GUWAHATI: The Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) cadres, who have carried out a reign of terror in the Dima Hasao district for over a decade, will now become law-keepers and will fight their ex-colleagues as personnel of Assam Police.
The DHD saw a split in 2003, when one faction, DHD-Nunisa, declared ceasefire and decided to hold talks with the government. The breakaway faction, DHD-Jewel, led by Jewel Garlosa, continued with the rule of terror. The outfit soon came to be know as the Black Widows and held the entire district to ransom till the DHD outfits surrendered en masse in 2010 for holding peace talks.
A senior home department official said Assam Police is preparing to form a battalion with recruits from the two factions. "We have to absorb them for rehabilitation and settlement. The selection process to recruit 235 men is on, after which they will be sent for training," the official said.
DHD-Jewel publicity chief Daniel Dimasa told TOI, "Cadres from both groups are being recruited into an Assam Police battalion. We have been told that a separate battalion would be raised with these boys. We have been demanding from the Centre that the cadres should be helped to settle down in mainstream society, besides making our primary demand for a separate state."
Earlier, the government had facilitated the recruitment of former Bodo Liberation Tiger cadres into central paramilitary forces after the outfit was disbanded and an accord was signed.
The two factions of the outfit have killed more than 170 civilians and security personnel in the last decade. The DHD-Jewel faction proved to be more dreaded than the parent organization and in 2005 it killed 44 civilians. The worst massacre was in October 2005, when the group killed 30 persons, including nine women in a single day in Karbi Anglong district.
In 2009, the DHD-Jewel faction also forced two national projects of highway construction and railway broad gauge conversion project through the district to come to a grinding halt. The group resorted to large-scale extortion and kidnappings followed by the killing of railway personnel and security men.
In 2010, the faction was charged by the NIA and later by the CBI of siphoning off development funds from the NC Hills autonomous Council to buy weapons and wage a war against the country.
The outfit's publicity chief said, "We want to start the peace talks the government is yet to respond." The Gauhati high court recently ordered bail to the outfit's top two leaders, Jewel Garlosa and Niranjan Hojai, for four month to facilitate their participation in peace talks with the government.