KOHUR Counters COCOMI Statement on Kamjong District Border Situation

The Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHUR) has issued a rejoinder to the statement issued by the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI) on the evening of May 7, concerning the situation in border villages of Kamjong district.

While welcoming any genuine call for impartial investigation and the protection of civilians, KOHUR stated that  COCOMI's framing designed to recast a complex inter-community incident as "cross-border armed aggression by foreign-based groups against Indian citizens" is factually misleading, ethnographically illiterate, and politically self-serving. 

KOHUR stated that the Kuki-Zo are a trans-border indigenous community whose ancestral homeland straddles the present-day boundaries of India, Myanmar (Chin State and Sagaing Region) and Bangladesh - a geography that long predates the Yandabo Treaty of 1826 and the cartographic conventions of the colonial state. Kinship, customary law, language and clan structures continue to operate across that artificial line. As such, branding  Kuki-Zo presence on either side of it as "foreign" is not a security argument; it is a denial of identity.

KOHUR point out that such framing has never been applied to other trans-border indigenous communities of the region including the Naga people, whose principal armed organisations have long maintained operational geographies across the same Indo-Myanmar frontier. 

KOHUR stated that  COCOMI has built its sovereignty alarm on the unverified assertion of one sitting MLA from the affected constituency a politically interested party belonging to the community in confrontation with Kuki-Zo villages in that sector.

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"To elevate a partisan claim to the status of national-security fact, and to demand executive intervention on that basis, is precisely the methodology that produced the catastrophic state failures of 3 May 2023", the human rights trust stated.

KOHUR also added that COCOMI's statement systematically erases the documented record of who has been attacking whom in the Ukhrul-Kamjong-Tangkhul sector since the beginning of the conflict. 

The recent Kamjong incident did not begin as a "cross-border invasion." On the ground, it began as localised altercation a drunken brawl which Tangkhul actors have deliberately escalated into a community-coded conflict. Such actions KOHUR said is the same playbook that has been operationalised against Kuki villages across this sector for nearly three years.

KOHUR  list out names of Kuki villages which have been. Attacked, burnt or forcibly vacated under threat. The villages are : Litan Sareikhong (Kuki village burnt),Yaolen (Kuki village attacked), Patleijao (Kuki village attacked), Mulam (Kuki village - burnt), Song phel (Kuki village attacked), Maokot (Kuki village - burnt), Lanchah (Kuki village - burnt), Khoikai (Kuki village vacated under threat), Mollen (Kuki village vacated under threat), Gampal (Kuki village vacated under threat), Haijang (Kuki village vacated under threat), and Phungtha (Kuki village vacated under threat)

KOHUR reminded that not one of these aggressions towards Kuki villages  has produced a COCOMI press release. Not one has been the subject of the "high-level transparent inquiry" that COCOMI now belatedly demands when the direction of alleged force is reversed.  The asymmetry is the message and the wider context COCOMI has chosen to omit, the trust stated.

KOHUR informed that it has earlier placed on record regarding the armed cadres of NSCN (Eastern Flank) launching attacks on Kuki villages in the Ukhrul-Kamjong sector in the days preceding May 6. Houses were torched. Civilians were displaced. In adjoining Kangpokpi district, Kuki-Zo women cultivators have been repeatedly targeted in their own fields by the same constellation of armed actors. The factual record on this NSCN (EF) deployment has now been corroborated from across the international border itself. 

The Kaishan Rungyond Naga (KRN) the apex traditional body of the Kaishan Boklum area within the Naga Self-Administered Zone of Sagaing Division, Myanmar has issued a formal statement acknowledging that one of the NSCN-IM (EF) cadres killed during the Hongbei action, Cpl Bahnlei Ahlahpya (also reported as Sgt Pahnle Ahlahpya), was a member of their community from Kaishan Boklum, Myanmar. 

As reported in the a particular media house and corroborated by multiple press statements and videographic evidence now in the public domain, the slain cadre was a Myanmar national deputed across the international boundary by an outfit currently operating under a Ceasefire and Suspension of Operations arrangement with the Government of India, and killed while attacking Indian citizens on Indian soil, KOHUR added.

 "This is not a Kuki-Zo allegation. It is the slain cadre's own traditional body in Myanmar admitting he was theirs", says KOHUR.

The human rights trust added that COCOMI which has built an entire political project on the spectre of "Myanmar infiltrators" concealed among Kuki-Zo villages has not issued a single line acknowledging this confirmed instance of Myanmar nationals deployed against Indian civilians by a Naga armed group under a subsisting agreement with the Union of India. Its statement is silent on every one of these prior aggressions.

A press release that begins its timeline only at the moment Kuki-Zo defenders are alleged to have responded is not a security analysis; it is a narrative weapon, the statement added.

KOHUR stated that COCOMI has, since May 2023, declined to issue a single equivalent communiqué on the looting of thousands of firearms from Manipur Police and IRB armouries by Meitei mobs, and the continued non-recovery of those weapons;

the unchecked operations of Arambai Tenggol, including the Tronglaobi IED blast and the subsequent attack on a CRPF camp; the documented violence against Kuki-Zo Indian citizens that has resulted in hundreds of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, the burning of churches and villages, and the internal displacement of tens of thousands; the documented role, until his removal, of a sitting Chief Minister in the architecture of that violence.

"An organisation that locates threats to "national sovereignty" only at the Indo-Myanmar border, and never in the looted armouries of the Imphal valley, has forfeited the moral standing to lecture the Government of India on territorial integrity, KOHUR added.

Should the Government of India accept COCOMI's call for a high-level inquiry which KOHUR supports in principle that inquiry must be independent of the Manipur State machinery, which remains compromised.

The inquiry must be conducted by a court-monitored agency with a full territorial mandate, including the Imphal valley and the Tangkhul sector, extended to cover the May 2023 armoury looting, the operations of Arambai Tenggol, the Tronglaobi blast, the CRPF camp attack, the documented attacks by NSCN cadres on Kuki-Zo civilians including the confirmed cross-border deployment of Myanmar nationals under NSCN-IM (EF) colours, as established by the KRN's own admission referenced in Section 4 above and the twelve Kuki villages enumerated in Section 3 of this communiqué; and required to publish its findings, not bury them.

KOHUR stated that COCOMI is, in its political character and lineage, a civilian frontal organisation of the banned Meitei armed groups the Revolutionary People's Front / People's Liberation Army (RPF/PLA), the United National Liberation Front/ Manipur People's Army (UNLF/MPA), the People's Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK), the Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (KYKL) and the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP). 

These outfits have, for over three decades, operated from sanctuaries inside Myanmar, ambushed and killed Indian soldiers and unarmed civilians on Indian soil, and waged an explicitly secessionist armed war against the Republic of India in the name of "Manipur sovereignty."

The said Meitei outfits stands proscribed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of the Government of India. Their cadre, training, weaponry and financing have, in successive assessments by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Indian intelligence community, been credibly linked to Chinese state agencies and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

An organisation whose political and ideological lineage runs through groups that the Indian state itself has banned for waging armed war against the Republic from bases in Myanmar, with the assistance of hostile foreign powers has forfeited the moral authority to lecture either the Union of India or the Indian public on "Indian nationalism," "national security" or the "territorial integrity" of this country. 

KOHUR claimed that COCOMI has now appropriated the vocabulary of the Indian state itself, and turned it against indigenous Kuki-Zo citizens of the Republic, which is not an accident of phrasing. 

It is the logical extension of a long-running political project that has consistently dressed Meitei separatism in the colours of Indian patriotism whenever that posture has proved politically expedient.

KOHUR urged the Government of India, its security establishment, and the national press must read every COCOMI statement including the present one on Kamjong with this genealogy in full view and the political project beneath the press release.

The trust went in to state that COCOMI's deployment of "sovereignty," "territorial integrity" and "foreign aggression" in this context is not an accident of phrasing. It is a deliberate effort to internationalise and thereby criminalise - the indigenous Kuki-Zo presence in the hill districts of Manipur, and to manufacture 4/5 pretextual grounds for renewed coercive operations against Kuki-Zo villages under the cove border defence. The institutions of the Union, and the Indian public, must see this for what it is.

Stating that Tangkhul drew the first blood and started the first fire, KOHUR added that the Kuki-Tangkhul conflict will end when, and only when, the Tangkhul stop attacking Kuki villages.

KOHR reiterates its unwavering commitment to peace, the rule of law, and the protection of all civilians regardless of community. 

Assuring continuous cooperation with every lawful and impartial process KOHUR further stated that it we will not, however, accept a discourse in which one community's political committee itself a frontal formation of groups proscribed by the Indian state is permitted to define which Indian citizens are indigenous and which are foreign, which armed groups warrant national-security alarm, and which armed actors warrant their continued silence. The integrity of Manipur cannot be defended by misrepresenting its peoples, KOHUR added.