| Worth Reading |
Posted
on 06-May-02 07:33 PM
Return to Year Zero
Nepal's Maoist rebels are murdering, beating, bombing and looting—all in the name of 'protecting the people'
BY ALEX PERRY KATHMANDU
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.
Click On The Link Below For The Complete Article:
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Link Url: http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501020513-235504,00.html
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