Bloody week causes Nepal's generals to rethink their strategy

GAM, Nepal -- Drugged and battle-hungry, guerrillas beheaded an army officer, mutilated another and burned several dead soldiers on a remote mountaintop, an army commander said on Saturday. Two days later, the rebels called for a cease-fire.

Journalists were taken to the village of Gam to see the remains of a burned-down security post, where a retaliatory attack by the guerrillas last Tuesday left at least 70 soldiers and police dead.

The bloodiest week in Nepal's six-year insurgency left hundreds of rebels dead in their heartland, the remote western district of Rolpa, 180 miles west of Katmandu. The unprecedented violence has forced the Royal Nepalese Army to rethink its strategy.

Girding for a fresh guerrilla attack, the army started withdrawing troops from Gam and another army base in Thawang. The new attack was expected at Rolpa's largest garrison, at Libang.

"This is a tactical withdrawal," a top general said on condition of anonymity. "We had two choices, either to reciprocate or withdraw. ... We chose the latter, to have sufficient troops for a larger operation."

The army move was prompted by its losses in Gam, the 1996 birthplace of a revolution aimed at toppling the constitutional democracy in this Himalayan kingdom.

The guerrillas' retaliation came after an assault by the army in Rolpa nearly two weeks ago. Nepal's interior ministry said at least 350 rebels were killed in the offensive there.

The casualty figures are impossible to independently verify.

Last Tuesday, the guerrillas came in waves, beating drums and screaming, sparing few at the military base on the desolate mountaintop, said the commanding officer at Gam, who witnessed the battle and spoke on condition of anonymity.

An officer was beheaded, as the hands and feet of another were tied and his neck slashed repeatedly before he was shot through the head, he said.

The army says the rebels routinely torture, rape and mutilate their victims and use civilians as human shields. The rebels, who draw their inspiration from Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong, deny the allegations and accuse the army of large-scale human rights excesses and summary executions.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International say there are serious human rights violations by both sides.

"We will return when we have adequate resources. Currently we are very thinly spread," said the general, adding that the army needed at least four months to gather more weapons and men.

Nepal will have 6,000 newly trained soldiers later this year. Katmandu is also seeking helicopters, 50,000 M-16 assault rifles, communication equipment and night-vision devices from the United States.

The Bush administration has pledged $20 million in aid, but not for military equipment.

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who met President Bush earlier this week, rejected a cease-fire offer Thursday by rebel leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as "Prachanda," or "fierce one."

On Tuesday, as Prachanda's men fought their way into Gam, they exploded handmade bombs, burned down the thatch-roof huts at the base of the mountain and then slaughtered goats for food.

As bullets whizzed, some soldiers in their bunkers listened hard to what the rebels were shouting. It seemed like a code.

"Five!" one rebel shouted.

"Eighty!" another screamed, approaching the battalion commander's hut. During a lull in firing soon after, a soldier shouted the same toward the guerrilla positions.

"Eighty!" at least eight men said in a chorus as they rushed forward. All went down in a hail of automatic weapon fire. Nine more were killed soon in the same manner, the local battalion commander said.

Army officers said the rebels were drugged on morphine. Used syringes and small bottles of a transparent liquid were strewn about the small potato farm along with hundreds of spent bullets.

Also on the mountainside were some 150 rebel corpses, officers said.

The guerrillas leave few traces of their casualties by flinging their dead down cliffs, burying them or carrying them back in baskets. If the bodies are too many, they behead their own to prevent identification.

On Saturday, journalists saw the bodies of 10 rebels who appeared to have been quickly buried by their colleagues in shallow graves as army reinforcements began to arrive.