Comrade Ranju is standing on a sunlit hilltop in western Nepal, telling me how she'd come to kill more than a dozen paramilitary policemen in one night. Dressed in fatigues, she's tall and strong for a 19-year-old Nepali woman, and her straight black hair is scraped back severely from her forehead. For the past three years she's roamed these mountains as a soldier in the Maoist army, whose brutal tactics have spread terror throughout the kingdom. Ranju is describing an assault in September 2002 in Sindhuli district, 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) southeast of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. Her unit was besieging a police station just before midnight. After seeing several comrades gunned down, she came upon a line of policemen. "They didn't surrender, she says. "They were still firing. She claims to have killed 16 or 17 officers with her semiautomatic rifle. In all, 49 police and 21 Maoists were killed.
As she remembers the battle, Ranju becomes so vehement that another rebel steps in to calm her. "We don't kill people if they throw down their arms," he says. "There are many instances of us giving garlands to soldiers and police who surrender." But Ranju's eyes still glare fiercely. Born in eastern Nepal, she'd joined the Maoists at 15 after being harassed by government security forces. Her father had been an active Communist, and she was suspected of contact with the rebels. "People used to point fingers at girls like me," she says, referring to her independent attitude. "Most Nepali women are oppressed. Many end up as prostitutes in Bombay [Mumbai], or are beaten. It has to be changed." The other women soldiers standing near Ranju nod in agreement. She's a natural leader, and I sense that in other circumstances she might have made an excellent teacher—or police officer.
What's happened to Nepal, that young people like Ranju are killing each other with such fervor? And what future does the nation have, now that its ruler, King Gyanendra, has retaken absolute control, ending 12 years of government by political parties? This past February, supported by the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA), the king declared a state of emergency, briefly closing the international airport in Kathmandu, cutting off telephones and e-mail, and placing politicians under house arrest—all in the name of fighting the Maoists. In response, the rebels called a nationwide strike and continued their campaign of violence. The Himalayan kingdom seems poised on the brink.
The Maoist insurgency was born in the poverty of rural Nepal, with the first attacks against government posts taking place in 1996. The Maoists, an extremist faction among various communist groups, were led by a former agricultural student and teacher named Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who assumed the nom de guerre Prachanda. Now in his early 50s, he's rarely seen in public and almost never photographed.
When Nepal's democratic government ordered crackdowns on Prachanda's band of militants, the police were indiscriminately vicious. Suspects were tortured, villagers driven from their homes, and women raped. As the rebellion spread, the government's campaign widened. Security forces fired on a primary school in Jajarkot district during an evening dance performance. Killings mounted, and support for the Maoists grew. The rebels recruited a spectrum of disenfranchised Nepalis—women, ethnic minorities, Dalits (or Untouchables), the unemployed, and underemployed youths—offering them hope where there had been none.
Prachanda and his top rebel leaders are hard-core ideologues. They studied the works of Mao Zedong and—despite being disavowed by the Chinese government as not true Maoists—created a new Nepali version of Maoism, the Prachanda Path, a mélange of Mao's military strategy, Marxism, and Nepali patriotism. Prachanda himself commands both the People's Army and the rigidly hierarchical Maoist political wing. At the apex is a standing committee, supported by a politburo, central committee, regional bureaus, district committees, area committees, and cell committees.
The rebels' power grew as Nepal's hard-won democracy stumbled. Political parties, legalized in 1990 by Gyanendra's brother and predecessor, King Birendra, bickered and stuffed their own pockets. Nepalis developed a phrase for this graft, "Pajero culture, after a Japanese SUV favored by status-hungry politicians. Divided into a prosperous capital and an impoverished countryside, Nepal entered a tightening spiral of decline.
Then on June 1, 2001, something outlandish and awful happened. Birendra's son and heir, Crown Prince Dipendra, deranged by drink and perhaps drugs and armed with an assortment of weapons, shot dead his father and mother, his brother and sister, and five others. Then he reportedly turned the pistol on himself. Gyanendra was declared king.
Into this disarray marched young Ranju and her comrades—disciplined, committed, and ruthless. With an army estimated at 12,000, the Maoists spread to all 75 districts of the country. Entrenched in classic guerrilla terrain from which the RNA has been unable to dislodge them, the Maoists have become a force in most rural areas, leaving control of Kathmandu and district capitals to the government. In all, nearly 13,000 people have been killed by the state and insurgents, and millions of villagers remain caught in the deadly cross fire.
"We're being watched all the time," the teacher says as we sit outside a teahouse in the village of Babiyachour in the western district of Surkhet. Chickens scratch at our feet, and water buffalo drag wooden plows through fields beyond the mud-and-straw houses. The village has no electricity, and the young girl who makes our tea boils water from a communal pump on a wood fire. Nervously fingering his glass, the teacher doesn't want to give his name and speaks softly, fearing he might be overheard by Maoist sympathizers. Everywhere, Maoist operatives depend on intimidation, extortion, and brutality to exercise control. "We're under pressure, not so much in the classroom, but in the village. People notice what contribution you make to political discussions."
Having just finished college in the nearby town of Birendranagar, the teacher was living outside the village, but local leaders told him to move closer to the school so they could watch him. Although Maoists control the region, he continues to draw his government salary of 4,000 rupees (about 60 dollars) a month, but he has to pay five percent to the insurgents—a tax levied wherever the Maoists are in control.
From the teahouse I can see the police station, a broken concrete shell daubed with Maoist graffiti. The police have fled from here, as they have from most of rural Nepal, and the village is now the front line, the first community I've seen that is openly controlled by the rebels. When photographer Jonas Bendiksen and I arrived in Babiyachour, we noticed a few Maoist soldiers buying aluminum plates and sacks of rice for hundreds of new recruits training on a hill above the village. One of the highest ranking Maoists, Comrade Diwakar, was said to have arrived for their "graduation." We sent our letters of introduction up the hillside, asking to meet him. Nobody seemed in a hurry to respond.
That night the Maoists hold a torchlit rally, and a young party member named Abhiral invites us to tag along. They're preparing to launch a strategic offensive against the government, he says, and the war is entering a new and final phase. Demonstrations like this are being organized in every village across Nepal. At the front of the column, grasping a torch, is my new friend the teacher, out to convince local party workers of his dedication. Each household has been compelled to provide one demonstrator, and ordinary villagers jostle in the center, mouthing slogans with half-clenched fists. A female Maoist rushes forward to encourage them, and shouts of "Down with American imperialism!" erupt again.
Next morning, an old Dalit stops to talk as we eat breakfast. Fifty years ago, he says, Babiyachour was nothing more than malaria-infested jungle prowled by tigers. His family helped clear the land, while the government sprayed DDT to kill mosquitoes. Now it's home to 500 people, too many to survive on farming, so more than 50 men from this village alone have gone to India looking for work, including two of the old man's five sons.
Before the fighting he'd been a blacksmith, he tells us. "But I tore up my license because the army was giving me trouble." Maoists regularly ordered blacksmiths to repair their firearms, making them targets for government security forces. "I'm petrified, he says. "I had to bury my tools." Now he relies on his small farm to feed his two wives, children, and grandchildren.
The whole village lives in fear of the day the RNA returns. The last time soldiers appeared, they shot an unarmed suspect as he fled. Earlier in Kathmandu I'd met many other victims of the conflict. Padam, a 34-year-old father of five told me how armed men describing themselves as Maoists had demanded 5,000 rupees (about 75 dollars) from each household in his village in Banke district in the southwest. Padam wasn't sure if they were really Maoists or just criminals posing as rebels. When strangers broke into his house in the middle of the night, he promised to pay up. "But the men dragged me into the street, laid my legs across a large stone, and dropped a tree trunk on them," he said. Months later, he's still in a wheelchair.
No one knows exactly how many displaced people there are in Nepal. Some organizations put the number as high as 200,000, with perhaps another 1.8 million who have fled the country. Many are politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, and health workers—community leaders associated with what Maoists call the old regime.
As days pass in Babiyachour, we begin to doubt that we'll meet the shadowy Comrade Diwakar. Without written permission from the Maoists, no one can go anywhere in the territory beyond the village. Then, quite unexpectedly, a young rebel appears waving a message. We're to leave at once for an undisclosed location two hours away. We pack bags, hire a couple of porters, and start up the steep dirt track into the mountains.
We follow our guide up a forested hillside, emerging at a hamlet where terraced fields perch on a ridge. Moving through the ripening barley and potato fields, we see Maoist soldiers in combat fatigues carrying M16s and other automatic weapons. The quality of their guns marks them as an elite unit, Diwakar's bodyguards. More troops cluster around a single-story schoolhouse. Inside are three middle-aged men sitting at low student tables. The oldest is Comrade Diwakar, commander in charge of the Maoist western flank.
Diwakar is urbane and educated, with a handsome silver goatee. His given name is Poshta Bahadur Bogati, and like the man sitting next to him, the western division's commander, Comrade Prabhakar, he once ran unsuccessfully for parliament. Diwakar looks out of place in his fatigues, more like a professor than a guerrilla. Prabhakar, on the other hand, seems to be cultivating the look of a Nepali Che Guevara. They tell us they're open to journalists but complain that most "have followed the establishment line."
"We don't say we're perfect," Diwakar answers when I ask about the growing reports of Maoist human rights abuses. "There have been misdeeds among all levels of the party hierarchy. But there have been many achievements as well." The word "misdeeds" seems a cruel euphemism, considering that Maoists have routinely tortured victims—butchering them while they were still alive—and decapitated civilians accused of "sympathizing with the establishment."
After half an hour of talk, the two leaders agree to let us trek through Maoist-controlled areas and to meet a group of rebel soldiers. We can see for ourselves, they say, the economic transformation they're delivering to the poor of Nepal. We're told to return to Babiyachour and wait for our guide.
Two days later Comrade Ilaaka, 21, arrives, assigned to lead us for the first few days of what turns out to be a four-week trek. He must have been handsome before a grenade exploded near his face, badly scarring his right eye. "During the fighting everything happens so suddenly, he says. "We were firing at the soldiers. They were retaliating. My friends were throwing grenades, so was the RNA. I didn't know where it came from, but some shrapnel hit me in the face." He's also been shot twice in the leg, and bullet scars crease both his arms.
Ilaaka tells us he'll take us to Achham district. He's carrying a request from Diwakar that we be allowed to talk with troops there. We can speak with anyone, discuss anything we want, as long as we don't ask for real names or reveal operational military information. As far as we know, few independent Western journalists have ever spent time with a Maoist army unit in this way. We presume they're hoping to improve their media profile.
Two hours from Babiyachour we reach the village of Gutu, where the Maoists have established a "new model market of a hundred or so wattle-and-daub stalls displaying cheap Chinese goods from Kathmandu. "This is the Prachanda Path in action," boasts Bishwo Bandhu, the local commander. Compared with decades of neglect from the government, this may look like progress. But to me it seems a puny attempt at the kind of development the region really needs: better roads, electricity, health care, and good schools. Ironically, just up the hillside at a place called Chaukun, a Kathmandu company, Cosmos Cement Industries, announced in 2002 it would build a huge cement factory—the biggest industrial enterprise in western Nepal—creating thousands of jobs and generating taxes to fund infrastructure. The Maoist takeover wiped away those plans.
We follow Ilaaka from Gutu on a four-hour climb through pine forests to a tiny village on the crest of a hill. After dark, lighted only by cooking fires and candles, the place feels medieval. Ilaaka had never been to school, he tells me. His parents needed help working their scrap of land in Kalikot to feed his four brothers and two sisters. "Then the police in our village started accusing innocent people of being Maoists," he says. "They beat us and made us carry loads for them." Local Maoist cadres visited his family at home, encouraging them to resist. "They taught us revolution."
Next morning Ilaaka leads us across the Karnali River into Achham district in far western Nepal. The mountains become more precipitous as we slog up the steep trail. Terraced plots give way to pasture. By sundown we reach Turmakhad, a scruffy, half-deserted village of stone huts turned into a Maoist staging post. At an abandoned police compound we see rice and lentils being doled out to hundreds of recruits and activists. Many are children. Some look frightened, others grateful for the food.
International watchdog groups document cases of Maoists abducting children for political indoctrination and as military recruits. Some have been used as human shields. But government forces also victimize children. I couldn't forget interviewing the grieving mother of Rupa Tharu, a 12-year-old girl dragged from her bed by drunken soldiers and shot outside her home in Bardiya district. Stories like that have become routine.
In the morning we meet Comrade Srijana, a tiny, fiercely determined 15-year-old girl who's been a party member for two years. The empty holes in her ears and nose show her decision to abandon her traditional culture. "Jewelry is a prison for us. It is a symbol of entrapment, she declares. "My sisters and I made our mother remove hers too. As she speaks, her feet tap along to Nepali pop music blaring from a radio in a village tea shop. "The only way forward is revolution," she says, aping her commanders. "Peace talks won't give us what we want." Then she turns her attention to a group of boys who are clearly intrigued by this spirited girl.
The Maoists feel safe in places like Turmakhad, where they live in abandoned houses or with villagers. To attack such an inaccessible target, the RNA would have to use helicopters, as they'd done a few months before, strafing a rally in a nearby village. Six people were killed, including a primary schoolteacher the Maoists had forced to attend the rally. Few villagers know much about Maoism, but they're all terrified of helicopters.
Such incidents are unfortunate but exaggerated, said Gen. Deepak Rana, the RNA's regional commander, when I'd met him in Nepalganj. "Our directives are to treat Maoist soldiers as brothers and sisters. We must do our best to disarm them. But when you're in the field you understand how difficult it is to implement these theories. I feel it when one or two stray cases are generalized by your media friends and human rights groups.
"Stray cases may add up to hundreds," says Amnesty International, which estimates that 418 Nepalis disappeared in the year following the breakdown of the last cease-fire in August 2003. More recently, secret detentions continue, and killings are on the rise.
Soon after we reach Turmakhad, a group of rebels, including Ranju, arrives under the command of Comrade Bijay. Born in a village in Kalikot, Bijay had joined the Maoists when they were only a ragtag band of a few hundred. Now he's vice commander of the 31st Battalion and veteran of a dozen encounters with government forces. "We started with sticks and muskets," he says. "We took on the police, and then the army. Nobody thought we could succeed. But we have."
When I ask if he's ever been to Kathmandu, the ultimate goal of the insurrection, a slow smile spreads across his face. "Not yet.
Each soldier in Bijay's unit receives a small allowance and clothing, like Chinese sneakers bought in bulk in government-controlled towns. Their guns have been captured from government forces: British .303s, some pre-World War I, but all in perfect working order. "My job," Bijay says, "is to kill a soldier, grab his weapon, and use it against others. India has just given Nepal 20,000 rifles. Soon they will be with me." More modern weapons, including M16s and heavy machine guns, are shared out for attacks. I saw no instances of Maoists using arms acquired outside Nepal.
The longer we spend with Bijay and his troops, the more I wonder what would happen to their enthusiasm and commitment if they realized that instead of launching an economic transformation, the People's War has sent Nepal's rural economy lurching into reverse. Swept up in the excitement of a big enterprise, many of the young rebels seem incapable of seeing the terrible impact of their insurgency—or of imagining any other way to make things better.
A few days later, as our trek is drawing to a close, we follow Bijay and his troops out of Turmakhad on a four-day walk north to the stronghold of Ramarosan. The Maoists are planning yet another rally, part of the same propaganda campaign we saw in Babiyachour. Each village we pass seems more impoverished than the last. At Kamal Bazar, I walk across a new airstrip finished just before the Maoists arrived. No commercial flights have ever landed here. The village school has closed, and many young people have fled to avoid being drafted by the rebels. The health post has run out of even the most basic supplies, including rehydration salts—this in a country where at least 13,000 children a year die from diarrhea.
Outside Ramarosan, we stop for lunch at a farm where we watch hundreds of Nepalis on their way to the rally. I notice an old man and his son looking anxiously toward us. One of our minders says they want to talk.
The young man softly tells us his name is Krishna, and he's walked three hours to meet us because he thought we might be human rights workers. A year before, Krishna was herding sheep with a friend when they were caught in a rain shower. Sheltering in a cave, they found a strange metal object with fins and decided to hit it with a sickle. The mortar round exploded, killing his friend and nearly severing Krishna's arm.
Krishna lifts up his shirt and trouser legs to show the shrapnel still in his body. Livid scars run the length of his torso, and the stump of his right hand is raw from infection. He seems gentle and intelligent, but as bewildered as the rest of Nepal at the turn life has taken here.
Around me, I sense our Maoist guides growing uncomfortable. They say they never use mortars, that the shell was a misfire left by the RNA. I ask Krishna what he wants for the future. Our interpreter translates: "He says he wants to study. He says he wants peace." He says everybody here wants peace.