Showing No Mercy

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There was nothing unusual about the request for reinforcements. Citing the presence of Maoist rebels and fears of an attack, the letters from Achham chief district officer Mohan Singh Khadka had piled up steadily over the winter. But not until early February did the army order the garrison in the western district town of Mangalsen reinforced with 19 extra soldiers, bringing the total to 58. "All 75 districts are constantly demanding more troops," says a senior Nepalese military official. "We get all these reports: 100 Maoists seen here, 100 seen there. And some member of Parliament is always demanding more protection. It's hard to know who to listen to and who's crying wolf."

This time Khadka was not crying wolf. Just after midnight on Feb. 17, an army of at least 2,000 of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas—up to half of the core group of armed rebels—fell on Mangalsen from the surrounding Himalayan hills. Their rockets cut through the walls of government offices and police stations, while mortars whistled overhead. After forcing residents into the open, the guerrillas blew buildings apart. They ransacked the bank, making off with $263,000, and freed 16 comrades from the Mangalsen jail while more troops overran Sanfebagar airport 20 km away, one of the few operable runways in Nepal's far west.

But the bulk of the rebel force—and its savagery—was saved for the army barracks. After setting fire to several buildings in town and waiting until half the garrison mobilized to douse the flames, more than 1,000 rebels attacked the depleted post. Reinforcements arriving the next day found the soldiers' bodies in a line stretched across the sandbag ramparts. Many bore the powder-burn marks of close-range executions. The garrison commander was found decapitated and quartered, his head, arms and legs stuffed in a sleeping bag. All weapons and ammunition had been taken. Only three soldiers survived. The attack, four days after the sixth anniversary of the Maoist rebellion, was the bloodiest to date: the rebels killed 141 soldiers, policemen and civilians, including Khadka, intelligence officer Lok Eaj Upreti and Upreti's wife. The Maoists butchered all three upper-caste Nepalis with an ax.

If there were any lingering doubts that Nepal's Maoist guerrillas have graduated from poorly armed historical anomalies to the ranks of Asia's most-threatening insurgent movements, that notion died last week as reports of atrocities mounted—at least 34 police officers killed in an attack in remote Sitalpati in the midwest, five bus passengers blown apart by a bomb for defying a general strike call and a bomb blast that injured one man in the capital, Kathmandu. "This is now a serious threat to the existence of the state," says Prakash C. Lohani, a former Foreign Minister. "It is clear that the survival of the ruling class itself is at stake."

Until a year ago, the outgunned-and-outnumbered ragtag idealists armed with sticks, stones and World War I-era .303-cal. rifles seemed to employ a strategy of dying for their cause of ending monarchy, caste and feudalism: nearly 2,000 had perished while gaining little ground. But since Nov. 23 when the Maoist rebels ended a four-month truce and launched a string of attacks across the nation, it has become clear that the rebels, who take as a model Peru's brutal Shining Path, have transformed themselves into a lethal force. Since then, Nepal's civil war has claimed another 900 lives. Peace negotiations have been abandoned; Parliament last week extended the state of emergency by three months and the talk now is of full-scale war. "I no longer believe they are sincere about talks," Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba told TIME.

The weapons and tactics used by the guerrillas in Mangalsen have fueled suspicions that they have received training and aid from India's equally brutal communist rebels. Most of the Maoists' political leaders, including the group's founder, former agricultural student Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as Prachanda, have found shelter across the border in the northern jungles of Bihar State. The emboldened rebels are also striking isolated army posts to seize automatic weapons. The arms used with such devastation at Mangalsen—5-cm mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and Indian self-loading rifles, according to Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times—were the first demonstration of their newly acquired armory. "The Maoists, for the first time, had better weapons," said Dixit. "The police were still using their old .303s."

But it is the rebels' increasing savagery that has struck terror across the Himalayan kingdom. One 32-year-old subsistence farmer from western Nepal was singled out for a random nighttime attack three months ago. "We heard a group of women chanting in the dark 'Long Live the Maoist Party of Nepal,'" says the man in a hospital in Kathmandu. "They rushed in. They were all dressed in white, all with short hair, the youngest about 15 and the oldest no more than 22. They took me out on the porch where they bound my hands behind my back and tied my legs together at the ankles. They brought a big rock and put it under my knee. One girl showed me a very large ax. While 12 girls held me down, three other girls took turns hacking at me. Blood and pieces of my bones shot up in the air—it was all over the porch wall next morning." Doctors amputated the man's right leg below the knee. Dr. Mahindra Kumar Nepal, executive director of the capital's Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, says his wards receive one or two victims of similar attacks a day. "We are getting fractures here that you never see described in medical literature," he says. "A clear pattern has emerged. It seems there is a policy to terrorize people through the use of extreme violence."

Some suggest the rebels' new audacity stems in part from the assassination of King Birendra and eight other members of the royal household by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra on June 1. The late King did not use the army against the insurgents, leading to speculation that he had reached an unofficial understanding with the rebels, which ended with his death. Others claim that with the Maoists' political leaders abroad, military commanders have gained the upper hand. "The guerrilla wing has become stronger and the political wing has become weaker," says Yubaraj Ghimire, editor-in-chief of the Nepali-language Kantipur Daily. "The military faction is now leading and the whole concentration is on a military buildup." Others point to the rebels' use of fighters as young as 13 to explain the mindless brutality. As documented from Cambodia to Angola, indoctrinated, prematurely empowered child soldiers are capable of appalling atrocities.

Whatever the source of the new bloodlust, it is eroding the Maoists' earlier popular support. Villagers initially found the Maoists' opposition to the corrupt and self-serving ruling élite appealing and approved of their campaigns to ban alcohol and hashish and end age-old discrimination against women. That support is now all but gone, opening the avenue for Deuba to win back the public. Last week he promised sweeping social, economic and constitutional reforms, building on a package of land-reform measures passed last summer. But in the short term, the war continues to escalate. And while the eventual winner is unknown, the inevitable losers will be Nepal's 23 million, largely poverty-stricken citizens.