Seven minutes before all hell broke loose, Kepwang Wangsa Konyak recalled handing over his phone to a soldier on the passenger seat of one of the three SUVs parked midway on the steep kutcha road between the hilltop Oting village and the coal mines of Tiru Valley close to Assam. The soldier, his face barely visible in the dark, appeared to be in command. He was the only one who spoke but in monosyllables.

Kepwang, the president of the Oting Students’ Union, was among scores of villagers who had converged past 10 p.m. on December 4 at the spot from where they had heard a volley of gunshots about six hours earlier. Some had come down from Oting village about 4 km uphill and some from Upper Tiru and the adjoining Lower Tiru villages a couple of kilometres downhill.

Kepwang, based in Mon, the headquarters of Nagaland’s Mon district about 65 km away, was not supposed to be in Oting that night. The death of an elderly neighbour had brought him home on December 3, more than a fortnight before his usual trip to the village for Christmas.

He rode down to Tiru Valley the following afternoon to catch up with friends and relatives working in the coal mines. He was particularly interested in meeting his “richer” cousin Shomwang, owner of a coal mine, and extracting ₹500 from him for khana-peena (food and drinks).

“I was having tea and snacks with his money at Tamulbari (a junction from where the road to Oting snakes up from near the opencast mines) when Shomwang drove past in his pickup truck, carrying seven of my friends and cousins. He turned towards Oting,” Kepwang said.

Minutes later, at about 4:30 p.m, Kepwang heard gunshots in the direction where the pickup truck had gone out of view. The gunshots were unlike those produced by the ubiquitous muzzle-loading hunting rifles that almost every adult Konyak male villager carries as a habit, along with a machete.

It had been a while since the people of Oting and nearby hamlets had heard such gunshots. Members of two rival extremist groups had an exchange of fire in a jungle close to Oting in 2001. Three extremists and a soldier had died in two encounters over the past five years — one between Oting and Wangla village and the other at Lapa village. The shots of December 4 sent a chill down Kepwang’s spine; he knew something was wrong.

‘Night of madness’

“The mind said encounter, but the heart hoped not. There were 10 motorcycles at Tamulbari at the time the shots were fired. All of us headed uphill, with three of us who knew how to converse in Hindi and English leading the way. Some soldiers stopped us about 200 metres from where the presumed encounter happened and we took a detour to Oting as told to,” Kepwang said.

The villagers grew worried when eight of their sons did not reach home after more than three hours. A public announcement sanctioned by the Angh, the local king, was made about the missing men and the need to search for them. Messages were also sent to their brethren in Tiru Valley.

“The Army vehicles, all Assam-registered and driven by civilians, were ready to leave when we reached the spot. We saw in the near-darkness three soldiers jump onto the back of a pickup truck and try to cover something. I reached out and felt a head, a leg and a hand, cold and sticky. I withdrew my hand instinctively, asked the soldiers what was up. They did not speak,” Kepwang said.

He went to the vehicle where the soldier who seemed to be in command sat. “At 10:12 p.m., I called the DC (Deputy Commissioner of Mon district, Thavaseelan K.) and told him something bad had happened. I handed over the phone to the soldier and asked him to speak to the DC. I don’t know what they discussed, but the soldier handed the phone back to me after about two minutes when my sister called in desperation to know about our missing men,” Kepwang said.

The sister’s call probably saved Kepwang’s life. As he moved away from the Army vehicle to speak, some villagers spotted the bodies on the pickup truck and charged at the soldiers, who exited the vehicles, snatched three motorcycles of the villagers and went towards the Assam border. “They were shooting on the run, as if we were enemies,” Wangnai, one of the 35 survivors of that “night of madness”, said from his hospital bed in Dimapur, Nagaland’s commercial hub about 250 km southwest of Oting. He is recovering from two bullet injuries.

Before long, the spot turned into a battleground — sophisticated firearms versus machetes — leaving seven villagers dead and the Army vehicles in flames. When the local police arrived, there were 13 bodies, six of them coal miners killed at around 4:30 p.m. in what the Army called a case of “mistaken identity”. One of the slain coal miners was Shomwang, shot through the windscreen.

Missing among those who Shomwang was driving back to Oting were Sheiwang and Yeihwang. The soldiers, said to be from an elite commando unit, had reportedly evacuated and dropped them at the Assam Medical College and Hospital in Dibrugarh. On December 22, Sheiwang was shifted to the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital for further treatment while Yeihwang was expected to be discharged from the Dibrugarh hospital soon after Christmas.

Cold-blooded murders

A signboard quoting Mahatma Gandhi greets people entering Nagaland’s Namsa from Assam’s Namtola across a rickety bridge spanning a stream that virtually demarcates the inter-State boundary. It reads: “The future depends on what we do in the present.” The signboard is close to a flex poster displaying the photos of the 14 civilians killed on December 4 and the resultant unrest in Mon town on December 5. Similar posters are strung at strategic points along the road to Mon and elsewhere in Nagaland, a reminder of the greater goal — the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) of 1958 that is believed to give the armed forces personnel the licence to kill — besides the fight for justice to the victims of the botched Army operation.

Tahwang Angh, whose kingdom comprises Oting and Tiru Valley, agrees with the Konyak Union that the future of the Nagas has to be protected by ensuring the present is answerable for the “cold-blooded murders in the name of counter-insurgency operations based on credible intelligence”. The union is the apex body of the Konyaks, one of Nagaland’s 14 principal Naga communities, that dominates the Mon district.

A coal-powered local economy

Mon and the adjoining Longding district of Arunachal Pradesh have seldom been the domain of the NSCN (I-M) unlike its rival Khaplang faction. The NSCN (I-M) has been on ceasefire mode since 1997. The split-prone NSCN (Khaplang), now NSCN (K-Yung Aung), followed suit in 2001 but walked out of the peace process in March 2015.

The topography – dense jungles, difficult hills and poor roads – of these two districts offered passages for the Myanmar-based NSCN (K/K-YA) to carry out hit-and-run operations. The districts also became conduits for the members of the Assam-based United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent).

A dossier prepared by the Army before the December 4 incident said extremists of various shades use the tea, coal and oil belt from Nagaland’s Namsa in the northeast through Oting, Tiru and Naginimora in the southwest for extortion.

https://hinditonews.in/nagaland-civilian-killings-a-christmas-of-grief-in-mon-2/