Starting Points: Maoists

Showing posts with label Maoists. Show all posts

Apr 6, 2010

Rebel Ambush Kills at Least 73 Indian Officers - NYTimes.com

By JIM YARDLEY

NEW DELHI — India’s campaign against the country’s Maoist insurgency suffered a major setback on Tuesday when rebel fighters ambushed a paramilitary unit on patrol in an isolated forest region, killing at least 73 officers.

The authorities described a carefully executed surprise attack in which the Maoists opened fire as the patrol entered an area seeded with booby-trap bombs. When officers fell to the ground to take cover from gunfire, they detonated the explosives.

“Something has gone very wrong,” said Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, according to the news agency Press Trust of India. “I am deeply shocked.”

He said the attack by the Maoist fighters showed the “brutality and the savagery they are capable of.”

The attack comes as the government is mobilizing security forces against the Maoists in a multistate campaign known as Operation Green Hunt. The Maoists, also known as Naxalites, have existed in India for four decades and claim to represent the interests of the rural dispossessed who have not shared in India’s economic progress. Once lightly regarded by the government, the Maoists have expanded across a large rural corridor and now exercise outright control over some isolated, mountain regions. Maoist propaganda calls for overthrowing the Indian state.

The goal of the government operation is to push the Maoists out of more populated rural areas and isolate them in certain remote mountain regions. Maoist sympathizers have accused the government of brutalizing and killing innocent villagers as security forces sweep through rural areas to root out rebel fighters.

Officials say the Maoists are the ones who brutalize, having disrupted schools and hospitals and destroyed roads in many areas; the security campaign calls for clearing areas of rebels so that government services can be restored.

Image by Shreyans Bhansali via Flickr

By some unofficial estimates, roughly 200 security officers have been killed by Maoists during the past 12 months. The operation involves multiple federal and state security agencies, and some analysts have questioned whether poor coordination and training is exposing officers to danger. On Sunday, Maoists detonated a land mine in the state of Orissa, killing 10 officers and wounding 16 others. Last month, the Maoists blew up a railroad track, forcing the minor derailment of a passenger train. And in February, about 100 Maoists on motorcycles stormed a police outpost in the state of West Bengal, killing 24 security officers.

The attack on Tuesday occurred in the Dantewada region in the state of Chhattisgarh, in an area known as Chintalnar, considered a major Maoist stronghold. The officers were members of the Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary unit, who entered the forest on Sunday night for a two-day mission related to the government operation.

T. J. Longkumar, the Chhattisgarh police inspector general for the larger region, said the officers were returning to camp after an early morning patrol when the Maoists struck around 6:30 a.m. Officer Longkumar said he did not know how many fighters had attacked, but Indian news outlets reported that as many as 1,000 Maoists were involved.

“They were blasted,” Officer Longkumar said. “Most of the casualties were from the explosives.”

He said the attack was probably a response to security forces pressing deeper into isolated areas once completely controlled by the Maoists. “They have regrouped,” he said. “They feel we are entering their core area.”

Saimah Khwaja contributed research.

Oct 31, 2009

Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By JIM YARDLEY

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.”

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.”

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.”

The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Authorities in Chattisgarh then deputized and armed civilian posses, which have been accused by human rights groups of terrorizing innocent villagers and committing atrocities of their own in the name of hunting Maoists. Now, violence is frequent, if unpredictable, like the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra State, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

That morning, following a tip, a police patrol chased two Maoist fighters and stumbled into a trap. Two hundred Maoists with rifles and machine guns lay waiting and opened fire when the officers came into an exposed area of rice paddies. Seventeen officers died, fighting for hours until they ran out of ammunition.

“They surrounded us from every side,” said Ajay Bhushari, 31, who survived the ambush and is now the commanding officer in Laheri. “They were just stronger. They had more people.”

The Maoists felled trees across the only road leading to the village. The police, already wary of using roads because of improvised explosive devices, marched their reinforcements 10 miles through the jungle, arriving too late at the scene.

Officer Bhushari said violence in the area had risen so sharply that the police now left the fortified defenses of their outpost only in large groups, even for social outings. The Maoists also killed 31 police officers from other nearby outposts in attacks in February and May.

“It’s an open jail for us,” he said. “Either we are sitting here, or we are on patrol. There is nothing else.”

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,” said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.”

The Essar plant is part of broader undertaking by the government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Mr. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Mr. Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all. “That alone is not going to help,” he said. “We are not fighting an enemy here. We are fighting citizens.”

With police officers dying in large numbers and Maoists carrying out bolder attacks, the debate around the insurgency has sharpened in India’s intellectual salons and on the opinion pages and talk shows.

The writer Arundhati Roy recently called for unconditional talks and told CNN-IBN that the Maoists were justified in taking up arms because of government oppression. Others who are sympathetic to the plight of the adivasis say the Maoist violence has become intolerable.

“You can’t defend the tactics,” said Mr. Varshney, the Brown University professor. “No modern state can accept attacks on state institutions, even when the state is wrong.”

Local people are caught in the middle. On a recent market day in the village of Palnar, women balancing urns of water on their heads and bare-footed, emaciated men came out of the forests to shop for vegetables, nuts or a rotting fruit fermented to produce local liquor. As peddlers spread their wares over blankets, the nearby government office was locked behind a closed gate.

“It’s a bad situation,” said one villager who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from both sides. “The Naxalite activities have increased. They have their meetings in the village. They tell the people they have to fight. The people here do not vote out of fear.”

Another man arrived on a motorcycle from a more distant village. Several months ago, the police raided his village and arrested more than a dozen people after accusing them of being collaborators. A few were Maoist sympathizers, the man on the motorcycle said, but most were wrongly swept up in the raid. Now, Operation Green Hunt portends more confrontation.

“Life is very difficult,” the man said. “The Naxalites think we are helping the police. The police think we are helping the Naxalites. We are living in fear over who will kill us first.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Jul 29, 2009

Tibetans in Nepal Feel Financial, Political Pressure as Carpet Industry Unravels

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 29, 2009

KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Thinley Sangmo was taught as a young girl in exile how to weave traditional Tibetan carpets. Her grandmother's thick hands would twist and spin spools of sheep's wool to depict the landscape and religious iconography of their homeland: hairy yaks lumbering up snow-swept mountains, puffy clouds and ponds of pink lotus flowers.

By the time she was 14, Sangmo was hunching over an upright loom for more than 12 hours a day. Sometimes she would fall asleep. She wanted to attend school, but as the oldest of seven children and as a Tibetan refugee living without full rights in Nepal, carpet weaving was her best option.

"It's very hard work. At first, I would cry," said Sangmo, now 36, with walnut-colored hair tucked into a bun. "At times, I was angry and sad about it. But I learned to appreciate it. Now, generations depend on these factories. This is all we know how to do."

Yet today her livelihood, and that of thousands of other Tibetan carpet weavers here, is under threat. The global economic crisis has spread to this landlocked Himalayan nation, among the poorest on Earth. Fewer tourists are coming to buy carpets, and tens of thousands of dollars in export orders have been canceled, industry experts say, leading to the closure of more than 500 factories.

The crisis facing Tibetan exiles in Nepal is exacerbated by the country's new government, led by Maoists, who joined the political mainstream in 2006 after waging a decade-long war. As China's influence over the government grows, Tibetans are experiencing a rise in harassment and extortion, more restrictions on their movements and greater difficulty securing education and jobs than ever before, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Campaign for Tibet. An estimated 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal, which has centuries-old cultural and religious ties with Tibet.

"There has been change in the use of language by the Nepalese authorities to describe the Tibetan refugee flow through their country, suggesting a 'law and order' approach rather than the humanitarian approach that has characterized Nepal's treatment of Tibetans over the last decades," said Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet. "As a result of Chinese pressure on the Nepalese government, judicial system, civil society and media, Tibetans in Nepal are increasingly fearful, demoralized and at risk. "

Tibetan business and human rights leaders say that as the global economy worsened, Maoist militias and Nepalese police began "taxing" the Tibetan factories and workers, often through mafia-style shakedowns and threats. For many Tibetans still waiting for legal papers according them some civil rights in Nepal, there is nothing they can do to fight back as factories are forced out of business.

"The carpet industry is an economic and cultural lifeline for thousands of Tibetans and Nepalese," said Tinley Gatso, a Tibetan community leader in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital. "It was our culture, our art. When Nepal took us in, it was our big gift to Nepal. But now, so many carpets factories are closing. It's a very sad time, a worrying time."

Nepal is home to the world's second-largest Tibetan exile community after India. Buddhist prayer flags flutter along Kathmandu's alleyways and in its markets. Some of the world's most celebrated stupas -- whitewashed temples resembling enormous birthday cakes crossed with spaceships -- draw Buddhist monks and nuns and foreign tourists to the city's crowded squares. Recordings of the Buddhist mantra "Om mani padme hum," played by shopkeepers, echo through the narrow streets.

Since a wave of protests against Chinese rule that began in Tibet in March 2008, Nepal has been under increasing pressure from Beijing to take sterner measures against pro-Tibet demonstrations here, according to diplomats, government officials and human rights workers. A recent press statement by Nepal's Ministry of Home Affairs appears to support the tougher stance: "Nepal stands firm not to allow any external forces to use its soil against its neighbors and it sticks to its One China policy."

China accuses the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader, of trying to split Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India, has said that although he desires greater autonomy for Tibet, he does not advocate independence.

The squeezing of Tibetans in Nepal is most vividly apparent in the carpet business.

Khamsum Wangdu is one of the biggest Tibetan carpet manufacturers in Kathmandu. He once had four factories that employed 600 people. Now he's down to one factory and 20 workers. The economic downturn and the official demands for "fees" have affected his business, he said.

"We need the international community to help us," the burly businessman said. "Instead of giving the Dalai Lama gold medals, why not focus on helping Tibetan people with the recession and all of the political instability and pressure here in Nepal? The Dalai Lama is happy when his people are happy."

Thumbing his prayer beads, Wangdu said he was once proud that he was able to employee Tibetans and Nepalese in his factories. But on a recent day, in the single factory he still operates, only half the looms were in use.

In the half-finished factory built of brick and tin, women sat cross-legged at a vertical loom. Deftly, they wielded iron rods and scissors to stretch and trim the woven pattern. Hammers were used to separate the fibers, forcing out dirt.

The factory also doubles as a day-care center. One woman breast-fed her 2-month-old daughter during a break. Children raced in and out. Others bathed around a borehole outside, shampooing their hair with buckets of water.

"So many of my friends in carpet weaving have already lost their jobs," said Sanu Mayalama, 35, whose husband recently lost his job in a TV factory in Malaysia. "My parents are still living in the mountains. They are so poor. We need this income."

Tibetan carpet weaving dates to the 7th century, when the carpets were used as horse saddles. In the past, monasteries were the weavers' main clients. That began to change in the 1970s, when trekkers and mountain climbers descended on Nepal and began to take an interest in carpets. There was a separate boom in the late 1980s, when Tibet's struggle for independence became an international cause. Today, the carpets are sold in tourist markets, along with Tibetan religious paintings, prayer lamps, brass bowls and T-shirts embroidered with the words "Yak Yak Yak, Nepal."

On a recent morning, Sangmo sat in her neighborhood, where many Tibetan exiles live. Some mentioned that it was the Dalai Lama's 74th birthday but that their celebrations and religious ceremonies had been canceled. Sangmo's family, like many others here, fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama in 1959 after a failed revolt against Chinese rule.

Sangmo sat next to her grandmother, who had been a yak herder in Tibet before she moved to Nepal and learned the carpet-making craft. Both women said they worried that many people in the neighborhood will lose their jobs in the industry in the next few months.

"It's all we have," Sangmo said. "We are lost without carpet-making."