Author: Alex Perry Kathmandu
Publication: www.nepal-dia.de
Date: May 13, 2002
URL: http://www.nepal-dia.de/Aktuelle_Lage_/maoisten/pt_return_/pt_return_.html
Nepal's Maoist rebels are murdering,
beating, bombing and looting-all in the name of 'protecting the people'
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 torturers-a crowd of 60 girls and boys
in Maoist uniforms and rebel-red bandannas-grew 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, inspired-according to a former rebel commander-by
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
beheadings-of army and police, and fallen comrades whose identity they
wanted to protect-became 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 infrastructure-power
substations, telephone exchanges, village administration offices, bridges,
clinics, dams, irrigation and drinking-water projects-and 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 bridges-one
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 commander-now
hiding out in the capital after deserting in disgust over the new tactics
-says 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 torture-it 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. Deuba-whose ancestral
country home was torched by the Maoists last month-took 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 Dangol-a carpenter-in
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 areas-currently
about a third of the country-farmers 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.
