The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the CPN (Maoist) in mid-western region are facing acute shortage of food stock due to lack of regular source of income since the announcement of ceasefire three months ago, a newspaper report said.
Rajdhani daily reported on Monday that combatants of the sixth division of the PLS, stationed at a temporary camp at Gumi of Surkhet district, were no more had to worry for the battle, but for their own ration.
Rameswor Bohara reported that daily exercise of the guerrillas begins early in the morning. After 3-4 hours of hard exercise, these soldiers go to field to help villagers in paddy planting. The whole day they work in the field free of cost to win the heart of local population and return to the camp for the evening drill.
Despite this labourious daily schedule, PLA guerrillas neither have balanced diet nor enough food to eat. The meals contain mainly rice, lentil and seasonal vegetable. Said Division commander Pratik, “We can’t even think of supplying balanced diet to our comrades at a time we are facing problem even to feed them twice a day.”
Until a few months back, it was a different story altogether. There was enough money collected from taxes, extortion, forced donations or looting of banks. Now, the ‘donation’ has sharply decreased, looting has stopped and whatever money they had has been getting exhausted. People refuse to pay taxes to the parallel people’s government set up by the Maoists. Earlier, they were mobile and used to travel from one area to another. Now, they are camped in one place. Said Division Commissar Samir, “This is the first time that we are facing such type of difficulties. Our comrades have to be convinced. But they understand the problem. They would have fled otherwise.”
The camp has only half of the force under sixth division. Pratik says, “Our principle is not to ask anything from the villagers in return to the help we offer to them. But the expenditure is heavy.”
The PLA guerrillas need about 20 quintals of rice per day and an equal quantity of vegetables and lentil. It comes to around Rs 100,000 a day. On the other hand, they don’t have a regular source of income.
Samar is especially angry to see that the government did not allocate any sum to maintain the PLA, “Our PLA helped the seven parties for the reinstatement of the House of Representatives but they forgot us as soon as they ascended to power. They seem to have decided to kill us starving.”
Maoists have set up similar camps in Sindhupalchok, Makawanpur and Saptari districts.