"We killed one Maoist,'' said Rama Sharya Kumhal, 44, a teacher, as he sat under the spreading branches of a peepal tree in the center of Ratanganj, a small village in the borderlands with India. "He was asking for donations.''

"Donations'' is the Maoist term for taxation or extortion, a common practice by the communist rebels in rural Nepal, and one much hated by villagers.

"The Maoist was armed. He had a pistol and two bombs,'' said Munna Khan, 35, the richest man in the village and a leader of the Ratanganj anti-Maoist militia. A few meters away sat his house, the largest in the village now in ruins, the recent work of Maoist bombers.

"We all shot him,'' Kumhal continued, smiling.

"First we struck him with a knife,'' Khan explained. "Then we shot him. I hit him with a kukri.''

Since King Gyanendra seized absolute power in a coup on February 1, anti-Maoist militia or vigilante groups like Ratanganj's have sprung up in various parts of the southern strip of Nepal.

Despite earlier denials by the king's puppet government, the militias say they are being trained and advised by the Royal Nepalese Army.

Nepali security officials acknowl-edged that the phenomenon is spreading to other parts of the country and may get out of hand. And militia leaders say they have been encouraged to fight by the army and by Gyanendra's seizing power.

Some American counter-insurgency experts and diplomats say well-organized village defense groups could be a crucial tool in defeating the rebels, as they have proved in countries such as Peru.

But most diplomats, international observers, Nepali politicians and human rights workers say the emergence and government sponsorship of the vigilante groups is deeply worrying in a country that many fear is already on the verge of collapsing.

If Nepal were to descend into an ungovernable chaos, or were to be ruled by Maoists, many diplomats and Nepalis fear that millions of refugees would flee and the conflict could draw in Nepal's superpower neighbors, India and China.

Already stricken by a nine-year-long civil war between the king's army and the Maoist rebels, the last thing Nepal needs, critics of the vigilante tactic say, is a third force of armed and un-monitored gangs who have already shown signs of warlordism, violence, criminal infiltration and elements of religious and ethnic intolerance.

"There is a danger'' of the groups getting out of control, acknowledged Brigadier General Dipak Gurung, chief spokesman for the Royal Nepalese Army.

"Once you train them, you have to take responsibility for them,'' he said. "You have to monitor them. Let's see how it develops - if we're able to contain them. I hope it doesn't come to a situation where we have to disarm them but you never know.''

Observers cite Afghanistan and Kosovo as places where private armies, militias or paramilitary groups grew to cause widespread chaos and war. Each country and conflict is different, experts caution, but few conflicts have been calmed by the introduction of para-military or civil defense groups.

"Warlordism will emerge out of these activities,'' said Subodh Raj Pyakurel, chairman of one of Nepal's leading human rights groups, the Informal Sector Service Center, known as Insec. "If these things are not checked right now, in a few years we will find warlords in very many places. This is the most disastrous phenomenon. You can settle the [Maoist] insurgency but you cannot settle these groups.''

That may not be apparent to the army and supporters of the concept, some diplomats and Nepali observers say, because at face value, arming and training otherwise defenseless citizens to defend themselves against the Maoists might seem like common sense.

"It's an idea that in theory has its attractions and in practice can have an awful lot of downsides,'' said a Western diplomat in Kathmandu who has a background in counter-terrorism and who asked for anonymity. "It can encourage score-settling. As this conflict gets deeper, the militia situation could easily slide into something much worse.''

While most diplomats and people in Nepal's civil society are firmly against the groups, some believe the size of the Maoist threat to normal villagers and the limited resources of the Nepalese army mean the concept should not be dismissed.

"Okay, give me an option. The answer is always Pollyanna - `We're all going to talk. We're all going to be buddies,' '' said Thomas Marks, an American political risk consultant and perhaps the world's leading expert on Maoist insurgencies.

Marks first went to Nepal under contract with the US Agency for International Development in 2001, hiked among the Maoists in the district of Rolpa and returned to Kathmandu publicly encouraging the government to adopt a policy of establishing properly-run village defense forces.

He still believes it is the best way to defeat the Maoists and establish peace in Nepal, a country he otherwise sees tumbling into disaster.

"What you have to do is take a battalion,'' said Marks, who has been to Nepal a dozen times in the past four years, has an intelligence background and now teaches counter-insurgency at the National Defense University in Washington.

"It plumps itself down. It keeps a reaction force. Everybody else in effect clones the military. Mao had everyone armed with agricultural implements mainly. In Nepal, that's sufficient for the first line of defense. The key thing is you mobilize watcher groups, you mobilize that which responds to local officialdom but which is integrated into the local police.''

When Marks gave lectures in Kathmandu three years ago promoting the idea, human rights organizations and aid agencies united in opposition. The Nepalese government quickly dropped the detailed plans it had already been working on, according to Marks.

He now believes that was a fatal mistake and the criminality that has entered the militia groups is an inevitable result of the delay and the half-hearted, secretive way the Nepali security forces went about organizing the militias.

An American diplomat in Kath-mandu attended a meeting in Washington in June during which another expert in counter-insurgency promoted the village defense force concept. The diplomat felt it was an idea not to be dismissed easily.

"You can't have the army every place so do you leave killing grounds for the Maoists?'' said the diplomat. "Human rights activists say that para-militaries inherently lead to a greater amount of human rights abuses. That's a matter of training. You should have a reasonably trained, supported and represented people from the village who are able to convince the Maoists: Don't come in here.''

It is hard to find support for the idea, however, within Nepal's own civil society. To some, the king's government has adopted the policy of training militia forces because it wants to fragment any potentially united opposition to the regime.

Nepal is a delicately structured society, with many ethnic groups and social stratifications. Mostly Hindu, the country has a small but wealthy Muslim population and a slightly higher number of Buddhists.

The vigilante groups - they call themselves village counter forces - have tended to be led by wealthy landlords or businessmen, some with reputed criminal backgrounds, some from affluent royalist Muslim families, some with clear resentment against groups of Nepalis who have been displaced by the conflict from the hill country and now live in this flat, southern part of Nepal known as the Terai.

So far this year, the militias have torched an entire village of displaced hill people who they claimed were Maoist supporters and, human rights organizations say, have killed dozens of people, sometimes with extraordinary brutality. In one case documented by a local human rights worker in the district of Kapilbastu, two men sus-pected of being Maoists were burned to death in a haystack. Others were lynched.

The Maoists have retaliated, killing dozens in similarly brutal ways or in full-scale armed assaults on villages that have militias.

The violence flared dramatically on February 16, when residents in the village of Ganeshpur rescued a man who had been abducted by Maoists, witnesses said. That sparked a retaliatory wave across the district, including the torching of almost the entire village of Halanagar, a place populated by people who had fled the violence in the north. There were also reports of criminal-led mobs raping a young girl and using axes to kill suspected Maoists.

"There are no Maoists here - because of the enmity,'' said Rudra Prasad Bhattarai, chairman of the village committee in Halanagar. He was sitting in his rebuilt home - one of more than 300 houses burned to the ground on February 17 by a vigilante mob of hundreds. Most homes have been rebuilt by residents and foreign aid agencies. One resident was killed by the mob, Bhattarai said.

The enmity he spoke of is ethnic, geographic and economic. The people of Halanagar come from Nepal's hilly regions to the north of these swampy plains on the border with India. Over the past seven years, they have fled the fighting, hoping to find peace farther south. Instead, they found themselves unwelcome.

Halanagar's hill people tend to have Mongoloid facial features; the Terai people have Indo-Aryan faces. Halanagar's people are Hindu; their neighbors, many of them wealthy landlords, are Muslim. The villagers are, in some cases, former indentured servants; the landlords live in fortified mansions, surrounded mud and straw huts.

Bhattarai said the landlords were specifically angry at the villagers because they had been encouraging indentured servants in Ganeshpur to break out of their "virtual slavery.''

"They were angry, the landlords,'' he said. "They couldn't release that anger before and were just waiting for the opportunity.''

That opportunity came after the king's proclamation emboldened royalists all over Nepal.

The men Bhattarai and the people of Halanagar blame for orchestrating the torching of their village live in Ganeshpur, across the fields, in huge brick homes within walled compounds of well-tended flower beds and green lawns. The disparity of wealth between the landlords and the peasants is breathtaking.

"That's an unauthorized, illegal community,'' said a Muslim landlord, Rahman Khan, 40, referring to Halanagar. "It's a Maoist hideout.''

Khan and his two brothers said they supported the local militia "morally'' because the Maoists have attacked them repeatedly over the years. On March 7, they said, a large group of Maoists launched a major night-time assault on the compound. The brothers and their employees fought them off with privately owned weapons. The stables are still black from the fire of explosions. Bullet holes pepper the walls of the house. The brothers recently built red-brick fortifications on the roof in preparation for another Maoist attack.

"We have to fight to remain alive, for our own existence,'' said Khan's older brother, Abdul Moid Khan. "Two of my brothers have been killed. If we don't fight, they will kill us.''

Since February 1, Insec has counted a total of 62 people killed in violence between the vigilante groups and the Maoists, or suspected Maoists, in Kapilbastu district alone. Most of the vigilante-related violence happened in February and March, but the growth of the militias in the Terai has continued.

In June, some of the 40 to 45 armed villagers of the Ratanganj Village Counter Force proudly showed off their photo ID cards, which they said the army had issued. They had been to the nearby Gribeni army barracks for training, said Kumhal, the village teacher.

"They were training forces from 10 other villages,'' said Kumhal, who added that he had not gone for training. Perhaps the best educated man in the village, he seemed to act as a spokesman. Less eloquent villagers who were in the militia and had gone for training sat and stood around him, nodding their agreement. "There were three batches being trained in groups of 45.''

Training lasted for 15 days and included sessions on weapons training, Maoist tactics, how to patrol effectively, how to establish hidden positions and how to shoot while crawling. The training ended in mid-May.

In a sign of how sensitive is the issue of the connection between the army and the vigilante groups, the group's leader, Munna Khan, arrived later on in the conversation and when the issue of training came up, he said in Nepali: "Don't say anything about the training.''

Khan also said his men did not have guns. Sitting about 30 meters away were three of the militia men with shotguns and ammunition belts. One human rights official in Kathmandu identified Khan as a well-known criminal. Before he arrived at the meeting with Kumhal, villagers said he was a contractor upon whom most of them depend for work.

In another village in the region, a photographer and translator for Newsday came across a village counter force meeting the local police chief.

"It's not like it's only happening in this region,'' said Arjun Jung Shahi, senior superintendent of police for six districts in the Terai, sitting in his well-fortified headquarters in Kapilbastu. "In the north of Nepal they have formed village counter forces. They are united.''

Will they spread further, he was asked.

"Of course,'' the superintendent said.

NEWSDAY