Scots_Socialist
15th September 2005, 19:56
Didnt really know were to put this article,so i just stuck it here.Incase its of any interest to any other Comrades..Cheers :ph34r:
My Rifle Will Liberate Me
—Excerpts from female recruits of Nepal's Maoist army*
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Sweating under a purple bandana, Ekata looks like any other member of the Maoist guerrilla squad going through its paces in a paddy field near Jajarkot in western Nepal.
Aged 20 and barely 5ft tall, she is panting under the weight of her rifle. The purple stitching of its strap matches the colour of her face mask and nose stud.
Yet this slightly built mother of a one-year-old daughter is one of three members of her unit to have taken part in the Maoist armed raids on police stations that have left scores of police dead and forced the remainder to retreat into a few heavily barricaded strongholds across rebel-affected areas of Nepal.
She admits, with a smile, that police have been surprised to see her storming the barricades along with scores of male guerrillas. The direct question "Have you killed anyone?" prompts a confused glance toward her unit commander, who interjects: "These are technical questions you do not need to know."
Those technical questions cover the course of the five-year-old "People's War" that has brought six of the Himalayan kingdom's 75 districts under Maoist control, and scarred its mountains and valleys with violence long before the bizarre regicide that made headlines earlier this month.
With just an estimated 5,000 armed fighters, many sneered when the Maoist movement's intellectual mentor, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, first declared his intention in 1996 to turn Nepal into a red fort and "hoist the hammer and sickle red flag atop Mount Everest".
But the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) found willing recruits among poor youths in rural areas such as this one, 200 miles west of Kathmandu, that have seen little or no benefits from 11 years of multiparty democracy.
Ekata is reluctant to reveal details of her operations, preferring instead to mutter that she is "efficient" with her rifle and its 11-round magazine. What she is prepared to say is that she joined up three years ago to fight against alleged police injustices committed in her village, that her husband is serving elsewhere and that she has not seen her daughter for 20 days.
She rejects traditional dress: "I feel that wearing a sari, tikka (Hindu forehead mark) or lipstick is a kind of prison. It limits and confines you. Now I feel liberated."
Women play an important part in Nepal's Maoist rebel movement; two places in every nine-member squad are reserved for them.
Ekata's boss Comrade Jivan confirms that women command local squads and serve on the underground party's central committee, although he does not know how many. Slim and fastidious, Jivan is a 36-year-old former primary school teacher. He is flanked by armed bodyguards as he sits inside a tiny mud-and-brick cottage surrounded by mango trees and iridescent green paddy fields.
"Capitalism is slowly falling down. It cannot solve the problems of the lower class," he pronounces, his Next shirt and Italian tracksuit shielding a concealed sidearm.
"We are active in most districts of the country and the movement is going on throughout the country. We are waging a total war and we have to kill and be ready to kill."
Jivan's command is in the Maoists' mid-western heartland, where government officials concede that the rebels are in almost complete control.
Other western districts with a strong Maoist presence are Dailekh, Jumla and Pyuthan, and further east in Gorkha, Dolakha and Sindhupalchowk.
Ekata serves alongside two women trainees, Anju and Navena, both aged 16, who say they were motivated to join by tales of women being burnt alive and the prospect of leading boring domestic lives "cutting grass and feeding cattle".
The Worker, the party's official organ, includes a picture gallery of women "martyrs" and a suitably rousing quotation attributed to Marx: "Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine ferment."
The Maoist leaders see women as ideal recruits because although they carry out a double role in the house and field, male-dominated Nepalese society prevents them from attaining equal ownership.
To encourage support from women, Maoists frown on polygamy, make much propaganda capital of the harsh penalties their self-appointed courts impose on rapists and have strict rules that require party permission for recruits to marry and ban premarital or adulterous affairs.
A few miles from Ekata's unit another volunteer, 23-year-old Sunita, explains that she joined up five years ago seeking to avenge the death of friends who, she claims, were killed by police merely on suspicion of being Maoists. "Instead of just dying like that I thought I would die fighting the police," she says.
Barefoot and clutching an ancient muzzle-loading rifle, she uses the same stock phrases as her comrades to outline their plan of class struggle and eventual world revolution against the enemies of imperialism, capitalism and revisionism.
But chief among them is the desire to redress the many injustices she believes were meted out to women. "The aim is to put an end to social discrimination against women. There were so many women who were raped by police in my village, including two of my cousins," she says.
She claims to have no regrets about choosing a life where she must move through the forests from village to village, never sleeping at home and rarely visiting her parents.
She no longer wants to return to the normal life she once knew. "I am having an education reading Marxism, Leninism and Maoism. Going to school is education for selfish reasons, but what I am doing is for the whole country not for myself. "
My Rifle Will Liberate Me
—Excerpts from female recruits of Nepal's Maoist army*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sweating under a purple bandana, Ekata looks like any other member of the Maoist guerrilla squad going through its paces in a paddy field near Jajarkot in western Nepal.
Aged 20 and barely 5ft tall, she is panting under the weight of her rifle. The purple stitching of its strap matches the colour of her face mask and nose stud.
Yet this slightly built mother of a one-year-old daughter is one of three members of her unit to have taken part in the Maoist armed raids on police stations that have left scores of police dead and forced the remainder to retreat into a few heavily barricaded strongholds across rebel-affected areas of Nepal.
She admits, with a smile, that police have been surprised to see her storming the barricades along with scores of male guerrillas. The direct question "Have you killed anyone?" prompts a confused glance toward her unit commander, who interjects: "These are technical questions you do not need to know."
Those technical questions cover the course of the five-year-old "People's War" that has brought six of the Himalayan kingdom's 75 districts under Maoist control, and scarred its mountains and valleys with violence long before the bizarre regicide that made headlines earlier this month.
With just an estimated 5,000 armed fighters, many sneered when the Maoist movement's intellectual mentor, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, first declared his intention in 1996 to turn Nepal into a red fort and "hoist the hammer and sickle red flag atop Mount Everest".
But the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) found willing recruits among poor youths in rural areas such as this one, 200 miles west of Kathmandu, that have seen little or no benefits from 11 years of multiparty democracy.
Ekata is reluctant to reveal details of her operations, preferring instead to mutter that she is "efficient" with her rifle and its 11-round magazine. What she is prepared to say is that she joined up three years ago to fight against alleged police injustices committed in her village, that her husband is serving elsewhere and that she has not seen her daughter for 20 days.
She rejects traditional dress: "I feel that wearing a sari, tikka (Hindu forehead mark) or lipstick is a kind of prison. It limits and confines you. Now I feel liberated."
Women play an important part in Nepal's Maoist rebel movement; two places in every nine-member squad are reserved for them.
Ekata's boss Comrade Jivan confirms that women command local squads and serve on the underground party's central committee, although he does not know how many. Slim and fastidious, Jivan is a 36-year-old former primary school teacher. He is flanked by armed bodyguards as he sits inside a tiny mud-and-brick cottage surrounded by mango trees and iridescent green paddy fields.
"Capitalism is slowly falling down. It cannot solve the problems of the lower class," he pronounces, his Next shirt and Italian tracksuit shielding a concealed sidearm.
"We are active in most districts of the country and the movement is going on throughout the country. We are waging a total war and we have to kill and be ready to kill."
Jivan's command is in the Maoists' mid-western heartland, where government officials concede that the rebels are in almost complete control.
Other western districts with a strong Maoist presence are Dailekh, Jumla and Pyuthan, and further east in Gorkha, Dolakha and Sindhupalchowk.
Ekata serves alongside two women trainees, Anju and Navena, both aged 16, who say they were motivated to join by tales of women being burnt alive and the prospect of leading boring domestic lives "cutting grass and feeding cattle".
The Worker, the party's official organ, includes a picture gallery of women "martyrs" and a suitably rousing quotation attributed to Marx: "Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine ferment."
The Maoist leaders see women as ideal recruits because although they carry out a double role in the house and field, male-dominated Nepalese society prevents them from attaining equal ownership.
To encourage support from women, Maoists frown on polygamy, make much propaganda capital of the harsh penalties their self-appointed courts impose on rapists and have strict rules that require party permission for recruits to marry and ban premarital or adulterous affairs.
A few miles from Ekata's unit another volunteer, 23-year-old Sunita, explains that she joined up five years ago seeking to avenge the death of friends who, she claims, were killed by police merely on suspicion of being Maoists. "Instead of just dying like that I thought I would die fighting the police," she says.
Barefoot and clutching an ancient muzzle-loading rifle, she uses the same stock phrases as her comrades to outline their plan of class struggle and eventual world revolution against the enemies of imperialism, capitalism and revisionism.
But chief among them is the desire to redress the many injustices she believes were meted out to women. "The aim is to put an end to social discrimination against women. There were so many women who were raped by police in my village, including two of my cousins," she says.
She claims to have no regrets about choosing a life where she must move through the forests from village to village, never sleeping at home and rarely visiting her parents.
She no longer wants to return to the normal life she once knew. "I am having an education reading Marxism, Leninism and Maoism. Going to school is education for selfish reasons, but what I am doing is for the whole country not for myself. "