"We are sleepwalking toward a localized Rwanda, where systemic neighbor on neighbor elimination is normalized, and our leadership watches from high offices, paralyzed by careerism and factional cowardice, waiting to count the next round of bodies” the Global Naga Forum (GNF ) said in a statement condemning the killings of Nagas allegedly by a Kuki ambush in Manipur on April 27.
The Forum said - “Our institutional silence and our leaders’ endless appetite for accommodation with a sleeping or hostile state apparatus have reduced our sovereignty to a hollow phrase."
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| Mourning - on Aug 27 |
The GNF also questioned the security arrangements in Manipur, particularly the Suspension of Operations (SoO) framework involving Kuki armed groups.
“We mourn with microphones and organize committees while our youth are slaughtered like animals on their own ancestral lands”. If a nation cannot protect its civilians traveling on its own roads, it is not a nation...".
The GNF also says .... “because revenge is what our enemies want to reduce us to. But we equally reject the passive death of our people”.
“We are done with condolences.
We are done with asking for permission to live. If our leaders, state, central, or our own, cannot guarantee that a Naga citizen can travel a road and return home alive, then they have forfeited their right to lead”, the GNF said.
“History will not judge us by how many statements we issued, but by how many lives we failed to save while we were busy writing them”.
The blood is not just on the hands of those who pulled the triggers. “It is on the ledger of an entire system that has institutionalized our helplessness”, the GNF further stated.
In its statement the GNF said, “We are writing this not to appeal to the conscience of New Delhi, for it has none to spare, or to trade polite grievances with neighbors who operate with armed impunity.
We write this because the Global Naga Forum refuses to participate any longer in the ritual theater of grief”.
The GNF then said, “Let us speak the truth that our own people whisper in secret: we have become a paralyzed nation.
We have perfected the art of the press release, the grand funeral, and the recycled memorandum”.
The GNF then said the Government of India maintains an overwhelming, hyper militarized footprint across Manipur.
“Yet, this formidable security apparatus vanishes when ordinary Nagas are targeted”, it also said. Naga civil bodies have already put this pattern on record: security columns visible enough to police a Naga sit in, absent precisely where an ambush needs them stopped, the GNF stated.
The Suspension of Operations (SoO) framework has mutated from a peace pact into a license for terror, shielding armed cadres who use designated camps as staging grounds for murder, it further said, adding,
“If New Delhi and its security architecture cannot secure a stretch of vital road, then the SoO is a fraud..".
The GNF then said, “You cannot preach peace while managing an arena where one side holds a loaded weapon and the other is told to offer its throat for the sake of political convenience”.
The statement also said, “To those who claim political and moral leadership over the Kuki groups operating in these spaces: general appeals for peace are no longer enough, and you know it, because even Thadou Inpi, one of your own apex bodies, said the same the day after this ambush, naming individual commanders inside the SoO camps and demanding their arrest”.
The GNF then said it asks “nothing more than what you have already asked of yourselves”. A name in a press statement is not a man in custody, it stated.
“When armed elements sheltered within your territorial and political sphere go on killing unarmed Naga civilians while the commanders your own community has named remain free, the silence that indicts you is not the silence of words, but the silence of consequence”.
The GNF then said, “If you desire political legitimacy, produce the arrests your own people have demanded.
Anything less tells us that your political language, however sharply worded this week, remains a smoke screen for the same old ethnic dominance”.
ends
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