Q: So how does a terrorist make money these days to fund his activities?
A: Porn. BBC News reports (thanks for the tip Srinath):
Rebels in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura are making pornographic films to raise money for their separatist campaign, officials say.
The information has come from surrendered guerrillas of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), according to police.
They say the rebels are forcing captured tribal women, and some men, to take part in the films.
The films are then dubbed to be sold in India and neighbouring countries.
Come on. It’s one thing if porn is between “willing” participants, but to force helpless tribal people into it, and then dubbing over their voices is just sick!
“We get a lot more money , much above our normal rates, to process these films and deliver a sleek final product.“We know the insurgents are behind these films. When we process their raw stock, we can see boys standing around with automatic rifles and revolvers pulling in girls but we are supposed to cut all that out and just concentrate on the sex,” the owner said.
“It is very good money and we don’t think it is right to question the insurgents anyway,” he said.
So what is the NLFT’s purpose anyways?
The National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) was formed in December 1989 for the purpose of seceding from India in order to create an independent Christian fundamentalist state of Tripura. The group was banned under the Unlawful Activies Prevention Act of 1967.
The headquarters of NLFT is located in the Khagrachari district of Bangladesh, about 40-45 km southeast of Simanapur… The NLFT has set up a number of camps in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), in the Sylhet, Maulavi Bazar, Habiganj and Comilla regions. NLFT also has ties with Pakistan’s external intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). [Link]
Let’s review. They want to set up a God-fearing Christian fundamentalist state with the help of Islamic militants and they do so by forcing tribal people into porn. Then they use the profits to terrorize people. The world is nuts.
Apparently there is a greater connection between pornography and terrorism worldwide than I imagined. I came across this article in Pravda from a couple of years ago:
The lieutenant colonel mentioned that up to 75% of all kiddie porn is distributed on the Internet. About 90% of Interpol’s international searches dealing with computer crimes are devoted to this issue. Chepchugov also said that the income earned from porn sales is a considerable part of the black market. In addition, much of this income is used to fund both conventional criminal and terrorist activities. Each child pornsite brings in about $30 thousand in illegal income each month, according to the RIA Novosti news agency…As far as the porn business is concerned, PRAVDA.Ru has already published an article called “Internet Cash Cow: Slaughter Time.” [Link]
i don’t condone the activities of these terrorists, but i think it is important to note that these tribal terrorists are partly motivated on a general level by the inmigration of bengalis (mostly hindus) over the past century, especially from what is now bangladesh. i believe bengalis are now the majority of the population of the province and tend to dominate its economy and gov. so in this case, the 1/3 tribal minority feels like aliens in their “own land.”
Shag for the mutiny!
The scene from the movie (in the picture) looks like a rape scene and not one of consensual sex.
Ladies and Gentlemen (especially Gentlemen):
There is no satisfactory substitute for the joys/sorrows, complications/confusions, delights/disastors of the real thing.
Don’t watch the stuff and you will do your own part in restricting the market for it.
Very sorry to learn of this. There are courageous people who combat human-trafficing and sexual slavery: http://www.humantrafficking.org
thanks for the sex ed chris, something in your tone tells me you’re unqualified to teach that subject 🙂
Razib,
Since 1947 the % of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined from about 30% to about 10% and in Pakistan from 25% to less than 1%. try to find out why this has been happening. Jinnah appointed Jogendranath Mandal in 1947 as his Law Minister. Mandal was a colleague of Dr. Ambedkar and one of the many leaders of scheduled castes movements of that time. Within a few months of Partition Mandal resigned from Jinnah’s cabinet because of the butchery that went on unabated. Mandal bought the line of “fellowship of the oppressed” possibly against better counsel from Dr.Ambedkar. Check out http://www.hrcbm.org for more info.
thanks for the sex ed chris, something in your tone tells me you’re unqualified to teach that subject 🙂
I have the incontrovertible evidence of three of my own children. So at least I can claim some success at procreation.
Levity aside, this is a serious topic. The intersection of criminality with pornography should be publicized.
Since 1947 the % of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined from about 30% to about 10% and in Pakistan from 25% to less than 1%. try to find out why this has been happening
This statement is patently ridiculous. The fact that Pakistan’s Hindu population from 1947 to 2005 went down from 25% to 1% is highly misleading.
Indian Punjab’s Muslim population also went down dramatically, from over 25% in 1947 to less than 0.5% today.
There was a big population shift between 1947 and 1952 and which continued for another 10 years upto 1962 (Indo-Pak war) on both sides of the border.
If you have figures of Pakistani Hindu population from 1962 or later, please post them as they will have some relevance.
Finally… some professional quality desi porn. Everyone is sick of that grainy amateur cameraphone crap.
Since 1947 the % of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined from about 30% to about 10% and in Pakistan from 25% to less than 1%. try to find out why this has been happening.
you know that wasn’t the point of the thread. are you just a bot? in any case, the bengalization of tripura to some extent predates ’47 (though the emigration of pakistani-bangladeshi hindus played a big role). the maharaja of tripura explicitly invited bengali hindus to develop his state in the late 19th century.
Means, meet End. End, oh wait – we can’t see you yet.
blech. My views on similar (will wait for people to tell me how they’re nothing alike) situations are all over this site.
Moral superiority is a treacherous beast, no?
Disgusting, but believable. Except for the part that says…
How can you force a man to have sex at gunpoint? Never heard of this…
M. Nam
Re: % of HIndus: The percentage of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined precipitously even since the 1960s. First, in the ’71 genocide roughly 50% of those who were killed of fled were Hindu (even though Hindus were nowhere near 50% of the population in East Pakistan; the large scale movement of Hindus to India has continued (along with the movement of course of many Bangladeshi Muslims as well to India).
By the way: Al Mujahid: I am curious where you got the stat that Muslims constitute 0.5% of Indian Punjab’s population. I had read (I believe it was in Stanley Wolpert’s brief and rather superficial history of India (1991)) that Muslims constituted 15% of Indian Punjab’s population (with 45% Sikh and 40% Hindu). I’m no authority on East Punjab demography, so this is really more by way of a question; 0.5% seems startlingly low to me (consider that way more than 0.5% of Pakistani Punjab’s population is non-Muslim).
I had read (I believe it was in Stanley Wolpert’s brief and rather superficial history of India (1991)) that Muslims constituted 15% of Indian Punjab’s population (with 45% Sikh and 40% Hindu)
According to the 2001 Census, Muslims constitute 1.6% of the population in Punjab. The 15% figure by Stanley Wolpert is obviously wrong.
HORRIBLE.
Thanks Al Mujahid: that link isn’t working for me, but I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the 1.6% figure.
The broader point, though, about declines in % of minority populations even over the last 3-4 decades, stands. Interestingly, this decline is far more significant in the case of East Pakistan/Bangladesh than in the case of West Pakistan (i.e. from what one gathers West Pakistan/Pakistan appears to have reached a sort of equilibrium, like India, after the initial mass migrations of 1947 to about 10-15 years later. There seems to have been no such demographic stability in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and it would be interesting to speculate on why that is so.
On the subject of declining minority %, a tricky issue is raised by the ’71 genocide, which was at least in part a genocide-by-proxy. That is, part of the iconography of the Bengali Muslims propagated by the Pakistan army was that they were “neo-Hindus,” “more Hindus than Muslims”, etc.; how is one to classify those who are targeted because in some way they are deemed tainted by “Hindu-ness”?
But we are veering off topic, namely the link between Tripura militants and forced pornography. Razib is right that these people have their grievances, but as with many other militant groups, it is hard to tell over time where the ideology ends and gangsterism begins (or mere gangsterism begins). Militantcy can be lucrative: consider the example of Kashmir, where the Srinagar economy (particularly in the construction sector) has boomed since the beginning of the insurgency. The same is true in cities like Guwahati as well. So it’s not clear to me if the Tripura “cause” hasn’t gotten all but occluded by layers of money, cynicism, etc. etc. (not to mention that the article itself notes that other militant groups in the region have in the past targetted pornographers). I might add that the NLFT is a particularly efficient ethnic cleanser itself, and is responsible for the deaths of incredibly large numbers of Bengali settlers. I highly recommend the books of Siddharta Deb for an empathetic look at the plight of the North-East’s Bengalis (“plight” because, from the Indian government perspective, poor Bengalis are always more expendable than insurgent groups, which are alternately battled, cajoled, negotiated with, etc.; and every succeeding truce/round of negotiations has made the position of Bengalis ever more precarious in the various insurgency-affected states).
PS– on the subject of Deb, the basic plot of his “Outline of the Republic” is precisely about a woman who has apparently been shot by a militant group in Manipur as punishment for being a porn star (the idea is that “decadence” is the handmaiden of “Indian imperialism” in the region). Similarly, in the early- to mid-1990s militants in Kashmir used to target cinema halls and stores selling Bollywood movies (combined with edicts warning women to cover up or else). Evidently, some things– the mania of appropriating the female body in order to make wider political points, in other words the cooptation of the female body in the service of political agendas– never change…
…or do they? In Tripura, if this story is true, what we have is more akin to a mob-style operation (analogous to “snuff porn”) than anything else…
I read in a book about how Pakistani soldiers were ordered by their officers to look for Hindus to kill first – they would check to see if they were circumcised before killing them. Hindus were targetted to basically wipe them out from Bangladesh – I dont have the figures but some esitimates say a million civilians were killed in that killing spree – nasty. The most shocking thing is how that genocide has virtually been forgotten around the world – in fact Pakistanis even deny it took place today.
And the percentage of Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab is virtually zero – there are more Punjabi Muslims living in a few streets in Malerkotla East Punjab than there are Sikh/Hindus in the whole of West Punjab – so I always take Pakistani claims of tolerance with a pinch of salt – they have well and truly cleansed themselves, have succeeded of cleansing Kashmir of Hindus, and the only question is where they will try to cleanse next – I believe they are trying to cleanse Karachi of Shias and they are well on the way to cleansing the Christians – cleansing is very important because Pakistan is the land of the pure – got to get rid of those damn infidel impurities.
So they’re essentially raping people to produce “entertainment” in order to finance their cause. Some sections of mankind always seem to find yet new depths of depravity to sink to.
The fact that this is supposedly in order to facilitate the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian state indicates the extent to which they have absolutely no idea of even the basic principles of their faith. I find it mind-boggling how people — all around the world, as we all know — can undertake certain courses of action in the name of their religion whilst simultaneously violating the religion’s humanitarian principles.
To paraphrase Cicatrix: Means, End, etc. Or, to put it another way, acting in the name of God whilst actually acting more like the Devil.
Campa Cola: For more on ’71 (and an interesting take on why this should be termed a “gendercide”):
http://www.gendercide.org/case_bangladesh.html
PS– Hindus and lefties (whether Muslims or Hindus) were the “first” targets of the army; the idea was to exterminate the “intellectual” class, and in the first few days of the (euphemistically-named) army action thousands of college students, teachers, university professors etc. were killed. Some in Bangladesh (typically the religious parties like the Jamaat) were only too happy to be rid of their left and Hindu enemies, and shamelessly collaborated with the army (they are now in a coalition running the country; no surprises that Sufi shrines and Ahmedis have been targetted with depressing regularity in recent years)…
That reminds you of Pol Pot, doesnt it? Je also wanted to kill the intellectuals, artists and academics. So they planned to exterminate the intelligentsia and then carry on with the genocide until Bengal was cleansed. The orders must have come from the top – it sounds as though this was planned and targetted.
It is really sad to hear that the collaborators with the enemy who killed one millon Bangladeshis are now sharing power in government.
Maybe this link will work
the idea was to exterminate the “intellectual” class, and in the first few days of the (euphemistically-named) army action thousands of college students, teachers, university professors etc. were killed.
the only people associated with my family killed in ’71 were hindus (servants we couldn’t protect) or artistic intellectuals (a relative of mine said that “the pakistanis tried to kill our brains”). btw, be careful of the data on hindus in bangladesh. i have a acquaintance who is an economist and he says a lot of those numbers are cooked, so hindus might be undercounted to make it a “more muslim” nation. on the other hand, anecdotally many hindus have left bangladesh and now live in india, but for legal reasons (property holdings) they are still official residents of bangladesh (so count toward the census).
whoever brought up Siddhartha Deb’s Outline of the Republic was right on point. Brilliant examination of the collusion between governments, militias, clueless foriegn aid-groups, effective PR skills, and desperate people willing to believe anything that promises hope for a better future. The closer you come to understanding “the truth” of what’s really going on (as opposed to stories and propaganda) the more surreal it all seems.
Quick search for a good review turned up a dismal number of reviewer who didn’t understand or get it at all. The Nation’s reivew by Shashi Tharoor (!) typically misses the fantastic (also incredibly sad and fatalistic) point of the book.
Anyone else read it?
Razib: Welcome to the Root-cause-of-terrorism Club! Yes, Bengalization has been a problem, but it has been exacerbated by petty local politicians and militant leaders, in the process ignoring completely the contributions of the expat Bengali population to the economies of the North East. In any case, how does it justify this? And how does it justify the atrocities of the militants? Don’t sound like an apologist for terrorists, especially given that these militant outfits are nothing but criminal enterprises. What about Naga terrorists?
M. Nam wrote: can you force a man to have sex at gunpoint? Never heard of this…
Is this some kind of sick joke referencing the stereotype of endlessly horny men? Is the idea that there are some men in the world who wouldn’t find it erotic to rape a woman for a camera-wielding terrorist group completely unbelievable to you? Is the implication that YOU would happily join in? Did I misunderstand what you were asking?
M. Nam, yeah, I wondered about that too…my initial thought was gay porn rape scenario, but that probably wouldn’t fly, given that it’s Indian, Muslim, and Christian. Only straight rapes, please. This is probably just what it sounds like… see “The Bluest Eye” by Tony Morrison. You can force a man to have intercourse with a woman…to limited degree of success.
In any case, how does it justify this? And how does it justify the atrocities of the militants?
don’t be a dumbass. i hate mind-reading psychics, especially when aren’t very good. if i may make an observation about some readers at SM: when it comes to say american foreign policy people tend to take a step back and are able to analyze issues without imputing emotive or normative motives on every assertion. when it comes to brownland issues of course, every comment has hidden meaning which the respondent is automatically privy too.
anyway, i sound like an apologist for terrorism to you, because like i said, you’re being a dumbass.
and to be clear, i brought up the bengalization of tripura because i am skeptical that the majority of SM readers would know much about tripura (as opposed to nagaland). a little context is generally in order, though that might get in the way of your mantra shouting.
Hmm I’m curious, so you support this sort of contextualization when it comes to American foreign policy? If we’re going to do so for Tripura, we can for the US too right?
Nice
Hmm I’m curious, so you support this sort of contextualization when it comes to American foreign policy? If we’re going to do so for Tripura, we can for the US too right?
sure. i don’t care much about US foreign policy so i’m not going to get into an argument with you if i think you are taking what i say out of context. your pleasure.
and to be clear, by contextualization in the case of tripura i thought it was important that people understand that tripura tribal terrorism is not simply derived from fundamentalist christianity or nihilistic chaos. it has a base derived from resentment at displacement.
as for american contextualization, one must know the enemy to defeat them. so though i don’t talk about foreign policy much, the mantras of both the Left and the Right (“poverty creates terror,” “they hate us because of our freedoms”) leave me cold because they are usually propogandistic slogans with little value added substance.
a little more elaboration on foreign policy.
It’s amusing when people get upset over jokes.
i don’t condone the activities of these terrorists, but…
That’s what I was talking about. It’s like saying 9/11 happened, but Bin Laden was in cahoots with CIA once upon a time…true but not relevant to the crime in question.
I didn’t question the relevance of bengalization, but just said that’s no justification for what Tripura militants have been doing. You did provide context, but it wasn’t complete. Is bengalization the only problem?
when it comes to say american foreign policy people tend to take a step back and are able to analyze issues without imputing emotive or normative motives
Btw, when did I do that? Who is imputing motives? My rant was based on what you posted, you are accusing me of saying things I never did! Who’s being the dumbass here?
feminista,
No need to fly off the handle. I was wondering if any man could have sex/rape a woman when someone is holding a gun to his head?
Rupa,
I’ll check out “The bluest eye” when I get a chance.
M. Nam
What happened to your web page?