In The US, Mass Child Killings Are Tragedies. In Pakistan, Mere Bug Splats

George Monbiot, The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012

 

[A memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook school shootings in Connecticut. The children killed by US drones in north-west Pakistan ‘have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and teddy bears’. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty.]

“Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world’s concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

The barbaric comprador monarchy of Saudi Arabia defends beheading

[That barbarism, feudalism, monarchism, and imperialism present an undivided front of arrogant impunity–of acting like nothing’s wrong–is shocking and disgusting, but expected, given their history and nature.  But that the story is so hidden, in the highly touted “information age,” is a shameful crime of media who claim, falsely, that they are objective, the basis for an informed democracy.  No, they are premeditated co-conspirators with the barbaric powers-that-be. — Frontlines ed.]

Charlotte Rachael Proudman, The Independent (UK), Tuesday 15 January 2013

The beheading of a housemaid in Saudi Arabia highlights slave-like conditions

In 2010, 27 migrant workers were executed in Saudi Arabia and, according to Amnesty International, more than 45 foreign maids are currently on death row

A young Sri Lankan woman was beheaded with a sword last Wednesday in a Dawadmi, a small town in Saudi Arabia. Rizana Nafeek was found guilty of murdering her employers’ child – a crime she vehemently denied until death.

Rizana is not the only migrant worker to have been executed in Saudi Arabia – at least 27 were executed in 2010 and more than 45 foreign maids are facing execution on death row according to Amnesty International. Rizana’s deadly fate highlights the plight of migrant workers all around the world.

Like many migrant workers’ Rizana’s story began when she left her home country Sri Lanka in 2005 for Saudi Arabia to work as a housemaid where she could earn enough money to support her relatives. In the same year she was arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to death for murdering her employers’ four-month-old son, Kayed bin Nayef bin Jazyan al-Otaibi. Rizana said the child choked on milk and died. The child’s family believed Rizana had strangled the child after attempting to bottle-feed him.

Once arrested Rizana battled with an unjust Saudi legal system. “Defendants are rarely allowed formal representation by a lawyer and in many cases are kept in the dark about the progress of legal proceedings against them,” Amnesty International said. The Sri Lankan government and human rights organisations campaigned for Rizana to have a fair trial.

Rizana did not have legal representation prior to her trial – and – she was physically assaulted and forced to sign a confession under duress, which she later retracted. Under international law Rizana at the age of 17 was too young to receive the death penalty. As a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Saudi Arabia is prohibited from sentencing a child under the age of 18 at the time of the alleged offence to death. It is unlikely Saudi Arabia will be subject to any stringent sanctions for violating international law, which led to the death of a young woman.

How to Avoid “Stop and Frisk”

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Intifada

A Leap of Faith Toward Freedom

by RAMZY BAROUD, Counterpunch

If Palestinian leaders only knew how extraneous their endless rounds of “unity” talks have become, they might cease their enthusiastic declarations to world media about yet another scheduled meeting or another. At this point, few Palestinians have hope that their “leadership” has their best interests in mind. Factional interests reign supreme and personal agendas continue to define Palestine’s political landscape.

Fatah and Hamas are the two major Palestinian political factions. Despite Hamas’s election victory in 2006, Fatah is the chief contender. Both parties continue to play the numbers game, flexing their muscles in frivolous rallies where Palestinian flags are overshadowed with green and yellow banners, symbols of Hamas and Fatah respectively.

Historically there has been a leadership deficit in Palestine and it is not because Palestinians are incapable of producing upright men and women capable of guiding the decades-long resistance towards astounding victory against military occupation and apartheid. It is because for a Palestinian leadership to be acknowledged as such by regional and international players, it has to excel in the art of “compromise”. These carefully molded leaders often cater to the interests of their Arab and Western benefactors, at the expense of their own people. Not one single popular faction has resolutely escaped this seeming generalization.

This reality has permeated Palestinian politics for decades. However, in the last two decades the distance between the Palestinian leadership and the people has grown by a once unimaginable distance, where the Palestinian has become a jailor and a peddling politician or a security coordinator working hand in hand with Israel. The perks of the Oslo culture have sprouted over the years creating the Palestinian elite, whose interest and that of the Israeli occupation overlap beyond recognition of where the first starts and the other ends.

Petition in support of Dr GN Saibaba

[We have received the following petition in support of Dr. GN Saibaba, who is threatened with eviction by Delhi University, where he is a professor.  Dr. Saibaba is disabled and wheelchair-bound, and an active leader in the people’s movements in India for revolutionary democratic rights.  We urge our readers to sign, and circulate further, this petition to the DU administration, to stop the threatened eviction.  For more information, see internationalistjustice.blogspot.com.  —  Frontlines ed.]

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Please sign the following petition in support of GN Saibaba, which can be found by clicking the link given here:
https://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/dr-m-m-pallam-raju-union-minister-for-hrd-government-of-india-prevent-eviction-of-a-disabled-teacher-dr-g-n-saibaba-by-delhi-university?utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=url_share&utm_campaign=url_share_after_sign#

Please sign the petition and also forward the link to your contacts who might be interested in signing the petition.

Regards
Hany Babu.
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Delhi
hanybabu@gmail.com

The text of the petition is reproduced below:

Dr. M. M. Pallam Raju
Minister of Human Resource Development
Government of India

Dear Dr. M. M. Pallam Raju,

We the undersigned are astounded to know that the University of Delhi is
withdrawing a facility provided to a severely disabled teacher of its
College. Taking recourse to technicalities as the benchmark to forcefully
evacuate a disabled teacher ignoring further national and international
developments in law pertaining to the differently-abled is a sad state of
affairs of one of the leading universities in India. Any future perusal by
the university authorities of the question of special accommodation at the
warden’s flat, Gwyer Hall accorded to Dr. G. N. Saibaba cannot ignore the
specific grounds of his 90 percent disability.

Universities should be centres of excellence, where cutting edge ideas are
discussed and deliberated towards building a future which is humane and
compassionate. University of Delhi is witness to a comparatively sizeable
increase in the intake of differently-abled people as faculty, students
and non-teaching staff. Given the fact that there are few Universities in
the country with such intake it becomes imperative that Delhi University
also be a model in providing a humane and dignified space for the
differently-abled. And this demands urgently a disable-sensitive
administration which is humanely conversant with the new developments in
jurisprudence pertaining to the differently-abled.

London: A Call to Boycott India’s 63rd Republic Day and stand against sexual assaults on women

 DEMONSTRATE OUTSIDE INDIA HOUSE IN LONDON, Aldwych, WC2B 4NA.

11am to 1pm 26^th January 2013

As India prepares to celebrate its 63^rd Republic Day on 26 January 2013, Delhi is trying to come to terms with the recent gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus and her subsequent death. Such rapes have become rampant in the Indian cities and towns. Few months ago London Guardian commented India to be the worst country for women among the G20 nations. Indian rape laws are stringent enough; however, the executive and the judiciary are so much feudal and patriarchal that the conviction rate for rape cases in India between 2001 and 2010 was 26%. In the case of Muslim and Dalit women the rate of conviction is lmost nil as evident from the gang rape case of Bhanwari Devi in Rajasthan.

However a bigger dimension to this is that the Indian state itself has proved time and again to be the biggest perpetuator of rapes and all forms of assaults on women. State violence is institutionalised through a culture of institutional impunity to the police, the paramilitary and the army. In June 1984, hundreds of Sikh women were gang raped in the sanctity of golden temple by the Indian Army during ‘Operation Blue Star’. In the village of Kuman-Poshpura in Kashmir valley, about 100 women were mass raped by the Indian Army in a single night of 23^rd Feb 1991. Hundreds of Muslim women were gang raped by security forces during the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, as the Chief Minister Narendra Modi just watched. The brutal gang rape and execution of 32 year old Thangjam Manorama in Manipur in July 2004 is another example of Indian Army’s ongoing repression on women in the North-East.

Three Kurdish activists killed in Paris, France — statement of migrant workers from Turkey

We abhor the murder of the three Kurds in Paris!

ATIK | 15.01.2013 | In the evening of the 9th January 2013 was a barbaric attack on the Kurdish Information Bureau in Paris, capital of France, by people that have still not been identified. Through this cold-blooded murder, the co-founder of the PKK Sakine Cansiz, the Paris representative of the KNK Dogan Fidan and the youth activist Leyla Söylemez were executed. This attack Sakine Cansiz and Dogan Fidan were killed by head shots and Leyla Söylemez with shots to the head and abdomen.

This attack was discovered on 10 January 2013. A journalist of Kurdish newspaper Özgür Politika could not reach Dogan Fidan, so he and some other people decided to go to the Kurdish Information Office. On entering the office, they were confronted with the bodies of three Kurds. As the office is located in a busy street, this murder was unnoticed, which could be a sign that this attack was planned and carried out by professionals.

Thousands of Kurds mourned the activists killed in Paris — Funeral in Turkey, 16 January 2013

Sakineh Cansiz the women who was murdered in Paris, was born in 1957 in Dersim. In her youth, she was active in the pupils and students movement of Elazig. She is also one of the founders and a cadre of the PKK.  She was arrested during the 1980 military coup in Turkey in Amed, severely tortured and imprisoned for years in prisons in the fascist Turkish state. Since her first day of participation in the political struggle, she always led a revolutionary life and was therefore one of the first women cadres of the Kurdish national liberation struggle.

Dogan Fidan, was born in 1982 in Maras-Elbistan, emigrated in childhood with her family to Europe. Since 1999, she was active in the revolutionary struggle in Europe. Dogan had long been active as a Parisian representative in the National Congress of Kurdistan. Also murdered in the attack, Leyla Söylemez was an active member within the Kurdish youth movement.

It is well known that in the past many times such murders were carried out by the fascist Turkey. That the fascist Turkish government and its representatives, the current AKP try to portray this as an internal party dispute, is no coincidence. As long as the real perpetrators of this massacre are not found, France will have to bear the responsibility for it.

We as ATIK abhor this massacre and press the Kurdish national movement, its sympathizers and relatives of the victims of our sympathy. We call upon all democratic-minded people and our members to be on the side of the victims. The people will one day bring the murderer to justice.

Sakineh Cansiz, Dogan Fidan, and Leyla Söylemez are immortal!

ATIK-Confederation of Workers from Turkey in Europe

10th 01. 2013

First Nations on the Move — the Idle No More movement

The willow that weeps no more

by Hera Chan , The McGill Daily, 17 January 2013

Τhe air was cold, sharp, biting. A medicine man was burning sage in a cleansing ceremony and a sacred fire burned in my peripheral. An elder called forth all the women who knew the Willow Song to come share their voices. In my Torontonian grade school, Canada’s history begins with the so-called discovery of the Americas. The Willow Song, as well as many other Indigenous traditions, was never taught. As the beat of my heart blended with the beat of the drums, I began to understand the immensity of the history I did not know. So I took some notes from the Willow Song: willow trees bend by the force of the wind. They do not break.

Through the smoke of the fire, I could see the slow rush of the Ottawa River and on its noble cliff, Parliament Hill. Samuel de Champlain wrote in his journal on June 14, 1613: “the savages call it Asticou, which means kettle.” The waterfalls that gave the land its name are no longer there. Today, most call this Algonquin territory Victoria Island, home of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. A woman who, through her hunger strike – still ongoing at time of writing – is inspiring thousands of people to march for Indigenous rights in the social movement now known as Idle No More.

The grassroots movement brings to light three main goals: the decolonization of Indigenous peoples by the federal government, the reversal of omnibus Bill C-45, and the union of Indigenous people and their allies in a collective, nationwide movement. Omnibus Bill C-45 amends 64 acts or regulations, including the Indian Act and several acts regulating natural resource extraction. Many of the reforms will allow the federal government to streamline projects and profit from Indigenous territories.

***

A fellow Daily editor and I arrived on the island the morning of January 11 – one month after Chief Spence began her hunger strike. There was a demonstration planned for that day and buses were already arriving from all over the country with people ready to walk the short distance to Parliament Hill. The Ontarian band chiefs had convened the day before in Ottawa’s Delta hotel to discuss whether or not to negotiate with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This was our second attempt at getting past the camp gates. A media blackout that began the previous Monday had kept journalists like us out. The following day, we came as students instead, without recorder, notebook, or camera. (Thus, I won’t be talking about the demonstration inside the camp.)

Before entering the camp, my colleague and I spent a good ten minutes idling among the parked cars, unsure how to respectfully approach a movement we felt was not ours. A woman wearing traditional indigenous regalia approached us and introduced herself. She laughed with us and chatted amicably about where she was from. “Go make your observations inside,” she said.

Colonized/Occupied Hawai’i: Hawaiian Sovereignty on the move! For land, for food….

#IdleNoMore Hawaiʻi

#IdleNoMore Hawaiʻi, Label GMO & Pounding Kalo

Philippines: New Peoples Army unit assigned typhoon relief work, responds to AFP attack

Merardo Arce Command

Southern Mindanao Regional Operations Command

New People’s Army

Press Statement

18 January 2013

NPA takes prisoners of war, defeats military raid vs AFP operations in Typhoon Pablo-ravaged towns

As the AFP and the US-Aquino regime resumed its fascist counterrevolutionary campaign in typhoon-ravaged countryside, the New People’s Army (NPA) secured two Prisoners of War and defeated a military raid against a detached team of NPA political officers in Compostela Valley and Davao Oriental provinces.  This, after the Merardo Arce Command-Southern Mindanao Regional Operations Command-NPA has directed all its units to take active military offensive stance after it lifted its temporary ceasefire last January 15.

In an NPA checkpoint, operatives from the Guerilla Front 34 Operations Command arrested and detained 60th Infantry Battalion’s Pfc. Jesrel Colanggo, and PNP’s SPO1 Ruel Pasion on January 17, 2013 at around 8:00 AM in Brgy. Mangloy, Laak town.  The NPA also confiscated a 45 caliber pistol in their possession.

The two prisoners of war are being treated well, their safety are of primordial consideration, as the NPA abides the tenets of international humanitarian law.

The NPA checkpoint was conducted to prevent undesirable elements and to counter the fascist Special Operations Team of the 60th IB under the AFP’s Oplan Bayanihan.  The 60th IB’s bloody record against the masses included the summary execution of peasant Totong Mabinse of Brgy. Datu in Laak town, and the forced recruitment and coercive surrender of peasants.

The day before, on January 16, the 67th Infantry Brigade and 72nd IB troops raided a detached team of NPA political officers belonging to the Guerilla Front 15 Operations Command in Sitio Limot, Brgy. Binondo, in Baganga town, Davao Oriental at around 7 AM.  The Red fighters were alerted and battled it out in a counter-defensive measure, but the team left its two high-powered rifles at the scene.

The Red fighters have detached from the main front guerilla unit at the time of the ceasefire to solicit goods for the relief and rehabilitation program of the People’s Democratic Government for the Typhoon Pablo victims.

In the ongoing brigade-wide operations of the 67th IB and 28th IB of the 701st Brigade in the towns of Baganga, Manay, Mati and Lupon in Davao Oriental, the AFP troops have gone berserk in violating the human rights of the poor, suffering Typhoon Pablo victims.  The fascist troops blocked the entry and exit of residents in Sitios Tigbawan, Limot, Mantapay and Bagangan of Brgy. Binondo in Baganga town, and Sitios 72 and Tangaan of Brgy. Manurigao in New Bataan town.

The NPA perseveres in taking part of the People’s Democratic Government’s medium-term program for the recovery of damaged farms and livelihood of suffering masses in Typhoon Pablo-hit areas in the region.  As the people’s war escalates, it will defeat the abusive and deceptive Oplan Bayanihan that has made the lives of Pablo victims worse than ever.

(Sgd.)Rigoberto F. Sanchez

Spokesperson

Merardo Arce Command

Southern Mindanao Regional Operations Command

New People’s Army

As “peace talks” get no traction, Philippine government war on people’s resistance slated to expand

Revved-up counterinsurgency

AT GROUND LEVEL, by Satur C. Ocampo (The Philippine Star) | January 19, 2013

“I am now in a position to influence the implementation of (Oplan) Bayanihan as chief of staff because I now become its operational commander. Unlike when I was the CGPA (commanding general of the Philippine Army), I had a limited role as the force provider. But now I will have a direct hand in the implementation of Bayanihan.”

Thus declared Lt. Gen. Emmanuel Bautista, who became AFP chief last Thursday, regarding the Aquino government’s six-year counterinsurgency program for which he is credited as key author. Basically the program is lifted from the 2009 US Counterinsurgency Plan applied in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One can gather from his statement both a sense of relief and gratification: relief from frustration, as Army commander having had an ancillary or “limited role as the force provider,” and gratification for finally being put fully in-charge of implementing his own plan.

Hence the go-go spirit exuded by Gen. Bautista. He told the press he would “hasten the tempo” of the AFP’s 44-year-old campaign against the Left armed revolutionary movement, with the end-goal to “render irrelevant” the NPA and its armed struggle.

Going by the timeframe of Oplan Bayanihan, officially known as the Internal Peace and Security Plan, Bautista has to work really hard and fast. (His stint as AFP chief ends on July 20, 2014.) The plan calls for the “substantial completion” of the end-goal within the first three years of the program, or in 2011-2013.

This is because within 2014-2016 the AFP aspires to relinquish its lead role in counterinsurgency “to appropriate government agencies” so that it can “initiate its transition to a territorial defense-focused force.”

Nepal: ‘If bourgeois state does not deliver democracy …. we will take up arms’

[While the split in the revisionist-bourgeois UCPN(M) and the formation (re-formation) of the Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist has been the focus of high hopes among revolutionary Maoists internationally, the consolidation of the CPN-M has also been a subject of conflicting views and an emerging debate about how complete the split with revisionism has really been. 

Aspects of the emerging line have not yet been spelled out completely, but some signs of an ongoing and developing struggle over political line have been on the surface of public events.  These struggles are further expressed in former liberated (by the People’s War) base areas, among former PLA fighters, and among others who have shown dismay at the urban-centric work plans and diplomatic ties with Chinese, Korean, and Indian post-Mao revisionists.  While these issues will be watched, and debated, by Nepalis and by internationalists who continue to raise the revolutionary road, the danger of a consolidated “centrism” and of uneasy and unprincipled “reconciliation” of revisionist and revolutionary lines is present.  The following article may, or may not, be indicative of this centrism.  The response of others who are undoubtedly advocating a Leninist and Maoist understanding of the class nature of the state, is not yet being reported.  We anxiously await further developments, and hope this new party will be a far more receptive (and productive) place for this struggle than the UCPN(M) in the revisionist hands of Prachanda and Bhattarai has been. — Frontlines ed.]

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“Maoists will take up arms” if…. : Baidya

KATHMANDU, Jan 17: The CPN-Maoist on Wednesday warned that the party will take up arms if the state power cannot assure the rights of the people. Speaking at a press meet organized here by the party following the conclusion Tuesday of its seventh general convention, the CPN-Maoist also informed that the time for the revolt will be determined by the political situation.

“Give rights to the people. It the people get their rights, who will take up arms? Nobody. Why is the state conspiring instead of assuring people their rights in accordance with previous agreements and assurances. If rights are not given to people, it is sure that arms will be taken up,” answered Mohan Baidya, newly elected chairman of the CPN-Maoist, when asked about the reason for people´s revolt.

“As far as the date for launching a revolt is concerned, it is not a matter to be announced at present. It will rather be determined by the circumstances. Asked when they would launch their revolt, Baidya said, “We will launch the people´s revolt or people´s war as and when circumstances compel us because no one takes up arms just on the basis of the whim or interests of certain leaders”. “Arms will be taken up by any other force also when the situation so demands, even if we ourselves drop the idea.”

Murders in the Holy Land and The US media Wizards of Ozreal

How the media let Israel get away with murder

Charlotte Silver, The Electronic Intifada, San Francisco, 17 January 2013

Relatives of Samir Awad mourn after the 17-year-old died of gunshot wounds on 14 January.

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Israel spends a lot of time talking about secure borders and how the need for them drives its policies regarding the Palestinians. With few exceptions, the media act as willing promoters of this perversion of reality.

Between 11 and 15 January, four young Palestinians — aged 17 to 22 — were shot dead by Israeli occupation forces. The murders took place in the Gaza Strip and at different points along Israel’s wall in the West Bank. In all instances the Israeli army justified the use of lethal force by invoking its need to protect the integrity of the wall and Israel’s borders.

On 11 January, 22-year-old Anwar Mamlouk was reportedly just outside the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza when Israeli soldiers gunned him down.

The next day, Odai al-Darawish, 21, was shot to death at three o’clock in the afternoon while crossing Israel’s wall in the West Bank to get to work in Israel. Initially, Israeli sources claimed the soldiers shot al-Darawish in his legs, in accordance with the “rules of engagement” (“Israeli troops kill Palestinian trying to cross barrier,” The Chicago Tribune, 12 January 2013).

But medical sources quickly revealed that he was hit in the back, indicating that he was likely shot while trying to run to safety (“Israeli forces shoot, kill worker south of Hebron,” Ma’an News Agency, 12 January 2013).

Al-Darawish was from the village of Dura, near Hebron, where in September last year a man attempted to immolate himself in a desperate protest of the dire economic conditions Palestinians face in the occupied West Bank (“Palestinian man attempts to set himself on fire in West Bank village of Dura,” Haaretz, 17 January 2013).

Mustafa Jarad was aged 21 and a farmer from Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. He was shot in the forehead by an Israeli sniper on 14 January while working his land. But despite the Israeli gunman’s skillful marksmanship, Jarad was not killed immediately.

Doctors at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City tried to remove the bullet from his severely injured brain, but Jarad died after surgery (“Mustafa Abu Jarad, murdered in Gaza, by the Israeli army,” International Solidarity Movement, 15 January 2013).

Why Does a Revolt Fail? On Reexamining “Who are you fighting? Is your force and vision capable of victory?”

[If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Jordan – a failed uprising and a re-emerging regime

“Up to now, the regime has been successful in absorbing the movement and fragmenting it”

by Hisham Bustani, Your Middle East, January 8, 2013

There is no doubt that the November 2012 events in Jordan dubbed Habbet Tishreen by many activists in recollection of its 1989 counterpart, the April Uprising, or Habbet Neesan, are unprecedented. Although both were triggered by an increase in the prices of oil derivatives, the 2012 version seems to have been much more radicalized in its approach to the ruling regime, especially the Hashemite monarchs/family and the king himself.

Before 2012, it was the virtue of the ultra-brave to publicly criticize the king and the royal family: they usually spoke with evident hints and innuendo, but without going the full route to directly uttering the name of the king. Criticizing the king and the royal family was simply not tolerated under Jordanian law, and it is still punishable by one to three years in prison. The law incriminating this sort of criticism has perhaps the world’s most absurd name for any legislation: literally, the ‘Law on elongating one’s tongue about the monarch’!

I was not one of the brave ones, but while others directed their criticism to ‘the government’, I have always referred to “the political authority” in my articles, making a point that governments do not rule in Jordan, they are mere executives, and the decision-making lies somewhere else, in spaces on a higher level: The Royal Court and the General Intelligence Agency (Mukhabarat).

India: Maoist rebels attack Indian air force helicopter

	ASSOCIATED PRESS
	NEW DELHI, Jan 18: Police say suspected Maoist rebels have fired on an Indian Air Force helicopter, injuring one wireless operator on board while the aircraft was trying to evacuate wounded policemen from the Maoist stronghold.
	Indian Air Force Helicopter The helicopter was forced to land in Teliwara area in eastern Chhattisgarh state on Friday, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. Pranay Sahay, a paramilitary force officer, says the helicopter was trying to evacuate two state policemen wounded in fighting with Maoist rebels in the area. The rebels have been fighting the central government for more than four decades, demanding land and jobs for tenant farmers and the poor. About 2,000 people — including police, militants and civilians — have been killed in the past few years.
Published on 2013-01-18 21:12:51