July 29, 2012

AS TENSIONS IN INDIA TURN DEADLY, SOME SAY OFFICIALS IGNORED WARNING SIGNS

Posted by The Himalayan Voice:
[The Bodo tribe in the finger of land between Bangladesh and Bhutan has long been feeling squeezed by Muslim Bengalis immigrating from Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. In addition to having less communal ideas about land ownership than the Bodos, the Bengalis, whose numbers are growing, increasingly threaten the Bodos’ dream of having an independent state.]
By 
Anupam Nath/Associated Press
Women from the Bodo tribe, which is feeling squeezed by Muslims from
Bangladesh, at a relief camp on Thursday in Assam State.
NEW DELHI — There is a numbing familiarity to the riots that struck the eastern Indian state of Assam this month, leaving 48 dead and 400,000 people homeless. The violence had been building for months and even years — thousands of years.
So why, critics ask, were the authorities caught by surprise despite clear warnings of impending conflict?
“The district authorities should have seen the tension building up and acted sooner to prevent the kind of violence that we have seen since,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
The Bodo tribe in the finger of land between Bangladesh and Bhutan has long been feeling squeezed by Muslim Bengalis immigrating from Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. In addition to having less communal ideas about land ownership than the Bodos, the Bengalis, whose numbers are growing, increasingly threaten the Bodos’ dream of having an independent state.
The Bodos, many of whom have been converted to Christianity, now represent just 10 percent of Assam’s population of 31 million, but have ancestral claims to roughly half of its land.
Four years ago, Bodos and Bengalis, who speak different languages, clashed in Assam, leaving 70 people dead. Tensions began to build anew on May 29, when a local Muslim youth group called for a strike in Kokrajhar to protest the removal of a signboard from a mosque. A series of drive-by killings followed until generalized violence exploded on July 19.
State officials said they were caught unaware. “We had requisitioned the army on the very first day, but it took four, five days for the forces to reach the state,” Tarun Gogoi, chief minister of Assam, said Friday at a news conference.
U. G. Brahma, a former member of Parliament from the region, said police and other government officials did nothing to stop the violence for several days. “This is a deliberate act of negligence,” Mr. Brahma said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Gogoi said no further violence had been reported for at least two days, although bodies from earlier outbreaks continued to be found and homes were still being burned.
Mr. Gogoi rejected the charge that the government was slow in its response and said he had no intelligence before the rioting suggesting the need for troops. Such riots have been part of India’s history since its violent birth in 1947, but its roots go back far longer.
Indians’ genetic variability is vast. Scores of languages are spoken, 15 of which appear on the nation’s currency. The Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist religions are all strongly represented.
And then there is the issue of land, a scarce resource in a nation of nearly 1.2 billion people.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited two relief camps in Kokrajhar on Saturday. He called the fighting “a blot” on India, The Associated Press reported, and promised to provide $3,600 to each family of those killed and $900 to those seriously injured.
 Sultan Alam, a member of a Muslim student group in Assam, called for an inquiry by the nation’s top law enforcement agency. “The minority community here has been ruined by the violence,” he said in a telephone interview, demanding more benefits for Muslims. “We just want our rightful share in everything.” A representative of a rival Bodo student group could not be reached for comment.
Opposition lawmakers accuse the Congress Party, the dominant party in the governing coalition, of turning a blind eye to the immigrant issue, since Muslims tend to support the coalition.
Vijay Goel, general secretary of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, said the influence of Muslim immigrants in elections had grown too great. “We want the illegal immigrants to be identified and deported,” he said, according to news media reports.
At the news conference, Mr. Gogoi said politics played no role in his decision making and blamed his political opponents for the violence. “The situation has flared up because of the N.D.A. regime,” he said, referring to the National Democratic Alliance, an opposition coalition that includes the Bharatiya Janata Party. “It is not me who is playing vote bank politics. I do not need a single vote of the illegal migrants.”
Bengali Muslims have been a significant part of Assam’s population since India’s founding, and separating the recent arrivals from those who have been in the state for decades would be difficult. Each side in the conflict has long-held grievances.
Ms. Ganguly said the state should have done far more in recent years to ease tensions. “This is a battle over resources, not religion,” she said.
Mr. Gogoi promised action.“The only solution to these waves of ethnic conflicts is development, and tomorrow the state government will seek some kind of development package from the prime minister,” Mr. Gogoi said Friday, joining a long line of state officials seeking more money from India’s central government.
Malavika Vayawahare contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Samrat from Mumbai, India.


@  The New York Times

TENSE TALK IN CONFERENCE BETWEEN U.S. AND PAKISTAN


[Pakistani officials have long faced criticism from Americans and Afghans for what they say is their failure to stop militant assaults originating from safe havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.]

By 

ASPEN, Colo. — Tensions flared between the United States and Pakistan on Friday, as two top officials traded accusations of doing too little to combat Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The tart exchange between the officials, Douglas E. Lute, President Obama’s top adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, took place during a conference in this bucolic mountain setting.
Under questioning from Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” Ms. Rehman, speaking on videoconference from Washington, said that Pakistani Taliban fighters, who have taken refuge in two remote provinces in eastern Afghanistan, were increasingly carrying out rocket attacks and cross-border raids against Pakistan.
“These are critical masses of people that come in; this is not just potshots,” Ms. Rehman said. She said that on 52 different occasions in the last eight months Pakistan had provided to American and NATO commanders in Afghanistan the locations from which the militants were attacking, to no avail.
Immediately, Mr. Lute, a retired three-star Army general and deputy national security adviser who rarely speaks in public, fired back. “There’s no comparison of the Pakistani Taliban’s relatively recent, small-in-scale presence inside Afghanistan to the decades-long experience and relationship between elements of the Pakistani government and the Afghan Taliban,” he said. “To compare these is simply unfair.”
Pakistani officials have long faced criticism from Americans and Afghans for what they say is their failure to stop militant assaults originating from safe havens in Pakistan, often with the complicity of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.
But in the past several months, Pakistani officials have started accusing American and allied officials of the same problem coming from Afghanistan.
Just last month, Afghan-based Taliban militants crossed into Pakistan to kill at least 13 Pakistani soldiers, beheading some of them, the military said.
A senior Pakistani military official said at the time that more than 100 Taliban militants armed with heavy weapons had crossed the border in the attack. After the raid, the militants retreated back into Afghanistan.
Pakistani Taliban fighters fled into Afghanistan starting in the summer of 2009 after a major assault by the Pakistani military on the Swat Valley in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.
Many have taken refuge in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, areas where they have strengthened their presence as American forces have withdrawn. Pakistani officials say that two senior Taliban commanders — Maulana Fazlullah from Swat and Faqir Muhammad from Bajaur — are taking refuge there while their fighters plan attacks in Pakistan.
“We’re feeling a little bit of blowback from ISAF redeployments along the border,” Ms. Rehman said, referring to the NATO command in Afghanistan.
The barbed exchange came during a wide-ranging 90-minute panel discussion in the Aspen Security Forum at the Aspen Institute here. The New York Times is a media sponsor of the four-day conference. At the beginning of the session, it seemed that Mr. Lute and Ms. Rehman were intent on building upon the recently agreed deal to reopen NATO supply lines into Afghanistan.
Ms. Rehman said that the two countries had experienced “an extraordinarily difficult period” after an American airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost near the Afghan border last November, but that they were still staunch allies. Mr. Lute said the countries shared the vital interests of defeating Al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan.
But the bonhomie did not last long. Ms. Rehman also criticized the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone strikes in Pakistan, saying they had reached the point of “diminishing returns” while also whipping up anti-American sentiment in the country.
“This adds to the pool of recruits we’re fighting against,” she said.
 @ The New York Times