India's Khmer Rouge

India, like China, is a country to watch. If this is to be the Chinese century it’s just as likely to be the Indian one. This is a country that Gandhi would scarcely recognise; a country of rapid economic growth, of new technologies and gleaming skyscrapers; it’s a country of call-centres and Bollywood starlets, of glamour, fashion and high-living; it’s a country of the future.

There are problems; of course, not least of which is atrocious levels of corruption. This led to a series of protests beginning in the spring, with people coming out in support of Anna Hazare, an activist very much in the Gandhi mould, who has taken a principled stand over an issue which affects so many areas of Indian life.

This was the big news from India at the turn of the year (aside from the proposed intrusion of Tesco and Wal-Mart, a form of globalisation that many would prefer to do without), news reported across the world; news extensively reported by the BBC World Service when I was in Egypt.

What is not so widely reported is that India, for all its modernity, is suffering from a stubborn and prolonged insurgency, the kind of thing that seems to belong firmly in the past. Elsewhere in Asia Maoism and the Maoist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge variety are distant dreams; in India they are a present nightmare.

There is the spectre haunting India - the spectre of the Naxalites. This is a Maoist guerrilla movement so named because their rising began in 1967 in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari. These red fundamentalists are active over a huge area in the east of the country, from Andhra Pradesh in the south to the Nepalese border in the north.

By 2006 the situation had deteriorated to the point where Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, described the insurgency as the biggest single internal security challenge that the country had ever faced.

There was really no great exaggeration in this, given that some four thousand civilians had been killed up to that point and 40,000 displaced. These people, often of the most humble origins, left their villages in search of government protection; for the Naxalites, like the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, carry fear before them like a banner.

The movement has a reputation for reprisals against perceived ‘class enemies’, really just anyone they take a dislike to, the kind of ugly savagery that was associated with the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Kanwar Gill, the former Director General of Police in the Punjab, and a counter-insurgency expert, believes that frightfulness lies at the core of Naxalite ideology; that they use the manner of killing to frighten more than the killing itself. Understandable, when one notes that people have been hacked to death with axes.

Last year the Naxalites were responsible for the deaths of almost 1200 people, more than all of the other terrorist groups in India combined. However, the government, whose counter-insurgency operations in the past were often piecemeal, lacking in coordination between central and local authorities, scored a major success when special forces intercepted and killed Malloojula Koteswara Rao, known by the nom de guerre of Kishenji, an important military leader and member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), to give the Naxalites their official name.

Set alongside the deaths of other important figures in the movement, this marks something of a breakthrough. Naxalite killings are also in sharp decline. Last year some 564 people died at their hands, bad enough but a significant reduction over previous years.

Even so, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon. It lies in the nature of India itself; it lies in the uneven picture of development. Mumbai, with its university-educated professionals, is a universe away from the rural communities of the east, particularly the tribal areas, where government, any kind of administration, simply does not exist; where there are no schools, no medical services, no infrastructure, no roads – nothing.

It’s a vacuum filled by the likes of the Naxalites, a point made by Jairam Ramesh, the minister responsible for rural affairs. He went on to suggest dealing with the problem effectively may take another twenty to twenty-five years. It will certainly require resources and a lot of political will. Military solutions are only ever of a temporary nature

India may be rushing into the future but for as long as this problem exists, as long as the Naxalites swim in a sea of resentment, it will continually have to look with apprehension back into the past.

Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony!

I wrote an article a few years ago, a comment on a ‘trending’ campaign on Twitter directed against an English journalist. I opened as follows;

I love old horror movies, really old ones, the old black and white flicks with people like Boris Karloff. I’m sure people will have seen some of the original Frankenstein movies. Quite often there are scenes of indignant mobs out with flaming torches, hunting down the monster. But that’s so old-fashioned, don’t you agree? The mob is still with us of course, but it has long since lost the torches. Now it expresses its righteous indignation on the internet, haunting down the creatures that have happened to offend, hunting in a mood of outrage; hunting like a pack.

It’s true; the mass expression of a two-minute hate (yes, the analogy is appropriate) against Joseph Kony, head of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is the latest example. Angelina Jolie has joined in, saying that she does not know anyone who does not hate Joseph Kony. All this flaming passion and outrage was sparked by Kony2012, a YouTube video broadcast last Thursday, one sponsored by a charity called Invisible Children.

The aim was to make Kony ‘famous’. This man carried out a war of terror in northern Uganda for decades, with an army made up in part of kidnapped children, an army responsible for the most nauseating atrocities. No need to make him famous, because he was already infamous. But ‘famous’ he has become in the lights of Kony2012, with over fifty million views of the video. People in the States were encouraged to put up posters in cities across the nation, thus making the fight against Kony and the LRA a matter of ‘national interest’ in Washington. That, so the film makers believe, will ensure that US military ‘advisors’ are sent to Africa to aid in the hunt for Kony.

I wonder if these people understand the potential damage they have done; I wonder if they understand anything at all about the present political situation in Uganda? Ugandan bloggers and journalists, outraged by this moral imperialism, are saying that the film may very well serve to resurrect Kony and the LRA from a long decline. Javie Ssozi, a leading Ugandan blogger, has said that suggesting that the answer is more military action is wrong.

Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.

The other thing worth pointing out is that the picture painted of Kony and Uganda by the film is six or seven years out of date. Kony is no longer in the country but hiding away in the jungles of neighbouring states. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to tell the truth as honestly as they can; otherwise they risk sinking into the mire of propaganda. Kony2012, with its inaccuracies and patronising view of Ugandans and Uganda, has done nothing more than whip up mass hysteria, the sort of thing that would have been understood by the yellow press of old. Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony! – what’s the difference?

Do not misunderstand me; I think Kony is a boil on the backside of humanity, but this campaign is all surface and no substance; it rose quickly and it will die just as quickly, when the mob turns to some other fashionable trend. There have been people highlighting the Kony problem for years, with a lot more sobriety and a lot more effect. Sending in US troops would be like setting an elephant off in pursuit of the ants, and we surely all know the outcome with that.

Who are these Invisible Children people; what’s their motivation? Is it altruism, a concern for suffering humanity? No, the organisation seems to be a money-spinning operation feeding off pure emotion. I read in the Telegraph that of over $9million it spent in 2001 less than half went on helping people on the ground. The rest apparently went on “awareness programmes and products”, as well as management and media; in other words, a lot of self-promotion.

A spokesman for the Ugandan government, also pointing out that the war is no longer in the country, said that Kony2012 (it really should be Kony2006) is creating a wholly misleading impression, allowing Invisible Children to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda. It’s clearly been a great success, playing on emotions rather than reason. But it really is time for the hate fest to end.

That's the way to do it!

It’s interesting to compare the success of the British in handling the communist insurgency in the old Malay States with the failure of the parallel French struggle in Indochina.

On the face of it the French should have had greater success because they deployed much more in the way of force and firepower in Indochina than the British ever did in Malaya. But what one really has to look at here- the key to the whole issue -is the differing political strategies adopted in each case.

The French intention was to restore, in almost all respects, their pre-war colonial authority, paying little attention to the emerging national movement. It was because of this that the Viet-Minh was able to move beyond its Communist ideological confines, becoming a movement of national liberation in the most complete sense.

Now, in strategic and political terms, the British position in 1945 was no better in Malaya than the French in Indochina. The Japanese had been defeated, yes, but the former subjects of the Empire were imbued with a new sense of national consciousness. There was also a vigorous and well-armed Communist guerrilla movement, organised in the Malayan National Liberation Army. But, almost from the beginning, the British adopted a different strategy from the French. Instead of struggling against the tide of Malayan nationalism they worked with it, effectively separating and isolating the Communist Min Yuen from the rest of the national community.

When the British returned the old federated and unfederated Malay States were reorganised into a new Malayan Union. However, because of opposition from Malayan nationalists this was quickly replaced by the Federation of Malaya, returning power to many traditional rulers. The long-term British intention, moreover, was not, as in Indochina, to re-establish colonial authority on the old basis, but to hand over power to a non-Communist native government as soon as this was practicable. During the course of the Emergency, before full independence in 1957, Malayans became an increasingly important part of the bureaucracy, the army and the police. In effect the whole insurgency, it might be said, was being eaten away, from the inside out.

Ethnic divisions between the Muslim Malays and the Communist Chinese served to isolate the guerrilla campaign still further. In his counter-insurgency operations, General Gerald Templer made use of this 'ethnic fragmentation', resettling large numbers of Chinese squatters away from the forest fringes to New Villages, where they could be protected and kept under watch. Deprived of this essential base of logistical support, the number of guerrilla attacks dropped from 6000 in 1951 to 1000 in 1954, just as the strength of the Min Yuen army declined by half. In that same year, while the French were being defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Malayan Communists were forced to retreat into Thailand. And that was the way to do it!