History
The ULFA was founded on April 7, 1979 at the Ahom King in Sibsagar by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). The founders included Paresh Baruah, Arabinda Rajkhowa, Anup Chetia, Pradip Gogoi, Bhadreshwar Gohain and Budheswar Gogoi. The organization's purpose was to engage in an armed struggle to form a socialist Assam.
Recruiting for the front did not begin until 1983. Soon after it finished recruitment in 1984, it began to seek out training and arms procurement from other groups such as the Kachin Independence Army(KIA) and the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland(NSCN). In 1986 it launched a fund raising “campaign” across India by way of extortion. It then began to set up camps in Tinsukia and Dibrugarh but was soon banned by New Delhi on November 7, under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967.
In less than a decade of its formation, the Ulfa emerged as one of the most powerful and violent insurgent outfit in Southeast Asia, largely because of the immense popularity it enjoyed during the first decade of its struggle as well as its economic power which in turn helped it in bolstering its military capabilities. In the early 1990s, ULFA launched an aggressive campaign with victims such as security forces, political opponents, and blasting rail links. In July 1991 the front captured and held 14 people for ransom, included in the abductees was an engineer and a national of the Soviet Union. From the 1990s on the ULFA have continued to carry out terrorist attacks.
Read more about this topic: United Liberation Front Of Assam
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)