Posted on 05/13/2002 8:28:05 PM PDT by Sawdring
DELHI: The battle in the remote western area of Nepal is merely the latest in a series of gruesome encounters between the kingdom's rampant Maoist guerrillas and government forces.
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 Gujarat. Intelligence reports circulating in Washington and London, meanwhile, warn of a summer-long conflict between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
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 mediaeval streets of Kathmandu, drifting between email kiosks and bagel bars, are staying away and the country's economy is close to collapse.
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.
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 overwhelming evidence 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 then burnt him alive. So far, none of the Hindus who have attacked Muslims has been punished. Gujarat's Hindu police force has itself 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 freedom struggle against the Indian state is coming to an end. The daily death toll in Kashmir is invariably higher than in the Palestinian intifada, but it rarely merits more than a brief mention in the foreign news pages. About 50,000 people - soldiers, fighters, civilians - have died.
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.
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 on Saturday.-Dawn/The Observer News Service.
Dawn/The Observer News Service.
It was written by the Observer.
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