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Manipur Sitting on a Powder Keg
Lhingneiting Haokip, an eighteen-year-old girl of New Samtal village in Chandel district of Manipur, lost one of her limbs while playing in a paddy field in March 2006. She is not the only victim. Several people have been either killed or injured in the landmine blasts in the past several years. India’s northeastern state of Manipur, bordering China, Bangladesh and Myanmar, has become the testing ground for lethal anti-personnel landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by several rebel groups. They use landmines to inflict damage on security forces. “Planting such devices by militants reduces the risk of getting into an encounter with the security forces, but may inflict greater damage to the security personnel and civilians,” says a senior official in the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) at Vairengte in Mizoram. The death toll by landmines in the northeast is minimal in official records. The army doesn’t differentiate between mine-related casualties and death by other weapons. However, intellectuals, student bodies and rights groups in Manipur claim that the state is emerging as one of the worst landmine-affected zones of Southeast Asia. A 2009 report released by the Canada-based journal Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor this year says terrorist groups particularly in Manipur are increasingly using landmines. In the last year, the journal identified 57 casualties from victim-activated mines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) in India, an increase from the 33 identified in 2008. Most of the landmine victims were from security forces (17 of 21). Casualties involving children made up 75 per cent (21 of 28) of civilian casualties in the country. The majority of casualties occurred in Jammu and Kashmir, followed by Manipur, the report reveals. The United National Liberation Front (UNLF) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), two major militant outfits in Manipur, are using the ‘command activated’ devices. Insurgents plant landmines around houses, paddy fields, populated villages and roads. However, the militant groups like the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaac-Muivah) and the Kuki National Organization (KNO) renounced use of anti-personnel landmines by signing the Geneva Deed of Commitment. In the Manipur hills, people are afraid of venturing out of home. “Nobody knows where it (landmine) is planted. My son stopped going to school due to the threat,” says Vanlalngaka whose wife Awmpui was killed in a landmine blast. According to the Kuki Movement for Human Rights (KMHR), at least 31 villages in Chandel and Tengnoupal assembly constituencies in the state are heavily mined. The lives of more than 6,000 people are affected by the menace resulting in large-scale migration to other parts of the region. What’s the reason behind the spurt in landmine related casualties despite New Delhi’s support for the mine ban treaty? Several areas of Jammu& Kashmir and Chhattisgarh have been sanitized, but the northeast has been fully kept out of the clearing operation. The government and army officials say the mines found in some areas along the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar border were actually the explosive remnants of past conflicts and planted by militants. But the fact is that the military continues to use mines to protect international border and insurgents use it against the army. The anti-India groups operating in the north-east don’t hesitate to buy costly low metal content M14 blast mines (non-detectable version) from the arms dealers of Myanmar, Pakistan, China and Nepal. The M14 mines are available in India despite the government’s claim that it produces only NM14 landmines (detectable version) as per the Convention on Conventional Weapons Amended Protocol II. Sources say that although production of mines is done by government agencies, some of the production process appears to be carried out by private players. Making the northeast a mine-free zone is easier said than done, say army officials. Each day, new areas are mined by the rebels and the existing methods of detecting landmines are costly and inefficient. Metal detectors have not been very successful due to the abundance of scrap metal in the soil. Many mines are composed of plastic, which metal detectors fail to detect. Ground-penetrating radars can’t detect anti-personnel mines. Dogs can be trained to sniff explosives, but they can’t work very long. The governments have so far remained a mute spectator. The mine victims like Jamkholun Baite, Letkholal Khongsai, Kikim Haokip and Phallan Khongsai are now planning to leave their ancestral villages for safer places. “I have seen landlords turning into landless labourers in Manipur due to mines,” says Baite. Sample this: there were eight persons killed in a landmine blast in Manipur on December 16, 2007. In March 2007, the Kuki Students’ Organization (KSO) in a memorandum to the Indian government alleged that 34 villagers were killed in mine blasts in Manipur’s Chandel and Churachandpur districts from 2001 to March 2007. Civil society organizations, which are campaigning against landmines in Manipur, opine that casualties can’t be stopped unless the fields are cleared of the booby traps and the terrorist groups forced to sign the Geneva Deed of Commitment. “Manipur government should immediately take up mine clearance on humanitarian ground and start awareness campaign,” says Lalramsan Hmar, a journalist and member of the Hmar Students’ Association (HAS) in Asom.
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