Both Meitei & Kuki groups bin move by Manipur NDA MLAs

GUWAHATI: Meitei and Kuki groups rejected Tuesday a resolution adopted by 27 NDA legislators at CM N Biren Singh's initiative the previous night, with one side objecting to planned security operations being restricted to Kuki militants suspected of killing six inmates of a Jiribam shelter and the other terming it "ethnic persecution".

Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI), a pressure group representing the valley's predominantly Meitei community, gave the state govt 24 hours to revise the resolution to "initiate mass operations against the Kuki militants responsible for the killing of six innocent women and children in Jiribam within seven days".

COCOMI spokesperson Khuraijam Athouba said the administration should instead start "a comprehensive military crackdown" on all Kuki militant outfits bound by the tripartite Suspension of Operations agreement, holding them accountable for the continuing ethnic bloodshed since May 3 last year.

Committee on Tribal Unity (COTU), taking up cudgels for the Kuki-Zo community, added to the embattled CM's discomfiture by slamming the resolution as a "clear indication of the administration's complicity in the mass genocidal pogrom of Kuki-Zos". The organisation said the fact that the resolution was passed in the absence of 10 MLAs representing the Kuki-Zo tribe proved that it was an extension of the "sequence of failed attempts to pivot accountability from the political mess".

It said the resolution indicated "the majoritarian community's disapproval of peace and their insatiable appetite to exert political dominance over the minority Kuki-Zos".

The committee sought the Union govt's intervention to end the turmoil that has stretched beyond 18 months by ensuring constitutional protection for the minority Kuki-Zo community under Article 239A.

In tribal-dominant Churachandpur, Kuki-Zo protesters attired in black marched through the streets with empty coffins, demanding justice for the 10 Hmar "militants" killed in a confrontation with CRPF and Manipur Police at Jakuradhor in Jiribam on November 11. Kuki-Zo groups say they were "volunteers" tasked with safeguarding their villages from assailants from the valley districts. The procession culminated in the Wall of Remembrance, a memorial to Kuki people killed in the ethnic violence.

The bodies of the slain Hmar men, brought to Churachandpur from Silchar Medical College in neighbouring Assam after autopsy, remained in the district hospital's morgue Tuesday as the families refused to take them for burial until the authorities made the post-mortem reports public.

Imphal West district, where curfew is in force along with other valley districts, witnessed defiance of prohibitory orders by Meitei civil organisations protesting the killing of three women and as many children by suspected Kuki militants.