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COMMENTARY
Southeast Asian arms trail to
India's northeast
By Bibhu Prasad
Routray
On September 21, security forces
operating in India's upper Assam district of Tinsukia
recovered 31 AK-56 rifles from a suspected United
Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) hideout. A few days
later, in a series of raids, a large quantity of arms
and ammunition belonging to the National Socialist
Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM) was recovered
near Khonsa in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.
The cache included RPG propellers, mortars and
substantial quantities of ammunition. On October 24, the
police in Jorhat seized some 600 detonators on the
Nagnimora-bound passenger train that originated in
Nagaland.
Now, the problem is rapidly extending
into areas that have been largely peaceful in the past,
and in one of the largest ever seizures of ammunition in
the state of Meghalaya, police on November 1 destroyed a
Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council hideout at Khlaw
Roman in Mawlai Nongpdeng and recovered 460 M-16 live
shells, 169 AK-47 bullets, two 7.62 SLRs and two
high-explosive hand grenades, along with some
cartridges.
Incidents such as these leave behind
a combined sense of relief and trepidation: each
recovery is another counter-insurgency success story,
but it points towards the length of the road that needs
to be traversed before India's northeast can be salvaged
from the menace of small arms, and the spiral of
violence that they support and provoke.
For the
insurgents in the region seeking sufficiency in arms
supplies, it has been a slow and steady growth to
perfection. The Naga insurgency, considered to be the
mother of all insurgencies in the northeast, initially
managed with the assistance of counterparts in
neighboring Myanmar, until the Southeast Asian illegal
arms bazaars unveiled before their eyes in the late
1980s.
The underground markets in Thailand and
Myanmar offer abundant supplies of AK series rifles,
RPGs and an array of other sophisticated small arms and
explosives. In its new avatar, the NSCN-IM not only used
these bazaars for its own perpetuation, but also
introduced new players in the arena, such as the ULFA in
Assam, to the world of the arms dealers. Soon, the ULFA
was not only surfing the Southeast Asian bazaars, but
also venturing into deals with European players. The
ability of the insurgent groups in the northeast to
engage the Indian state in protracted little wars is
substantially the result of the easy access to these
tools of terror.
Ironically, there has been
little commensurate growth in terms of access to
comparable weapons among the police forces in the
region. As the annual report of the Union Ministry of
Home Affairs, 2001, noted, "The condition of police
forces in the northeastern states is quite poor. Many of
the militant groups have far more modern arms and
equipment than the state police." There is little
evidence of any dramatic transformation in the
circumstances since this observation was made, and, in
the absence of the army and paramilitary forces - forces
modelled on a brawnier archetype with a better range of
weapons - the police in the various states of the region
retain very limited capacities to engage with the
terrorists.
A September 2002 report on the state
of Meghalaya, for instance, revealed that police in the
district of South Garo Hills - the smallest among the
state's seven districts, but spread over 1,850 square
kilometers - have access to only three AK rifles and two
carbines. This, despite the fact that the district is
not only a hotbed of a local insurgency led by the Achik
National Volunteers Council (ANVC), but also serves as a
key transit route for groups like the ULFA and the
National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), which
operate in neighboring Assam from and to their safe
havens in Bangladesh.
Official estimates of the
quantity of weapons available to the insurgents vary,
and are necessarily approximations. However, if seizures
are the proverbial "tip of the iceberg", the region is
awash in arms. A total of 6,196 weapons have been seized
in the period between 1991-2002. A senior officer of the
Border Security Force in the state of Manipur observes,
"Security force personnel operating in Manipur are up
against 6,770 cadres of 12 terrorist outfits armed with
3,750 sophisticated weapons. The People's Liberation
Army, with a cadre-strength of 2,000, has 700 weapons;
and the United National Liberation Front with 1,500
cadres has 800 weapons." Evidently, not only is access
to weapons a relatively simple affair, but the time lag
between the origin of an insurgent group and its
graduation into a full-scale armed guerrilla group has
become very short. Most of the insurgent groups
operating in the northeast secure rapid access to
sophisticated small arms, often through the mediation of
the larger established militant organizations.
The availability of huge numbers of arms and
ammunition for the insurgents needs to be analyzed
against the background of the growing networking among
terrorist groups, and also the uninhibited extortion
set-up that they administer with impunity. The ULFA's
newfound association with the Manipuri group, the United
National Liberation Front, is one such marriage of
convenience. Linkages between the ULFA, the Kamatapur
Liberation Organization, the NDFB, the ANVC, the NSCN-K
and the All Tripura Tiger Force have, at least in part,
emerged as facilitators of successful gunrunning across
the northeast region. The Indian state is, consequently,
pitted against a confederacy of insurgent groups with a
vast and assured supply of sophisticated firearms.
The easy availability of such weapons is sourced
primarily in Southeast Asia. Even a decade and a half
after the cessation of hostilities in Cambodia,
Southeast Asia remains an unending arms dump for the
weapons released from that conflict, and these cater to
the ambitions of every malcontent in the region.
Cox's Bazaar, a completely unmonitored port in
Bangladesh, has emerged as a major transit center for
the supply of illegal arms and ammunition, not only
feeding criminal and extremist elements in that country,
but also the medley of insurgent outfits in India's
northeast. Most of the arms passing through this port
originate from Cambodia, and are routed through southern
Thailand on tiny high-speed boats.
The frequency
of such deliveries is also a matter of concern. In the
past year alone, two major consignments are known to
have found their way to ULFA's armory alone.
Intelligence sources suggest that another such delivery
reached the NSCN-IM cadres in the month of December
2001. In the latter case, the contraband safari started
from the Gulf of Thailand and, through multiple modes of
transport, including small steamers as well as porters,
reached the NSCN-IM's bastions in Nagaland.
It
is true that the range of weapons available to the
insurgents in the northeast is yet to reach the level of
sophistication of their counterparts in other theaters
of conflict, particularly Jammu and Kashmir. If the
recovery of weapons by the security forces is any
indication, the AK series of rifles still constitute
just a small fraction of the total arms seized. Over the
past five years, recoveries in Assam are mostly in the
range of pistols, revolvers, rifles and other
unspecified guns. The AK series rifles constitute less
than 6 percent of the total number of seized weapons.
This, however, gives little scope for
complacence. There have been occasions where the
militants have used an eclectic mix of small arms and
explosives to execute major operations, and the
fatalities have remained high for nearly two decades. On
January 27, suspected ULFA terrorists killed Kamrup
district Deputy Superintendent of Police Devajit Pathak
and his driver, using a sophisticated improvised
explosive device on the Boko-Nalapara Road near the
Nalapara village.
The impact of the easy
availability of such a range of small arms and
explosives is that most of these extremist groupings
have been able to continue with their unrestrained
extortions over wide geographical areas. Insurgents have
not only been able to kill with impunity (403 deaths
have already been reported from the northeast region
this year), but have also usurped the political space in
states like Manipur.
There is little prospect of
curbing this liberal flow of arms in the foreseeable
future in the absence of an international mechanism to
impose accountability on the sources of supply and
distribution. Regrettably, efforts to curb, monitor, or
account for the international production, stockpiling
and diffusion of small arms have always been stonewalled
by the major armament producing nations.
Measures to account for the immense stockpiles
that were transferred into the Asian region in the many
"little wars" of the Cold War era have also seldom gone
beyond an elaborate charade, and the sheer volume of
weapons floating about in the region becomes a primary
source of escalation and transformation of social
tensions into armed conflict.
Within this
context, the efforts of state agencies within individual
victim nations to secure some degree of control through
border management and counter-insurgency operations, are
at best fire-fighting measures with limited
possibilities of success. This is particularly true in
the vitiated atmosphere in the South Asian region, where
several states and their intelligence agencies actively
support subversion, extremism and terror in neighboring
countries.
Bibhu Prasad Routray,
acting director, Institute for Conflict Management,
Database and Documentation Center, Guwahati.
Published with permission from the South Asia
Intelligence Review of theSouth Asia
Terrorism Portal
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