[Assam] Beyond India's borders - IANS

[Ram Sarangapani]

This article by Sreeram Chaulia has a different take on bad (?) foreign
policy decisions of the GOI toward its close neighbors and its affect to
stem the ULFA uprising.

Netters want a shot at this article?

--Ram
_____________________________

Following the inhuman ethnic cleansing against non-Assamese by the United
Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the Indian Army has begun
counter-insurgency operations in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

This is a placebo that bypasses the real cancer breeding outside India's
borders.

While discrimination, underdevelopment and unemployment in Assam are serious
internal failures of the Indian government that explain the origins and
early legitimacy of ULFA in the 1980s, the current savagery of this
discredited terrorist group owes to India's failed foreign policy towards
Myanmar (Burma).

The mayhem unleashed by ULFA cadres on poor immigrant labourers from other
parts of India can be traced back to terrorist camps located in Myanmar.

ULFA's killing machines utilise Arunachal as a conduit that connects to
their hideouts in Burma's northern Kachin state.

The death shrieks of non-Assamese in Assam are stinging reminders that
India's policy of cooperating with the military junta in Myanmar has
flopped.

The mass abuses of human rights being committed by the junta in Kachin state
provide ULFA the backdrop for a safe haven in Myanmar.

Forced labour, natural resource depletion, seizure of farmlands,
disappearances and mass graves mark the history of Kachins since Myanmar's
first military coup in 1962.

The Kachin Independence Army (KIA), whose factions now shelter and train
ULFA warriors, was created in response to the unilateral abrogation of
minority rights by the Ne Win dictatorship in the 1960s.

Had Myanmar remained democratic and in civilian hands, the 'ethnicity
problem' would never have exploded into incessant warfare and cycles of
destruction.

Waves of Myanmarese Army incursions to assert central government control
over the Kachin people and the area's jade, timber and opium wealth created
the fertile instability for ULFA and other northeast Indian insurgent groups
like the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) and the United
Liberation Front of Bodoland to find a foothold. Around 1986, ULFA
approached the KIA through the 'good offices' of the Naga rebels.

At a time when ULFA's stock in Assam itself was on a downward slope, its
recruits learnt the rudiments of fighting in Myanmar from the KIA, which
reportedly charged 100,000 rupees per trainee.

As long as Bangladesh and Bhutan were the main staging arenas for ULFA,
Myanmar played second fiddle in the outfit's overall priorities.

ULFA shifted bases from Bangladesh to Bhutan in 1997 after Sheikh Hasina's
government assisted New Delhi in flushing it out.

At India's behest, the Royal Bhutanese Army destroyed most of ULFA's camps
and observation posts by 2003.

Hounded everywhere, ULFA returned to its first love: the war-devastated
Kachin hills of Burma, where the KIA was ever ready to indulge in quid pro
quos.

Some observers perceive India and the Myanmar's military junta to have
common interests when it comes to acting against ULFA, since its partner,
the KIA, is opposed to Yangon.

This hides a more complex reality wherein the KIA's political wing signed a
peace treaty with the Myanmarese military in 1994 and many elite Kachin
guerrilla leaders have developed a tight relationship with the generals in
Yangon to jointly benefit from the war economy in Kachin state.

Numerous splits within the KIA occurred owing to divide-and-rule ploys of
Yangon.

The segment of the KIA that is allied with the junta and has a hand in the
narcotics business is now ULFA's launching pad.

The so-called animosity between Yangon and the KIA is limited to those
factions that oppose the junta's militarisation of the region and plunder of
natural resources.

While sporadic junta operations to drive out ULFA and NSCN have received
attention, why has Yangon not eliminated ULFA, root and branch, from
Myanmarese soil?

If Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina and Bhutan could do it, why not Myanmar, a
military state?

Myanmar is the world's second largest opium-producing country and Kachin
state is next only to Shan state in overall production of this deadly crop.

Several top Myanmarese military generals have proven involvement in the drug
trade and are close to KIA faction leaders on the ground who double up as
mafia barons.

General Zau Mai, a former Chairman of the KIA's political wing, was one such
figure who fixed deals with the junta on logging, gold and jade mining in
Kachin territory.

In December 2006, three ULFA terrorists were nabbed by the Indian army in
Assam with a haul of brown sugar worth 10.3 million rupees.

This was the first evidence that the KIO-junta duet in Burma had an ULFA
angle.

The porous India-Myanmar border opens gigantic market for drugs, with ULFA
acting as an intermediary that finances its hit squads with illegal business
investments and transportation of contraband commodities.

ULFA is thus useful for the Myanmarese junta both as a business partner and
as a bargaining chip against India cheering for Aung San Suu Kyi's
pro-democracy movement.

Yangon proves itself 'useful' to India by occasionally cracking the whip on
ULFA and NSCN while not entirely smashing their redoubts on Myanmarese soil.

This delicate strategy of keeping the ULFA menace simmering enables Yangon
to buy New Delhi's tolerance for Myanmar's absence of democracy.

India ends up as the biggest loser of this triangular junta-KIO-ULFA game
that is destroying the social fabric and economy of Assam.

For over a decade, India has been betting on the wrong horse in Myanmar. If
New Delhi hopes to counter Chinese influence in Yangon and defeat ULFA,
democracy in Myanmar is the only honourable and pragmatic solution.

*(Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on world affairs based at Syracuse
University, New York. He can be reached at*
*sreeramchaulia<sreeramchaulia at hotmail.com>
@hotmail.com <sreeramchaulia at hotmail.com>) <sreeramchaulia at hotmail.com>*
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