Partners In Terror?

Reports of the identification of 824 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in India's Northeast (excludingMizoram and Arunachal Pradesh) for suspected links with the insurgent groups have persistently hit theheadlines in the regional media over the past fortnight.  As luck would have it, several incidents injust the last few days also have demonstrated the truth of these reports, and of what is generally well known,though usually played down by various power centres in the region.

Whether the Union Government takes concrete steps to rein in these organisations masquerading asservice-providers in different sectors by restricting the flow of funds to them - a preponderance of suchfunding comes from the Government and its various agencies - is still to be seen, and there is some sign ofbacktracking by the Union Government. Nevertheless, it is high time that the dynamics and functioning of theseorganisations are brought into a sharp and critical focus.

Media reports suggest that the number of NGOs recently identified as having links with insurgent groups in theregion were: Assam - 151, Meghalaya - 323, Manipur - 197; Nagaland - 82; Tripura - 69; and Sikkim - 2. Theexistence of this nexus between purported organs of civil society, on the one hand, and various insurgentgroups, on the other, raises crucial questions of security and governance:. Specifically,

1. It highlights the complexities of trying to understand (let alone solve) the problem of the multipleinsurgencies in the region.

2. It provides some hope that the Government is gradually coming to terms with the ground realities thatflushing the region with enormous amount of money will only enforce the forces of terror.

The extent of NGO activity in India's Northeast can be ascertained from the example of Meghalaya, a Statewith an area of 22,429 square kilometres and a population of 2.3 million. A study conducted by the Kolkata-basedSociety for Socio-Economic Studies and Services (SSESS) found that there were 8,757 registered NGOs (inSeptember 2001) in the State. This very large number - an NGO for every 263 persons in the State - wouldsuggest a thriving civil society and vast developmental efforts concentrated in the non-Governmental sector.The reality on the ground, unfortunately, makes this number laughable, and there is little evidence ofnon-Governmental developmental activity, or of a substantive civil discourse on the challenges confronting theState.

The problem goes well beyond the perversion of the NGO culture in terms of organizational linkages with theforces of terror. The near-complete renunciation of the basic objectives associated with the NGO movement iscompounded by the enormous amounts of money that are flowing into and through these organizations in the nameof development.

Comprehensive data on the total flow of funds is not available, but an assessment of the magnitude ispossible even on the basis of the fragmentary information that can be accessed. Thus, the Department ofDevelopment of North Eastern Region (DONER) alone disbursed Rs. 5.5 billion from the non-lapsable pool ofcentral resources in the financial year 2002-03. Even though no estimation exists regarding non-Governmentalfunding, including flows from foreign sources, an indication is provided by the SSESS study. The NGOs inMeghalaya alone received an amount of Rs. 1.3 billion from various funding agencies during the financial year1999-2000.

It is commonplace that, rampant extortion apart, leakages from developmental funds find their way into thecoffers of various insurgent groups. Conversations with a number of officials and junior level employees inManipur, for instance, reveal the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and the insurgents, which hasresulted in the near-complete abandonment of developmental activities and the diversion of funds into variousillegal sectors and private pockets. A statement by the Minister in charge of the DONER, C.P. Thakur, inGuwahati, put the leakage of developmental funds to the insurgents alone at 10 per cent of the totalallocations to the region. Officials and sources within the region, however, assert that this is, at best, amodest estimate.

Collusion between the NGOs and insurgents has long been an open secret. Such links include NGOs acting aspublicity managers for specific underground groups, as fundraisers, as overground facilitators of terroristactivities, as media handlers, as intelligence sources, and as conduits to and contacts with various politicaland administrative agencies.

More interesting is the uncritical support that such entirely compromised entities have received frominternational 'human rights watchdogs' such as Amnesty International. Nor, indeed, has such support beenentirely innocent. While documentation is difficult, there is at least one case in which an international'human rights' group - the London-based Liberation - falsified its own documents to provide deliberatecover and multiple identities to members of a terrorist group against whom red corner notices for murder hadbeen issued by Interpol, to appear before the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights at Geneva. (SeeArundhati Ghose -- Terrorists, Human Rights & the United Nations.)

A look as some of the 'leading human rights organisations' in the region is illuminating. In Assam, the ManabAdhikar Sangram Samiti (MASS) has a long history of collusion with the terrorist United Liberation Front ofAsom (ULFA). ·

• As recently as on June 8, 2003, a female ULFA cadre, Kalyani Neog, who functioned as a librarian in the bannedoutfit's council headquarters in Bhutan, was arrested along with two MASS activists from the house of a MASScentral committee member, Minati Bora. Bora is currently absconding.
  
  
• In the last week of May 2003, Police recovered a large collection of ULFA documents from the Ghoguwa hills ofMorigaon district, which incidentally included a letter from MASS requesting ULFA to sponsor a trip for MASSmembers to New Delhi.
  
  
• The confessional statement of a surrendered ULFA militant, Kushal Mech, who gave himself up on May 27, 2003,elaborates on MASS' role, disclosing that it not only acted as ULFA's mouthpiece, but doubled up as itsrecruitment agency. Mech stated that "he had joined ULFA in 2002 with the help of two MASS activists whomhe identified as Pratul Saikia and Amrendra Sharma." These two MASS activists have already been arrested.Amnesty International has 'condemned' these arrests.
  
  
• In a letter recovered after his death on May 26, 2000, ULFA's Assistant Publicity Secretary, Swadhinata Phukanwrote: "In certain places we are not able to distinguish between a member of the ULFA and MASS." Tounderline the camaraderie, MASS condemned the death of Phukan by saying that "he was a member of thecivil wing of ULFA, and was thus a non-combatant. His death has highlighted the systematic use of extrajudicial executions as a standard method of counter-insurgency practice by the security forces."
  
  
• In August 1997, MASS Chairman, Ajit Bhuyan, along with two other office bearers of the organisation, wasarrested under the National Security Act (NSA). They were charged with maintaining links with the ULFA andpublishing statements issued by the underground group. Amnesty International in its Annual Report India, 1998,once again bemoaned these arrests, ignoring open source information, such as the Guwahati-based TheSentinel's report on September 5, 1997, of documentary evidence proving that Bhuyan had advised ULFA tostart a campaign against social activist Sanjoy Ghose, who was later kidnapped and murdered by the terroristgroup.

The fraternity of 'Human Rights organisations' extends over most of the theatres of conflict in the region.The Naga People's Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) and the Naga Students' Fedration (NSF) have been named bythe Union Government for their nexus with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim - Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM),though this is no longer a proscribed organisation following its five-year engagement with the Government.

Groups like the Committee on Human Rights (COHR) and Human Rights Alert in Manipur are outfits in theforefront of a campaign for 'human rights' to protect 'the people' from abuses by security force personnel,but who maintain a stoic silence when it comes to speaking of mounting excesses by the insurgents. In Tripura,where as many as 69 NGOs are said to have been put on the black list, organisations such as the Agartala-basedBorok Human Rights Forum operate with a clear pro-insurgent mandate.

The Amnesty International Report, 2003, on India makes a sweeping claim that, in the year 2002, "humanrights defenders were frequently harassed by State and private actors, and their activities labelled as'anti-national." It is not clear whether Amnesty has any credible procedure of assessing the credentialsof the various local 'human rights organisations' who provide it with its inputs, but it is abundantly clearthat, if such procedures exist, there are far from transparent.

There is sufficient evidence that a substantial proportion of Amnesty's inputs are generated from motivatedreports by fraudulent organisations that are linked to violent political and extremist groups, or are frontorganisations of such groups, and these inputs appear to be amalgamated into Amnesty's reports without avisible credibility check.

The result is that it is the cause of terrorism and political extremism that is actually promoted under acamouflage of genuine concern for human rights, and organisations like Amnesty provide terrorist fronts amuch-needed international platform. In a situation where NGOs constantly demand greater 'transparency' and'accountability' from the Government and its various agencies, it would be useful to bring a measure oftransparency and accountability into the activities of the NGOs themselves.

Of course, the work environment for NGOs in the Northeast remains far from healthy. Over the years, insurgentgroups have targeted legitimate NGO activists if they are seen to affect the standing or legitimacy of theextremist cause. In the most infamous case of the region, Sanjay Ghose, associated with AVARD-NE, was abductedand killed by ULFA terrorists in 1997. Following his disappearance, ULFA chief Paresh Baruah issued a diktatfrom his hideout in Bangladesh, declaring that, "no NGO can work in Assam without the permission of ULFA."According to Intelligence Bureau sources, following this directive, 25 NGOs actually applied for approval fromULFA to either start or continue their activities in the State.

Worse still, the response of the political classes has remained ambivalent. For instance, Tripura ChiefMinister Manik Sarkar, who has been crying himself hoarse over the Centre's failure to act against Bangladeshiauthorities for providing shelter to insurgent groups operating in the Northeast, continues to expressignorance about the linkages between such groups and various NGOs in his State, and has failed to act againstthe latter.

In other instances, sections of the political leadership of various States actively collude with insurgentgroups, or with their NGO fronts. Under the circumstances, in the absence of any statutory accountability ortransparency of operation, it remains improbable that the corrosive nexus between NGOs and the extremists canbe broken in the foreseeable future.

Bibhu Prasad Routray is Acting Director, Institute for Conflict Management Database & DocumentationCentre, Guwahati. This article appears here courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the SouthAsia Terrorism Portal