
venture out
into the yard the next morning. No one knew whether he had died of
shock or bled to death, but the pool of blood around his body
suggested the end had been slow.
Despite his grief, Bharat Mani Jnawali understands why his elder
brother's March 13 death faded from the headlines after a day. "This
is a very common method," he says. "It happens to hundreds. They cut
different parts of the body off and then only at the end, they chop
your head. Shooting would be easier, of course, but this is more
intense. It's for the fear." And it's working. When the corpse
arrived in Kathmandu for cremation, Congress leaders came to pay
their respects. To Jnawali, who had seen his brother's wounds, the
sight of him covered in flowers and bound in white was too much. As
the ministers drew near, he brushed aside the orange and purple
blooms and ripped open his brother's burial cloth to show the
butchered body. "I said, 'Look at him. Look at what they did to him.
Look at how your party suffers.' But none of them could look. They
were too afraid."
Terror, Nepal's 10,000 Maoist guerrillas have decided, is the key to
power. When they first launched their revolt six years ago, the
rebels took care to elicit public support with popular campaigns
against corrupt officials, alcoholism, drug use and chauvinism.
Dismissed by the outside world as poorly armed curios from another
time, their message that the elected government had succeeded only in
lining its own pockets since the end of absolute monarchy in 1990
resonated in the Himalayan hills. But lately, the "people's rebels"
have embarked on an altogether bloodier course, inspiredâaccording to
a former rebel commanderâby the tactics of Cambodia's Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge. In November, the Maoists broke off three months of peace
talks with Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba by launching 48
simultaneous attacks on army, police and government installations
across the kingdom. This kicked off a whirlwind of atrocities that
has cost nearly 2,000 lives. Strikes by thousands of Maoists
on isolated security force bases left no survivors. Battlefield
beheadingsâof army and police, and fallen comrades whose identity
they wanted to protectâbecame commonplace. And when 5,000 rebels
attacked two police bases in the midwestern district of Dang on April
11, they press-ganged children and old people from nearby villages to
serve as human shields. The tactic failed: the police and army fired
back indiscriminately, even using a helicopter gunship equipped with
American-supplied night-vision goggles. Ninety-two policemen and
about 100 Maoists died in this, the deadliest battle of the war.
But the horrors on the front line find an equal in the nightmare now
unfolding inside the Maoist heartland. Since November, the Maoists
have instituted a systematic "purification" campaign: to reduce their
territory to chaos and rubble and eliminate all opposition. As well
as crippling and killing government supporters, they have turned
their terror on anyone who might represent stability or an
alternative authority. Postmen, health workers, moneylenders,
landowners, teachers, all have become targets for public floggings or
executions. The guerrillas have executed about 200 people in the past
six months and tortured thousands more. Bands of rebels are also
descending on villages and dragooning a child from each family into
joining their ranks or, in the case of young girls, into becoming sex
slaves for the soldiers. State infrastructureâpower substations,
telephone exchanges, village administration offices, bridges,
clinics, dams, irrigation and drinking-water projectsâand the homes
of the "people's enemies" are being leveled. Their aim, the Maoists
admit, is to achieve Year Zero, a reference to the Khmer Rouge
genocide that was to clear the way for a socialist utopia. "At first,
we just wanted to destroy all the government institutions in the
village," Junge Kuna village leader Ghopal Phandari, 23, told me deep
in rebel territory in Dang. "But then we decided to block any access
to the villages by blowing up bridgesâone time we hit 48 in one day.
Inside our land, we also attack the water projects or cut the
drinking water or hit the electricity supplies because it is
symbolic. We have to make these sacrifices to protect the people."
Teacher Mim Bahadur Khada, 28, tells me from his hospital bed in the
provincial capital Nepalgunj how 20 Maoists surrounded his house in
Surket to the northwest, tied his hands behind his back and demanded
$170, his annual salary. They also said he should tear up the
curriculum and start teaching "practical" education classes, such as
giving instructions on how to sow potato seeds or repair a corn
thresher. When Khada refused, they kicked him, shattered his legs
with a stick packed in a rubber pipe and whipped him with a bicycle
chain before leaving him for dead. "They told me they wanted to
destroy all trace of the government and anything outside the party,"
says Khada. "They told me they wanted to break everything down and
then rebuild from chaos with their own Maoist cadres." Adds a Western
diplomat in Kathmandu: "It's classic Year Zero. Kill or drive away
anybody who could possibly be considered an enemy, break down all
state and social fabric and replace it with fear.In the end
the party is the only thing left." The former rebel commanderânow
hiding out in the capital after deserting in disgust over the new
tacticsâsays the Maoists' strategy is an experiment conducted with
the support of left-wing rebel groups across Asia. Three years ago,
he says, communist guerrillas from India, Bangladesh and the
Philippines met Nepalese counterparts in Kathmandu and resolved to
turn the kingdom into a laboratory for various revolutionary game
plans.
When village leader Phandari describes the Maoist system of
execution, he speaks with the ease of a man freed from the burden of
conscience. First, he says, a villager will lodge a complaint about a
person to the People's Militia, a group of seven to 12 cadres that
patrols the village. "We do not execute them immediately," he
says. "The militia gives notice to the person that they must reform.
We can give three ultimatums. But if they do not change, then we
execute them. Sometimes, we use tortureâit depends on the interests
of the people." The village authorities make a report, which is
passed up to the district party leadership to rule on the punishment
and who should administer it, he says. "We use the kukri, the bullet,
or beat them to death with a wooden stick. It's the party leaders who
decide."
In the nearby village of Pancha Kule, a Maoist leader known as
Commander Hikbat blithely dismisses concerns that innocents are being
killed. "Sometimes what you plan, your intentions, don't always work
out in the field," he says. "One time, we went to attack the police
in the village of Panchakatia and found they were hiding in a house
owned by some local people. We warned the police to surrender but
they did not. So we had to burn the house down and four innocent
people were killed. We take responsibility for that. It just happens
that way sometimes." Phandari, however, has no doubts about the two
people he has seen executed and the 15 he has watched tortured. "They
were all spies," he insists, "enemies of the people."
Shreeram Shankar Yadav, 68, was supposedly one such enemy. A former
Nepali Congress Party chairman in his village of Hasarapur on the
border with India, he refused to pay rebel "taxes" or surrender his
tractor to the guerrillas. In December, he went further, helping his
son and nephew capture two Maoists and take them to a police station.
On Jan. 8, the rebels took revenge. "About 250 of them surrounded the
house," recalls his brother, Bisseswar Yadav. "They came into the
house and tied all the adults' hands. They demanded to know where the
guns were and, when we didn't tell them, they began to kick us and
beat us with iron rods and sticks. While some of them began looting
the house, two men put a wooden box under my brother's legs. As two
men held him down, two others beat his legs, up and down with rods
and sticks until they broke them over the edge. Then they cut him all
over with kukris. All the time they shouted, 'Why do you spy? Why did
you take our comrades to the police?'
Then they asked everyone to be silent and demanded my brother chant
their song, that Mao is the best." After about an hour, says Yadav,
two men laid his brother on the ground, each gripping an iron
rod. "They put one through his stomach and another through his
shoulder." The guerrillas then firebombed the house. Yadav says the
Maoists also beat him, his wife, his sons and his 13-year-old
grandson, Rajman. "They hit me on the head with a wooden stick," says
Rajman. "One of them asked, 'Why are we beating the small one? Maybe
we should get some medicine for his head.' But the woman said: 'No.
Let it bleed.'"
While nobody expects the Maoists to march into Kathmandu and seize
power, the prognosis is grim. Preoccupied with factional fights
within the Nepali Congress Party and in command of a poorly equipped
army of just 45,000, Prime Minister Deuba has little chance of
regaining much land in Maoist hands. All through rebel territory,
police checkpoints, if they exist at all, go unmanned. Deuba came to
power just under a year ago as a peacemaker, promising talks with the
Maoists. But when the guerrillas broke off their truce in November,
he declared a state of emergency and ordered the army into battle.
Deubaâwhose ancestral country home was torched by the Maoists last
monthâtook the collapse of the cease-fire as a personal affront. "I
was betrayed," he says. "I was too lenient. They gave me no option
but to crush them."
Faced with growing opposition within his own party, Deuba gave the
army carte blanche to wipe out the Maoists. I spoke to several young
girls held prisoner in Nepalgunj jail accused of belonging to the
guerrillas' political wing. All told the same story of the police
keeping them blindfolded for weeks, sometimes months, beating the
soles of their feet with plastic piping, then rubbing chili powder
into the wounds. Nor are the security forces above murder. On March
18, a group of 20 policemen arrested five men, including Kanchha
Dangolâa carpenterâin Tokha outside Kathmandu. Four days later
Dangol's body surfaced at a nearby hospital: he had been beaten,
slashed, then shot in the chest and head. The official explanation:
Dangol was killed in an "encounter" with the security forces. Deuba
appears untroubled by such stories. "We will listen carefully to the
complaints and, if there are any mistakes, we will improve," he
says. "But maintaining human rights while trying to control terror
is not an easy job. The army is not superhuman and is not able to
distinguish perfectly who is and who is not a terrorist. Sometimes
there will be mistakes."
Caught between the Maoists and the security forces, tens of thousands
of Nepalese have left their villages and migrated to the cities or to
India. Inside Maoist controlled areasâcurrently about a third of the
countryâfarmers are selling or slaughtering their herds and leaving
their homes. Many are living in hiding, moving from house to house
out of fear of assassination. Thousands of others, too poor to
travel, are forced to stay on and run the gauntlet of oppression from
both sides. One doctor in western Nepal, who asked to remain
anonymous, says he has seen about 150 patients tortured by the
Maoists since November. Ten more had been killed. As for victims of
the army and police, he says they're too scared to seek treatment in
the cities, where the security forces are based. "The people are
trapped between the army and the Maoists," he says. "The Maoists come
to them at night and demand food and shelter. If they refuse, the
guerrillas kill them. But in the morning, the army comes
and kills anyone who has helped the Maoists." In February, the army
accused teacher Jeet Bahadur Khatri Chhetri of aiding the Maoists,
beat him so badly he could not walk for a week, then forced him to
sign a declaration supporting the government. Last month, a neighbor
in the village of Pancha Kule was tortured by the Maoists and
denounced Khatri Chhetri as the man who persuaded him to turn against
them. "So now I am waiting for them to come for me too," says Khatri
Chhetri. "They've already said they will."
A short drive away in one village that I visited, a 50-year-old man
approached me in tears. He and his son had been beaten a few days
before, he said, pointing to the house about 50 meters from his own
where the Maoists lived. They were sure to torture them again, he
said, adding that the rebels were also demanding that a neighbor give
up his 13-year-old daughter to them. Incoherent and distraught, the
man pleaded with me to take him and his son away to the city. When a
Maoist leader came to investigate, we decided to leave rather than
draw suspicion to him. As I climbed into my car, the man held onto my
arm, eyes wide with fear, and hissed in my ear, "Terror. Terror,"
before running back to his house.
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http://www.time.com/time/asia/2004/nepal...story.html
..... a growing insurrection by Maoist rebels, 10,000 fighters whose
ongoing civil war has claimed 7,500 lives in the past two years
alone.
In terms of its daily body count, the Maoist uprising is currently
the deadliest conflict in Asia. It is also the most brutal. While
human-rights groups accuse the 15,000-strong Nepalese paramilitary
police and 72,000-strong Royal Nepalese Army of executing hundreds of
Maoists, the rebels themselves are even more savage. An October 2003
report by relief group Mercy Corps relates how crowds of Maoists
would watch their leaders break every bone in a "class enemy's" body,
then skin him and cut off his ears, lips, tongue and nose, before
sawing the body in half or burning it. The study concluded that
the "almost identical pattern" of such atrocities suggested this
was "a policy coordinated at senior command levels."
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http://www.time.com/time/asia/2004/nepal...ory2.html#
New Delhi's concerns about Nepal have intensified since it emerged
that the Maoists were trying to coordinate with India's own left-wing
guerrillas, intent on creating a "revolutionary zone" combining
Nepal, eastern India and parts of Bangladesh.
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