Salwa Judum and the Missing AK-47s

About a month ago I went on assignment with BBC:The World to cover a story about a civilian counter insurgency movement in central India. For the last 40 years a communist insurgency known as "Naxalism" has been waging all out war against the government. They have killed government officials, attacked mines and skirmished with police on hundreds of occasions. Naxals are a serious threat to the government in 13 Indian states. The government has had such a hard time dealing with the Naxals that they have begun to fund a counter insurgency movement in the state of Chhattisgarh known as Salwa Judum.

The Salwa Judum are armed with government issued AK-47s, .303 rifles and a range of other small arms. They lead the police deep into Naxal territory and are said to be effective in routing the communists. However, backing the Salwa Judum has come at a terrible cost to local security. As the Naxals pull back the Salwa Judum fill the void with their own brand of warlordism. They burn villages to the ground, rape women and forcefully conscript children into their ranks. Lacking in any ideology other than violence and profit, the Salwa Judum are a far more serious threat to local security than the Maoists that they fight.

The story will air on BBC radio some time in November, but in the mean time take a look at an interview that I did with Xeni Jardin at BoingBoingTV earlier this month about my experiences in Chhattisgarh.



When I went to Chhattisgarh I was interested in tracking down some of the missing Iraq weapons that were reported MIA in September. The American arms lost as many as 180,000 AK-47s, pistols and rifles that were supposed to be distributed to the Iraqi security forces. People have speculated that the arms have entered into informal terrorist arms networks and could have fanned out across the world into the hands of militants. My plan was to track down serial numbers from the weapons that police had confiscated from the Naxals and track them back through their point of production. But I was not able to collect enough serial numbers to get any useful data, and it seems that most of the weapons used by naxals have actually been won through battles with police. I am not searching out other possible arms links with the LTTE in Sri Lanka.