Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  Oking was the name the Nagas had always given their headquarters, no matter where it was located. Any azha, or order, was always datelined Oking. By naming his newspaper after the elusive headquarters of the Naga underground, Zekope had, in effect, laid down an open challenge to the authorities in Nagaland. But quite remarkably, Indian democracy had tolerated even that and the paper was never banned.

  I was tired and weary after the showdown with the young Naga officer, so I sat up by the fire in the bamboo hut, learning about the traditional Naga way of life from Phomting. I asked why all the villages in the area had the prefix “Kayu” and the explanation was intriguing indeed. When a Naga clan settled in a new area, their first village would be called “Noknyu” which literally means “Mother Village”.

  Over generations, as the population increased, new villages would be set up on neighbouring hilltops in expanding circles around the Noknyu; in this case, Kayu Nasa, Kayu Longkai and so on. Kayu Noknyu, naturally, would be the mother village of the Kayu group of villages. Each village cluster has its own mutually unintelligible language even today. The NSCN recently has tried to introduce Nagamese as a lingua franca in the eastern hills also, but with limited success.

  “During the head-hunting days,” Phomting continued, “the clan headman would live in the Noknyu. The outlying villages defended him from rival village clusters which had grown up in the same manner.”

  I listened, fascinated, the flames of the fire casting dancing shadows inside the bamboo hut.

  “The last heads in this Kayu village cluster were taken two years ago, in 1983. This used to be one of the wildest regions in ‘the East’. Even when our leaders first entered these hills from ‘the West’, they encountered fierce resistance. All the villages were fortified with high stockades and their gates were permanently guarded. In those days, you see, all the villagers went about armed with spears and daggers. Some had homemade muskets. There were even a few .303 rifles which I think had filtered into this area by barter. As you know, during World War Two, the Allies built their Ledo Road about 100 kilometres—or four, five days’ walk—to the north and they distributed arms widely among hill tribes who fought against the Japanese. Our eastern cousins loved these new weapons and learnt how to use them.”

  Reading between the lines, I understood the NSCN had conquered these eastern Naga hills in Burma with brutal methods. Villages were burnt down and headmen executed as an example. And now, the NSCN was telling the people the plague raging in the area was God’s punishment for their initial resistance against the Christian Nagas from the Indian side. Judging from how enfeebled and subdued the villagers were in Kayu Longkai and Kayu Noknyu, the NSCN’s God had got his message through.

  I went to sleep just before midnight, close to the fire that was burning in the hearth. It was freezing cold in the mountain top village and I covered Hseng Noung, myself and Ee Ying with some woollen Naga shawls we had brought with us from Kohima. We had entered an amazing world, the last really unexplored frontier in Asia; an unmapped area which no outsiders but the Nagas from India had been able to penetrate before us.

  A message reached us as the sun rose early the next morning: bring the foreign guests to headquarters as soon as possible. Climbing the mountains was a lot easier that day and we reached a village called Chuyang Longkai after two hours’ walk. A red carpet welcome awaited us. The entire village came out to greet us; Naga soldiers in rag-tag uniforms and with old Chinese rifles, villagers in only shawls and loincloths, and hordes of totally naked, cheering children.

  Seven representatives from headquarters had come to meet us, including a tall man with a thin beard who introduced himself as Major Haw. I took an instant liking to him as we shook hands. He spoke excellent English. We went into one of the huts in the village and sat down on some bamboo stools.

  I learnt he had spent two years at the Kachin rebel headquarters at Pa Jau, from 1982 to 1984, and he knew all the KIA leaders.

  “Actually, we received a copy of your letter of introduction from the KIA several months ago. They sent it up from their 2nd Brigade headquarters. So we knew about you and that you were on your way,” Haw said.

  I was tactful enough not to ask him why, in that case, the NSCN had made no effort to help us cross the border. But the route forward now lay open before us and that was the most important thing.

  Fried chicken and rice was served by duty orderlies who put enamel plates with the steaming food down on a small bamboo table. We finished off with hot tea with powdered milk, a delicacy we had not tasted since we left Tongwang’s house in Mon. After lunch, we set off together over denuded hills and through occasional stretches of forest. Our group consisted of nearly twenty people, including soldiers, officers, porters and ourselves. It appeared Haw had been informed about the previous night’s incident and he apologised handsomely for the young officer’s behaviour.

  We marched into Chuyang Noknyu in the afternoon. Obviously, considerable effort had gone into making the village spick and span in honour of our arrival. The paths had been swept and the bamboo house that was put at our disposal was spotless. It even had beds of marigolds planted on either side of the front door—a minute emblem of civilisation in the surrounding wilderness. As the march continued and we came closer to headquarters—the Oking—the villages progressively became neater and laid out in a more organised pattern. Among the houses were small cultivated patches of vegetables and some villages even boasted schools and churches.

  “If you’d come here five years ago, you wouldn’t have believed it. People didn’t even grow rice. They lived on maize and cucumbers and the meat they ate was almost raw,” Haw said as we walked along.

  That also explained the irrigated paddy field and the zig-zag path that had caught our attention on previous days. Oking taught, on the one hand, that resistance to them could bring down divine retribution in the form of plague—but, on the other, that cooperation could lead to beneficial changes, modest at a first glance, but containing enormous potential for the future. Haw was a mine of information and I was excited at this first opportunity, after so many frustrating months, to be able to begin collecting first-hand accounts of the political and social situation in northern Burma—the whole purpose of our journey.

  On October 20, seven days after crossing the border, we arrived at a large village called Kesan Chanlam. The NSCN’s headquarters was located nearby and, to our amazement, Phatang was there to greet us, somewhat embarrassed but notably friendlier than at any of our previous meetings. He showed us to a newly built bamboo house next to the local village school.

  “These is normally the teachers’ quarters,” he said as we entered the building. “We’ve cleared the place for your arrival.” The teachers, it transpired, had been moved into the bamboo house next to ours which otherwise served as a dormitory for the school children.

  We unpacked our bags and made ourselves comfortable in our new “home”. Both Hseng Noung and Ee Ying had stood up to the first stage of our trek very well. But it felt good to be able to relax in a place where we expected to be staying for about a month. The school with its attached teachers’ quarters were on the eastern outskirts of the actual village of Kesan Chanlam which was built on a slope. To the west on a small knoll stood the village church which had a commanding view of a U-shaped plateau below where the barracks and offices of Oking were laid out. There was also a parade ground-cum-football field, a roomy conference hall and a military chapel. On a slight rise in the centre of this complex stood a three metres high wooden crucifix which could be seen from kilometres away.

  After we had bathed and rested, a messenger came running to our house to summon us to meet the NSCN’s leaders. Hseng Noung quickly gathered up her cameras while I grabbed my tape-recorder and notebooks. We were taken along a path around the church and down to the headquarters plateau. As we entered a small community building made from bamboo and with a thatched roof, an elderly but spritely man shook my hand.

  “We wish yo
u a warm welcome, Mr and Mrs Hamilton.” He gestured us to sit down. From pictures in the Indian press, I was able to identify him as Isak Chishu Swu, the NSCN’s Chairman.

  An army chaplain in uniform appeared and gave a short Bible reading, followed by a lengthy sermon. I was looking around out of the corner of my eye at the congregation, trying to pick out the other leaders. They were all there. Instantly recognisable from newspaper photographs was a swarthy man with a lively, intelligent expression. Thuingaleng Muivah, “the dreaded terrorist leader” of the Indian press, or for many radical young Naga students, “the Naga Mao Zedong”. This was the NSCN’s General Secretary and leading theoretician. Beside him sat a thin, middle-aged man with grey hair. He was dressed in a field-jacket with the collar turned up. This, I assumed, was the third member of the NSCN’s troika, Vice Chairman S.S. Khaplang, the leader of the eastern Nagas of whom we had been able to track down no photographs.

  When the sermon was over, we were served tea with powdered milk and Indian biscuits. Although nothing of substance was discussed, it was an opportunity for me to make my first impressions of the Naga rebel leaders. Isak, pious and soft-spoken, displayed an excellent command of British-accented English, which amid the near-Stone Age world of the eastern Naga hills struck me as somewhat incongruous. Muivah, affable and good-humoured, was also fluent in English and much given to cracking jokes. Khaplang, by contrast, was a different personality altogether. Here was an experienced soldier, unpolished, hardened by years of campaigning; a man of action rather than a thinker. As he knew no English, conversation with him was carried out in Burmese, with Hseng Noung interpreting.

  That evening, Kewezeko’s cousin Zekope came over to our bamboo hut to visit us. He was in his early twenties, high-minded and full of zeal—as the newspaper he had once edited reflected. We sat down by the fireplace and had a cup of tea. He had received his cousin’s letters, he explained, but the long delay had been due to recent fighting in the eastern hills.

  “And then…” he broke off and paused, “…the leaders wanted to be absolutely sure you had no contacts with the NNC.”

  That at least came as no surprise. We sat talking by candlelight of our difficulties in India and the help his cousin had given us. When finally he left it was already late. But we turned in that night comforted by the thought there were no strenuous walks ahead of us for some time to come.

  When the welcome festivities were over and we had settled down in our new home in the Naga Hills, a letter was sent by runner to the KIA. We set out our problems and requirements, not forgetting to include the news about our daughter. The runner left on 4th November. Our hosts estimated it would take the messenger two weeks to reach the KIA’s 2nd Brigade headquarters and then possibly another two or three weeks before we could expect our Kachin escort to arrive.

  Meanwhile, I established a little temporary office outside our split-bamboo house; a desk, a few crude wooden chairs, my books and maps, the tape-recorder and a bamboo vase with fresh flowers—overlooking scenery memorably more spectacular than that afforded by any other news-desks I had worked at. The barracks, offices and the crucifix that dominated Oking straggled along the ridge just below my hilltop office. Beyond, majestic mountain ranges strode towards a far horizon. In the morning, thick banks of mist swirled among the ravines between and below the ridges, hiding from sight the torrents that surged through deep gorges. Perhaps only the impressionist genius of one of the landscape masters of the Sung dynasty might have done justice to the wild but profoundly restful magnificence of nature spread out before me.

  Then my interviews began. Isak and Muivah came together to my mountain-top office, accompanied by armed guards. Isak began with a prayer and by reading the day’s lesson from the Bible. He was one of the veterans of the Naga struggle, having joined the old NNC in the 1950s. He served as “foreign secretary” to the self-proclaimed “Federal Government of Nagaland” for several years. In 1961, he guided Gavin Young from the London Observer around the Naga Hills. He was the first and until our arrival the only foreign journalist to visit the Naga rebels.

  “I also went on several clandestine missions to Pakistan in those days. We received military training in what was then known as East Pakistan. Our troops marched across Assam, or sometimes even through Burma. But, as you can understand, all this came to an end in 1971 when India invaded East Pakistan and it became Bangladesh.”

  A mild-mannered man, Isak spoke softly, occasionally sipping hot water from a white enamel mug; Muivah sat to one side, smiling. Isak went on:

  “It was through Pakistan we first contacted China. It was actually Muivah here who led the first batch of more than a hundred men who trekked through northern Burma to Yunnan in 1966 and 1967.”

  From the first, I could not help but be impressed by their honesty, even when it came to revealing some of the more sensitive aspects in the history of the rebel movement. Muivah, it appeared, had not been officially invited by the Chinese, but he and his group of insurgents were nonetheless cordially received. The soldiers were given political and military training in secret camps in Yunnan, while Muivah himself was taken to Beijing where he remained as the unofficial Naga representative for four years. It was apparent that he missed those days.

  “It was during the height of the Cultural Revolution,” he recalled, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. “Every Chinese thought he had a revolutionary duty towards all the oppressed peoples of the world. They all respected Chairman Mao. We Nagas also participated in mass rallies in Beijing and our troops got all the arms and ammunition they could carry back to Nagaland.”

  It was during this time Muivah formulated his rather curious ideology which might best be described as a mixture of evangelical Christianity and revolutionary socialism. It remains the foundation of the NSCN’s political line today.

  Rumours of the warm welcome he had received in Beijing sparked off a “China fever” among the rebels. One group after another set off on the long trek over the eastern Naga Hills and the Kachin mountains to Yunnan. Some of them got through; others were ambushed and lost their heads to their Eastern cousins, who had no idea what these Indian Nagas were up to, but saw them as intruders. Still others were trapped by Burmese forces, arrested and put in jail in Mandalay before being extradited to India. Listening to Isak’s and Muivah’s stories was a fascinating experience, not least as we were about to embark on a very similar trek ourselves, following more or less the same route as the Nagas in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Isak was one of the second batch of guerrillas which managed to reach China in 1968.

  “We marched for weeks over the eastern hills,” he recalled smiling softly. “We had to fight our way through this territory which we now occupy. The first Kachin village we reached was Pinawng Zup, not so far from the Indian border near Chaukan Pass.”

  When the party of some 300 well-armed Nagas arrived, Isak was astonished to hear that there was an old white couple in the village.

  “I didn’t believe it at first. I thought there must be some mistake and that the people were Indians.”

  But it turned out to be J. Russell and Gertrude Morse, an American missionary couple who for many years had been working among the Lisu and Rawang tribes of Kachins near Putao. In 1965, three years after the military takeover in Rangoon, the Morses had been ordered out of Burma. But instead of complying with the government’s order, they—children and grandchildren included—staged an exodus together with several thousand Lisus from the Putao valley.

  Like some latter day Children of Israel fleeing from the land of the Pharaohs, the Morses and their tribal flock walked over the mountains to Pinawng Zup, where they built up a self-reliant Christian community well beyond reach of the Burmese authorities. The Morse family stayed there for years before some of them trekked out to India. Later, the remainder were compulsorily airlifted out of their hidden valley in the Himalayas by Burmese government helicopters and subsequently deported.

  The Nagas were headhunters until
only a few years ago.

  “The old couple and their grandsons, Steve and Johnny, were of course frightened when they suddenly saw hundreds of armed men entering their village,” Isak continued. “But we explained who we were. We had a prayer meeting together and we bought rice from them. Steve and Johnny, who were in rags, were given a uniform each. I believe that must have been the first new clothes they had got since they marched out of the Putao valley in 1965.”

  Interviewing Isak Chishi Swu, chairman of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland

  With the death of Mao Zedong and the subsequent political upheavals in China, the Nagas’ treks to China and Beijing’s bounty came to an abrupt end. And back in Nagaland, hundreds of rebels surrendered to the Indian authorities in the wake of the Shillong peace accord of 1975. It was then, however, that the young firebrand Muivah openly challenged the old leadership, and in particular the exiled NNC President, Phizo. In 1980, Muivah set up the NSCN and tried to re-establish the old links with China. But although some NSCN delegations had succeeded in reaching the Kachin rebel headquarters at Pa Jau, the Chinese across the border made it clear they wanted nothing more to do with their erstwhile protégés.

  The Nagas were not easily discouraged, however. Group after group arrived at Pa Jau—simply to be turned back again. And the rebels were not the only ones who seemed to have difficulty adjusting to changing times: virtually every Indian press report on the NSCN trots out “well-trained guerrillas, receiving modern arms from China”. Viewing the NSCN insurgents in their ragged uniforms clutching obsolete, ill-cleaned weapons it was difficult not to smile. Of the NSCN’s full complement of 3,000 activists, we estimated no more than 500 were armed. And of those, scarcely a man could boast a spare magazine for his rifle.