From News Dispaches
NEW DELHI— Scores of people have been killed in a wave of ethnic fighting sweeping parts of the northeastern state of Assam, and the fighting has sent thousands of people fleeing into refugee camps and into a neighboring state.
The news agency reported that the police in neighboring Arunachal Pradesh had found 90 bodies of people killed in Assam state, and the most of the victims were from the minority Bodo tribe. Police officials in Assam said that the figures were exaggerated.
A top Assam security official said tonight that at least 18,000 people had been displaced or otherwise affected by the clashes and that at least 5 people had been killed and dozens wounded. He said a report that 60,000 people had fled the region was exaggerated.
Other reports said that about 15,000 refugees had crossed into Arunachal Pradesh, which borders on Assam, while some 6,000 others were sheltering in refugee camps in the area of the disturbances.
The violence is the worst in several years in the turbulent region about 1,0000 miles east of the capital. It has seen several insurgencies against the Indian Government and a 6 year agitation to oust illegal aliens form Assam between 1979 and 1985.
The victims are predominantly members of the Bodo tribe, which is a poor, largely agricultural group of about 2 million scattered across Assam, officials said. The cause of the violence was not immediately clear. Bodo militants have been agitating for eight months for a separate state, saying that they have been discriminated against in jobs, educational economic assistance by the Assamese, and the dominant group in the state.
(The Associated Press, in a report from Guwahati, the capital city of Assam, quoted a witness to clashes in the northeast as saying that the warring side fought with spears, homemade guns and bows and arrows. “It was like an ancient war,” said the witness, Dibya Kalita, who fled to Guwahati, the AP. said.
(The Assam Director-general of police, S.V. Subramanium, confirmed reports of the battles but said he was awaiting details, the A.P. said.)
The violence comes as the Assam Government has agreed to hold new talks on Bodo demands and to meet with and to meet with the militants outside the state to discuss the dispute.
It began with Bodo attacks on Assamese villages and then came the Assamese backlash which drove the Bodos across the border into Arunachal Pradesh,” said the security official in a telephone interview.
The clashes between Bodos and Assamese reportedly took place near India’s border with Tibet. The area was the scene of similar clashes in 1983, when more than 100 people were killed in violence. over land disputes and agitation by the Assamese to evict those they regarded as illegal aliens. The Bodos opposed the agitation.
The high police official said the riots between the Bodos and the Assamese occurred Friday and today and continued unabated for 48 hours before the police ordered a curfew.
Press Trust of India said as many as 23 villages had been torched.
In their campaign for a separate state, members of the Assam Bodo Students Union have bombed and burned police vehicles, Assamese villages, bridges, schools, roads, convoys of goods and trains in a spate of work stoppages that have hurt the economy of the entire northeast one of India’s most diverse ethnic regions.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 18, 1989
