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Subject: The War Scenario from the Bourgeois Perspective..
Fantoos    6/21/2002 4:26:07 AM
War at the top of the world From the Maoists of Nepal to the separatists in Kashmir, conflict in the Himalayas threatens to engulf southern Asia 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 tra
 
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