from Rita Willaert
Hello, dear readers. I’m going to Nagaland and I need three of you to come with me.
Nagaland is a small, autonomous state in India’s extreme eastern panhandle, situated in the Patkai Hills on the border with Burma. The Naga used to be a loose group of headhunting tribes, but heavy missionary activity in the 19th century converted most of the native population to American Baptism. At 75%, Nagaland is far more Baptist than Mississippi and “the only predominately Baptist ethnic state in the world.” For more than sixty years separatist movements have fought for the creation of an independent Baptist state founded on the principles of Maoism.
That’s pretty goddamned weird, huh? I want to go see what the place is all about. The problem is that the Indian government requires foreign tourists to have Restricted Area Permits, and the only way to get a permit is to travel in a group of at least four. So who wants to go with me?
The permits mean that all four people need to make a cold, hard commitment to this thing or no one gets to go. No maybes, no we’ll see.
The dates are somewhat flexible, but this would take about two weeks. We’ll leave around the last week of March and meet in either Darjeeling or Guwahati. There will be rickety trains, grueling bus rides, fly-blown dinners and the sense that maybe, just maybe, we did something a little different this year. Game? You can find out more here or shoot me an email at ross@rossleetabak.com.
If you go to Nagaland, try to get as close to Kachin State as you can and tell us what’s going on.
http://www.eurasiareview.com/2010/03/32308-india-and-myanmar-treacherous.html
Yikes, I hadn’t heard about Myanmar sheltering militants but it’s not very surprising. The Indian army has bigger problems than a couple of second-rate Baptist militants though, so I doubt they’ll really do anything about the border.
Kachin, on the other hand, is going to be a damn mess in a couple months. The junta wants the KIA and all the other ethnic armies to disarm before the ‘elections’ this year, which is exactly the opposite of what they’re all doing. The ceasefires they signed in the 90s are already pretty much defunct but it’ll be amazing if there isn’t an all-out civil war by the end of the year.
I probably won’t get anywhere near Kachin, but I did go check out Mae Sot and its 100,000 Karen refugees a while ago:
http://everythingisdirty.com/tag/mae-sot/