Author: Capt. Rameshwar Thapa

Publisher: Yatra Publishing House

Paperback 

Language: English 

ISBN: 9789937148245

Memoir

The state incurred heavy losses in the Mangalsen attack. After the Maoists mounted an assault on the army barracks and killed a large number of security personnel, the government was trying to formulate a new strategy to deploy the army against the insurgents. A unified command of the country’s three security bodies – the Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and the Royal Nepal Army, all of which were being targeted by the Maoists – would be formed under the army leadership.

Hot on the heels of the Mangalsen assault, the Maoists on 18 February 2002 attacked the Shitalpati police post in Salyan, killing 30 police personnel. And on 9 April 2002, they besieged APF barracks in Satbariya, Dang, where 37 security personnel were killed and many injured. The insurgents also looted plenty of arms and ammunition from both Shitalpati and Satbariya.

The Maoists, who started targeting army barracks from November 2001, had escalated the ferocity of their attacks within a few months. In the first week of April 2002, the government set up a base of the unified command in Gam, Rolpa, which came under a fierce attack within four weeks of its establishment. I had transported personnel and supplies to Gam as the unified command base was being set up. The base with 186 security personnel – 78 from the army, 61 from the APF, and 47 from the police – was under the command of Major Nilkantha Khadka from Gorakh Bahadur Battalion. They had been flown to Gam in batches. I had carried the police team. On a single day, I had transported two teams of 60 personnel to Thawang and Gam. The unified command base at Gam not only had security personnel, but also civil servants from different services such as postal, agriculture, veterinary and forestry. The Maoists used to criticize it as an ‘American fortress’ as it was modeled on US bases. There were sentry posts, bunkers, and underground trenches around the base. Although it was called temporary, the base, situated on a hillside between the two rivers, was formidable. Villages in Rolpa such as Gam and Thawang were highly impacted by the Maoist movement. The ‘people’s government’ was more influential there than the Nepal government. The government, inorder to make its presence felt among the locals, had appointed civil servants at the base.

Those villages did have police posts earlier, but as the impact of the ‘people’s war’ deepened, the government was forced to remove the posts. Once the unified command was formed under the army’s command, the government had set up temporary basecamps in ‘Maoist villages’ like Gam and Thawang. They attacked the Gam basecamp on 7 May 2002. Just before the attack, the security forces had carried out a four-day operation at Lisne Lek on the border between Rolpa and Pyuthan. There had even been fighting between them and the Maoists in the course of the operation. When the security forces were informed that the Maoists were planning an attack on Khalanga, the headquarters of Pyuthan, and were training for it at Lisne Lek, they had gone there on long-route patrols from Rolpa and Pyuthan. That’s when the fighting had taken place. Additional forces from Butwal, Dang, Rolpa, and Nepalgunj were airlifted and reinforcements sent to Lisne by helicopter. Although news of the fighting had gotten out, no one had accurate information on the scale of the loss. The government, however, had publicized that hundreds of Maoists had been killed and their training center destroyed.