On patrol in Nepal's rebel heartland

More than 3,500 have died in six years of fighting

By Daniel Lak BBC correspondent in Nepal

Clattering above the misty hills of Midwestern Nepal in an ageing Puma helicopter, I couldn't help but think what a target we must have presented for notional Maoist snipers below.

The clouds had forced us down to the deck and our pilot, Colonel Madan, was skimming the ridge lines and hilltops.

Around 80 soldiers and policemen died in Gam

I noticed that the army officers on board were sitting on their flak jackets so they must have been thinking of those Maoist marksmen too.

We were the first foreign journalists to be taken by the army to their forward positions in the Maoist heartland.

Media reports back in Kathmandu had spoken of hundreds and hundreds of rebel casualties in recent battles in Rolpa district where the Maoist rebellion began in February 1996.

But the officers I flew with weren't exactly overjoyed, or full of the glow of victory.

"We don't really know", one of them confided. "The enemy commanders drag their dead away and bury them somewhere in the jungle."

Incidentally, the officer asked me not to report any soldier's name because the Maoists target military families. It is that kind of war.

Gam Village

We landed on a barren rocky spur off the heavily forested ridge of the Himalayan foothills in central Nepal.

The army had born away their dead to heroes funerals in Kathmandu, but a different fate awaited those slain Maoists whose bodies had been left behind

This was the garrison at Gam village, scene of yet another battle that produced uncertain and unconfirmable Maoist casualty figures.

What we did know was that around 80 soldiers and policemen died here, defending an exposed and probably indefensible position.

The Maoists took the post, tortured captives and escaped with ammunition and fresh weapons. But the army officers said this was a victory because at least 150 rebels had died in the siege.

A cool wind blew rags and papers around. As I got closer, I saw that the rags were clothes - shell suits, underwear, socks - the possessions of dead soldiers.

The papers, well, many of them were playing cards, others were photographs of girlfriends and families.

Dead rebels

The army had born away their dead to heroes funerals in Kathmandu, but a different fate awaited those slain Maoists whose bodies had been left behind.

You could, of course, smell the rebel dead before you could see them. And it was our fault.

Soldiers exhumed the bodies from shallow graves to show us how many they had killed during the battle - four days earlier.

Swollen, wounds gaping impossibly wide as bodies decomposed, features almost unrecognizable, we all found ourselves gagging and averting our eyes.

The bodies were clad in bloody, torn camouflage, caps with red stars lay on the ground beside them.

Perhaps most obscene of all, the dead lay in a rice terrace sculpted from the mountainside by generations of family labour, now permanently polluted by blood and the buried dead of a shadowy war.

The Maoists have become possibly the world's best guerrilla fighters

No villager will ever plant here, ever again.

A senior general walked with us around the perimeter of the garrison and shook his head in dismay. He called for a walkie talkie and ordered his men to withdraw from Gam.

They would go back to base in the town of Libang, district headquarters of Rolpa, the last substantial bit of government-held territory in the area.

I found myself staring outward from the garrison defences a lot, wondering who might be looking back.

Imagine the lot of the Royal Nepal Army soldier out here, fighting on his own soil against an enemy who looks just like him, who arrives by night in overwhelming numbers, who screams, beats drums and summarily executes captured members of the security forces.

Outnumbered

On paper, the Maoists are vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the army and the police.

But in the six years since they turned rural alienation and poverty into a struggle for their version of a communist utopia, they have become possibly the world's best guerrilla fighters.

Rumours persist of foreign training - ex-British Gurkhas, militants from the Philippines, even al-Qaeda - but no evidence exists.

Many Nepalese have called for peace talks to resume

No one knows for sure, and that lack of knowledge, remains the Maoists best advantage.

Britain and America are promising help for the anti-Maoist campaign here.

A Western defence attache from one of the embassies in Kathmandu was strolling the perimeter defences at Gam with us, equally disgusted by the stench of death, listening to senior officers explain what they needed most to prosecute the war.

Helicopters gunships, one said, M-16 rifles, body armour, night vision goggles, technology and communications equipment.

The attache quietly observed that all the military aid in the world does not win wars - commitment does, along with luck, patience and the hearts and minds of affected civilians.

We can't give you any of that, the attache said.

Nepal's future

My biggest fear is not that Nepal is on the brink of anarchy or a Maoist takeover.

It is that the war will go on and on, the guerrillas using tactics and terrain, the army fighting hard and bravely.

But a horribly damaging status quo reducing a once proud nation to a shadow of itself, a dying economy, a countryside in the grip of a gun culture - Afghanistan in the Himalayas.

I hope not. I hope that the efforts of peace activists, aid agencies and Nepalis of good will can end the violence, restore peace.

But Shangri La is no more. Something has disappeared in this kingdom - innocence - perhaps never to be rediscovered.