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Himalayas threatens to engulf southern Asia
CRESCENT OF CONFLICT: Flashpoints of a region in turmoil

Observer Worldview

Luke Harding
Sunday May 12, 2002
The Observer

It was, by any standards, an unpleasant form of death for the few terrified 
survivors hiding among the ruins of an army camp in the remote village of 
Gam.
The Maoists had emerged from Nepal's scented pine forests late on Tuesday 
night. They were not in a mood to dispense mercy. 'The male Maoists held the 
officers down. The women Maoists then slit their necks using sickles,' Kapil 
Shrestha, of Nepal's Human Rights Commission said. 'The women soldiers bear 
far more grudges. Most of them have been raped by the police or their 
families have been killed by the security forces.'

The battle in the remote western area of Nepal was merely the latest in a 
series of gruesome encounters between the kingdom's rampant Maoist 
guerrillas and government forces. Over the past week nearly 1,000 people 
have been killed - a fact eclipsed by the blanket coverage of the far lesser 
carnage in the Middle East.

The violence now threatens to engulf the entire Himalayan region, from 
Afghanistan to Pakistan through India, Kashmir and Tibet.

In India, an increasingly aggressive Hindu nationalist government has done 
virtually nothing to stop the slaughter of Muslims by Hindu gangs. More than 
2,000 Muslims have died over the past two-and-a-half months in riots in the 
prosperous western state of Gujarat. Intelligence reports circulating in 
Washington and London, meanwhile, warn of a summer-long conflict between 
India and Pakistan in Kashmir, where Islamic militants have been fighting a 
separatist battle for 12 years.

In Tibet, revolt is stirring too. After a series of mysterious explosions, 
the Chinese authorities recently arrested a senior Tibetan monk, Tenzin 
Deleg Rinpoche. Almost unnoticed, the region is sliding into turmoil.

In Nepal, the Maoist rebels have been battling the government for six years. 
Outsiders dismissed them as an eccentric throwback to an earlier era, but 
over the past four months the Maoists have dramatically escalated their 
campaign. They have blown up bridges and electricity stations, plunging 
entire districts into darkness, destroyed water plants and tortured and 
executed their opponents - chopping off limbs, slicing away skin, and 
severing necks. Tourists, who once thronged the medieval streets of 
Kathmandu, drifting between email kiosks and bagel bars, are staying away 
and the country's economy is close to collapse.

In rural Nepal villagers no longer go out at night. They sit at home in a 
state of mute, expectant terror. The situation has become so desperate that 
the Nepalese government last week slashed the minimum fee for climbing Mount 
Everest, its main tourist attraction, from $75,000 to $25,000. The sense of 
creeping anarchy has even penetrated the country's national parks, where 
illegal logging is rife and poachers last week shot dead and de-horned one 
of the kingdom's last remaining rhinos.

Nepal's Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, is seeking military assistance 
from Britain and the United States, and last week President George Bush 
promised him $20 million to help to crush the Maoists. American military 
advisers have already secretly toured the Maoist-controlled west of the 
country, reconnoitring its dense, lowland jungles, inaccessible mountain 
valleys and poverty-stricken villages.

Tomorrow Deuba meets Tony Blair in Downing Street and there seems little 
doubt that Britain will also offer assistance. 'We have a very long-standing 
relationship with the Nepalese army,' a British diplomat in Kathmandu told 
The Observer last night. 'That relationship will continue,' he added.

Nepal's immense neighbour, India, is also in crisis. The Hindu nationalist 
BJP party in power in New Delhi has given every impression of tacitly 
supporting the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. India's Prime Minister, Atal 
Bihari Vajpayee, has refused to sack Gujarat's unrepentant Chief Minister, 
Narendra Modi, despite frequent allegations that he instructed his officials 
to allow Hindu mobs to rape, murder and burn their minority Muslim 
neighbours. The death toll in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's shiny commercial centre, 
rises every day. Early last week four Hindu youths spotted M. A. Kothawala, 
a 35-year-old Muslim lecturer, riding to work. His beard gave him away. They 
dragged him off his motorbike, stabbed him and burnt him alive. So far none 
of the Hindus who attacked Muslims has been punished. Gujarat's Hindu police 
force has shot dead more than 100 Muslims.

Despite the carnage, America has maintained a discreet silence on the 
matter. India, its crucial ally in the region, is pro-American and 
pro-Israeli (and likens its tough stand against Pakistan to Israel's 
approach to the Palestinians). The communal riots began after a Muslim mob 
incinerated 58 Hindu extremists on a train in the town of Godhra. A team of 
British diplomats recently concluded that the massive anti-Muslim backlash 
was 'pre-planned'.

There are few signs, meanwhile, that the 12-year insurgency by Muslim 
Kashmiris against the Indian state is coming to an end. The daily death toll 
in Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority province, is invariably higher than 
in the Palestinian intifida, but it rarely merits more than a brief mention 
in the foreign news pages. About 50,000 people - soldiers, militants, 
civilians - have died. India has blamed the rebellion on Islamist jihadis 
creeping across the border from Pakistan.

This is only half the story. Repeated human rights abuses by the 400,000 
Indian soldiers stationed in the Kashmir valley against the civilian 
population have ensured the movement is an indigenous one too. India's 
Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, last week rejected the suggestion made by 
the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, that monitors should supervise Kashmir's 
election later this year. His comments suggest New Delhi will, as on 
previous occasions, rig the ballot to ensure victory for the National 
Conference, part of the ruling BJP coalition. There is little sign of fresh 
thinking on Kashmir from the Indian establishment, which sees the solution 
to its difficulties as military rather than political.

The revolt in Kashmir, as in Nepal, however, is the result of political 
disaffection and economic misery. Some 80 per cent of Nepal's 23 million 
inhabitants are subsistence farmers. They lead medieval-style lives of 
appalling hardship and have seen no benefit from either the country's 
tourist industry or the arrival of democracy a decade ago. The Maoists are 
strongest in the poorest parts of the country. In their stronghold of Rolpa, 
the scene of last week's gruesome battles, per capita income is $100 a year 
and life expectancy is 52.

The message of revolutionary justice espoused by the Maoists' shadowy 
leader, Comrade Prachanda, has won its most enthusiastic response from a 
rural underclass with nothing to lose: women, peasants at the bottom of the 
caste heap, and the unemployed. Successive governments in Kathmandu have 
been more concerned with lining their own pockets than dealing with a 
far-away rural revolt. They hoped it would go away. It has not. Deuba, who 
declared a state of emergency in November and sent in the army, has now 
turned to the outside world for help.

There is nothing new about communal unrest or insurrection in South Asia, 
but what differs about the most recent violence in Gujarat is that it has 
taken place in the heart of India with the unambiguous evidence of state 
involvement. India, as envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi and its first Prime 
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was supposed to be a secular country, open to 
people of all faiths.

But Hindu fundamentalists who pushed aside Nehru's fading Congress Party in 
the mid-1990s have replaced his vision with something darker, fascist even. 
They give the impression of wanting India's 120 million Muslims to disappear 
or decamp to Muslim Pakistan. As Sunny Grewal, one of many BJP supporters 
living in Britain, put it: 'Muslims of India should pack their bags and head 
off to Pakistan. There is no room for the Satanic evil forces of Islam in 
India. They don't belong on this earth. They are evil.'

'I think the forebodings are very grim,' Ramachandra Guha, one of India's 
leading writers and environmentalists, added last night. 'Radical Hindus are 
trying to turn India into a kind of Hindu Pakistan, along theological lines, 
and with Hindus in charge rather than Muslims.'

Pakistan, meanwhile, has fared little better since independence. Its army 
has repeatedly toppled the country's frequently venal and short-lived 
civilian governments. And, with the Bangladesh war of 1971, the idea that 
being a Muslim was enough to hold a state together was catastrophically 
disproved when the country split in half. Like India, Pakistan, under 
military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, has signed up to the US war on 
terrorism (though not its support for Israel). He even won a spurious 
referendum in which he was the only candidate. But Islamist extremists and 
sectarian violence now threaten him with perpetual embarrassment.

Both India and Pakistan are facing crises of post-colonial identity - but 
their predicament has scarcely been noticed because of the West's continuing 
preoccupation with the troubles in the Middle East.

In Nepal, meanwhile, things get worse. As well as destroying the 
infrastructure, the Maoists are infiltrating the Kathmandu valley, blowing 
up politicians' homes and enforcing strikes. They may have only 7-12,000 
fighters. But they have so far proved more than a match for Nepal's 
45,000-strong, badly equipped army. 'The Maoists are a very intelligent 
organisation. Their leaders are well educated. They are fired up with a 
vision and sense of dynamism,' one Western diplomat in Kathmandu admitted 
last night. It is only a matter of time before the rebels launch their next 
ambush, scythes raised.

Guardian Unlimited






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