Gruesome Maoist pictures stir official outrage

Photographs of dead Maoists killed by Indian security forces have prompted an official reproach from the home ministry.

Photographs of dead Maoists killed by Indian security forces being carried “like animals” hanging from bamboo sticks have prompted an official reproach from the home ministry, reports said on Friday.

The pictures, published on Thursday after an attack by security forces on a Maoist camp in the east of the country, showed women with hands and feet bound to poles as they were carried from nearby forested areas.

“The way those bodies were being carried was simply inhuman,” a senior official in the ministry of home affairs told The Express newspaper.

The unnamed official said carrying bodies with bamboo poles might be necessary in jungle areas where Maoist camps are found “but once they come out of the forest area, they should use stretchers to carry bodies”.

Local paramilitary forces and the police have been told to treat the dead with more dignity, the official said.

Indian security forces killed 12 Maoists, including three women, in a gunfight late Wednesday in the latest of a series of raids against rebel strongholds in the east of country.

The government launched a major offensive last year to tackle the worsening left-wing insurgency, which critics say is leading to human rights violations and civilian deaths.

Since the start of the offensive, the Maoists have hit back with their own bloody strikes including the massacre of 76 policemen in April and the derailment of a train that killed 146.

The images of the women attached to the poles were explicit even by Indian standards, where photographs of the bloody aftermath of accidents or militant attacks are routinely published by newspapers and magazines.

Naxal problem not an armed conflict?

Meanwhile, India on Friday strongly protested against the inclusion of the Naxal issue under the realm of an “armed conflict” in a UN report, saying the violence being perpetrated by these groups does not make it a zone of armed conflict as defined by international law.

According to the Press Trust of India, referring to the recent UN report that deals with ‘Children and armed conflicts’, India’s envoy to UN Hardeep Singh Puri told the Security Council that Maoist operations did not fall into the realm of an “armed conflict”.

“At the outset I should make clear that the violence being perpetrated by these groups though completely abhorrent and condemnable, certainly does not make this a zone of armed conflict as defined by international law,” he said.

“We, therefore, cannot accept reporting on these incidents as falling within the mandate of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict,” he said, referring to top UN official Radhika Coomaraswamy.

The report, which is prod-uced by the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and submitted to the Security Council, highlighted the recruitment and use of children by the Maoist armed group in some districts of the Chhattisgarh.

“The Naxals have not only admitted that children were used only as messengers and informers but have also admitted that children were provided with training to use non-lethal and lethal weapons including landmines,” the report said.

Coomaraswamy did not respond to PTI on India’s specific objection but the UN diplomat spoke generally to reporters about the difficultly of defining an armed conflict.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th, 2010.