Manipur News

The post Interaction programme appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, Jan 11: Manipur Students’ Association Delhi organized an interaction program today with lead actors of the film ” My Japanese Niece” Junichi and Yu Asada and Director Mohen Naorem. at Delhi university park,near V.C office said a press released of the student body.

Around 50 students and their fans interacted with lead actor,actress and director, it said.

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The post Symposium on Electoral Reforms appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, Jan 11: The All India Youth Federation Manipur State Council will organized a symposium on the Electoral Reforms Need of the Hour on January 15 at JNM Dance Academy.

Speaking the media persons AIYF National Working Committee vice president Akham Kunjakishwor said Dr James Maichael Lyngdoh, former chief Election Commissioner (ECI) MC Raj chief functionary of Campaign for Electoral Reforms in India will be addressing the symposium as chief guest and special guest respectively.

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The post Cyclist killed in accident appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: An 18-year-old cyclist was killed in a road accident after a scooter hit him at Langdum Lamkhai Boroi Makhong on Imphal-Ngariyan road yesterday at around 6:30 pm.

The deceased has been identified as Michael, 18, son of Dhubra, a resident of Langdum Mamang Leikai. He succumbed to his injuries at JNIMS.  

A case has been registered at Irilbung police station and the dead body was handed over to his family after a post mortem was conducted at JNIMS morgue.

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The post In public interest appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

Leader Writer: Paojel Chaoba
One feels pain to know that for some section of the public, the Christmas Festival differed a lot from earlier. It may be said that it was a direct result of the general strike imposed by the organizations representing the artists of the State and other bodies decrying the Chandel issue. The Chandel incident may be viewed in different perspectives, it may be taken as a man assaulting a woman in a public place and none of the concerned authorities intervening to safeguard the woman in question, namely Momoko. However, the incident was blown out of proportion as it was no longer about justice demanded to penalize the perpetrator of the crime.

Here, Livingstone may be viewed as a drunken assailant or as a ‘Superman” of the NSCN (IM) who has enormous clout with politicians and someone who always has had his way at Chandel area . Nevertheless, a woman was assaulted and the artists of the State inclusive of the public took the incident in the gravest manner. The matter was amplified by staging a protest in front of the CM`s gate by the outraged artists in further condemnation of the incident .Later the resolve of various civil organizations led to imposition of the general strike demanding justice for the outraged actor. Some among the film artistes took the initiative of leading the arson themselves and the public followed suit.

The resulting state of affairs witnessed complete anarchy raging in the valley areas with the general public bearing the full brunt. However, the effect was felt deeply by the tribal Christian populace as shops remained closed down and the sudden imposition of the bandh stranded Chirstmas shoppers from the hill districts at Imphal town. The scenario of a silent exodus was witnessed in Imphal streets as individuals with laden baggages trudged along the streets silently amidst the burning tyres headed for the hills. They were to be at home and be with their loved ones during the festival of love, peace and brotherhood.

Stones were thrown and many incidents escaped the attention of the media. The sporadic incidents which were targeted at some tribal inhabited areas largely remained unreported, many must have borne the angst with silent fury. It has been assumed that some damage might have been done and the communities were polarized for an instant in time. A crack appearing within the social fabric could have fermented resentment in the hearts of the thousands who had to be transported to their villages under tight security escort.

It would be pertinent to address questions here:  were the circumstances reasonable? does the Livingstone attack on Momoko deserve the violent outbreak or were there other unseen factors? Were withheld emotions released due an undeserving episode?

Certain sections of the populace, those with the ability to think progressively have viewed the events and acted in a rational manner on the note that the communal harmony of Manipur cannot be compromised by such circumstances and that the larger interest of the public is paramount. Such insight led to the general strike being deffered from December 23.

It was also witnessed from some young Manipuri starlets having felt dissent of the bandh being called off. However, the matter was compromised and certain statements which should have not been made public were made aware by an actor at a meeting held at Thangmeiband Thau ground. It may have been done so unwittingly or due to the immaturity and the angst borne then. Instances of unethical reporting were also witnessed in the media. A report may not necessarily be carried if it may result in disrupting the communal harmony of the State. This decision to print or not to print rests on the experience and wisdom of the editor and comes under the ambit of media ethics. As the saying that children playing with fire may have devastating effects, similarly an issue which may have been settled in an amicable and reasonable manner had nearly spiraled out of control. The lesson must be learnt now that before pressing the panic button, the concerned must have the prudence to gauge the future predicaments and act with wisdom and in the larger interest of the public.

Manipur state is inhabited by many ethnic communities and there are organizations representing specific communites but care has to be taken whether the decision taken by one may be in the interest of a particular community but cause undesirable effect to other communities.

It has been an immense relief that the agitation concluded without much collateral damage. Let this incident serve as an example that the interest of the individual cannot override the larger interest of the State. The unity and communal harmony of Manipur hence cannot be compromised.

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The post Free boxing camp concludes appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: The First Free Residential Boxing training camp sponsored by the MI Enterprises and jointly organized by The Social Workers’ Congress, Khongman and the United Boxing Development since December 21 concluded today at the SWC office complex.

The training camp was attended by 74 young boxers including 7 girls and had Air Force Boxing Coach, A Lenin as the chief coach and assisted by 7 other coaches.

Khurai MLA Dr Ng Bijoy Singh attended the closing function as the chief guest, Dronacharya Awardee, L Ibomcha Meitei as president and SWC, Khongman president Ksh Chaoba Singh as guest of honour.

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The post THAU tennis appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: The doubles team of T Brojen and Sarat defeated T Panmei and N Dilip in the men’s open double semi final of the ongoing 10th THAU Tennis Championship, 2012 at its Deco turf today by 6-1, 6-3.

In the veteran doubles semi final, T panmei and N Dilip defeated Indrajit and Pradeep by 6-4, 7-6 (7-4).

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The post ARC in CC Meet semi-final after 12 years gap appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: The Assam Regimental Centre has entered the semi final of the ongoing 56th Sir Churachand Singh Singh, KCSI, CBE Memorial.

The centre which is returning to the CC Meet after a gap of 12 years defeated NISA by a solidary goal in the quarter final to book a semi-final berth for itself.

The last time Assam Regimental Centre had played in the Meet was in 2000 when it was defeated by SSB in the semi-final.

The first half of today’s match was controlled by the Assam Regimental Centre players.

In the 15th minute of play, Bobychand Singh converted a pass from Ajit Singh for the all-important goal.

The second half saw a much spirited playing style from the NISA players however they failed to convert any of their chances. Other than a few counter strikes from the ARC players, the whole second half was dominated by the NISA players.

ARC will meet the winner of the TRAU and Assam Rifles quarter final in the first semi-final on January 15.

The ARC team has 12 Manipuri players with nine of them in the starting line-up.

ARC coach Hemam Jembo who is also from Manipur said even though his played well in the first half they were unable to repeat their play in the second half.

He said the NISA players are all seasoned and experienced players.

He continued that his team will try to win the semi-final and train his players to improve their coordination.

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The post Veteran TT appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: Manipur Table Tennis Association, president Kh Loken Singh today inaugurated the 13th Manipur Veterans’ TT championhip today at the Indoor Stadium, DM College campus.

The tourney has been organized by the Manipur Veteran Table Tennis Association.

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The post RDD in final appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

IMPHAL, January 11: RDD Wangkhei defeated Bidyasagar Nondam by 4-1 in the first semi-final of the ongoing M Rabichandra Memorial Football Tournament.

The tournament is being played at the Kyamgei Ideal High School.

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The post A wider war looms in Myanmar appeared first on  KanglaOnline.com.

By Bertil Lintner
Recent weeks have seen some of the heaviest fighting in Myanmar`s decades-long civil war with government forces launching determined attacks against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic guerrilla force in the far north of the country.

For the first time ever, the government has used helicopter gunships and modern, sophisticated attack aircraft against the ethnic rebels, an escalation that has earned condemnation from human-rights groups and undermined President Thein Sein`s credibility as a national peacemaker.

Most of the fighting is taking place around the KIA`s headquarters at the border town of Laiza near China. The government seems determined to crush the Kachin resistance and gain control over the area now administered by the rebels.

The ongoing offensive may cripple the KIA militarily, but it will likely not defeat the rebel resistance. Observers fear that the outcome will be intense ethnic hatred, making it even more difficult to establish a lasting peace. Many Kachin now feel that there is no place for them in Myanmar.

“We know that it is wrong to feel that way, but we can`t help it,” says a Kachin women in the state capital Myitkyina. Adding insult to injury, the airstrikes against the Kachin, the vast majority of whom are Christian, began in earnest on Christmas Eve. “This we will never forget or forgive,” said a Kachin community worker.

The Kachins have become even more antagonized because of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi`s refusal to intervene in the crisis. Despite several appeals to the former Nobel Peace Prize laureate to act in a war in her own country, Suu Kyi has steadfastly refused to take a stand. On January 6, she told Agence France-Presse that she would not step in to help end the worsening conflict without official approval.

“It is up to the government. This case is being handled by the government at the moment,” Suu Kyi said. Her statement caused dismay and even anger among many Kachins. At a recent demonstration by Kachins in Australia, one protester carried a portrait of Suu Kyi with tape over her mouth and the text: “Silence is violence.”

It is widely suspected that the once fiery opposition leader has reached an informal accommodation with the government where she is allowed to act as a mainstream politician via her seat in parliament but has been barred from criticizing the military or becoming involved in the ethnic issue, which is a question of national security and therefore the responsibility of the military.

The escalated military campaign has also sent a stark signal to other ethnic armies which have entered into ceasefire agreements with the government. In a statement issued on January 1, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), an umbrella organization of about a dozen ethnic groups, some with and some without ceasefire agreements with the government, saying that they feel threatened by the offensive against the Kachin and called for unity among Myanmar`s multitude of traditionally factious ethnic militias.

“If we are not able to act collectively now we will be destroyed individually,” said a participant at the meeting that adopted the statement. Nai Han Tha, a spokesperson for the ethnic alliance, demanded that the government stop its offensive in Kachin State: “If the government continues its action, there could be offensives against the Shan, who bordered with the Kachin. We will consider the Kachin`s situation and discuss what we will do for our next step.”

If that persuasion proves futile, other ethnic rebel groups could act to suspend all talks with the government as long as the attacks continue in Kachin State, according to a UNFC spokesperson at a press conference in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai on January 10.

Dishonest broker

According to the official version of events – as outlined by Aung Min, a minister in the President`s office, in an interview with the US National Public Radio on January 7 – fighting broke out when the KIA refused to remove some “barbed wire fences” near Laiza to enable government forces to “move in and deliver food”.

For more than a year, Aung Min has been in charge of government-initiated talks with ethnic groups as well as Myanmar dissidents in exile. Several rounds of new talks with the Kachin in 2011 and 2012, some involving foreign interlocutors such as the Switzerland-based Center for Humanitarian Dialog, have produced no tangible results.

Instead, Aung Min`s fanciful statements and other government denials about the extent of the offensive have only added fuel to the Kachin`s fire. The government initially denied using air force against the Kachins, but Thein Sein backtracked after widespread international news coverage of the aerial assaults.

Independent observers point out that preparations for the offensive began several months ago, when government forces began to move heavy weapons including artillery into the area. In November, villagers in Karen State in eastern Myanmar were startled when airplanes dropped bombs and machine-gunned their rice fields and other plantations.

The Karen National Union (KNU), the ethnic army in the area, has a ceasefire agreement with the government, so the attacks, which did not hurt any locals, came as a surprise. The government told the villagers the aircraft were taking part in a “military training exercise,” which in hindsight seems to have been an armed rehearsal for their offensive in Kachin State.

Judging from photographs taken in Kachin State, the aircraft appear to be Hongdu JL-8 or Karakorum-8, light attack aircraft that Myanmar acquired from China several years ago. The helicopter gunships used in recent offensives are Russian-made Mi-35, the export version of the Mi-24 Hind that was used extensively in the Afghanistan war in the 1980s. Myanmar bought its first Mi-35s in September 2010, when the KIA still had a ceasefire agreement with the government.

The Kachins say they waited in vain for 17 years – from 1994, when they first made peace with the government, until hostilities broke out as government forces entered KIA-held territory in June 2011 – for political discussions about the future status of the frontier areas.

Other weapons used in the current Kachin offensive, which Myanmar, a neutral country with no external enemies, has acquired or developed since the first ceasefire agreements were concluded with various ethnic and political rebel forces include 60, 81 and 120mm mortars, 105 howitzers, 75mm recoilless rifles and 84mm Swedish-made Carl Gustaf rocket launchers.

On November 9, 2011, a Russian Antonov 124-100 – the world`s second-largest operating cargo plane – landed at Mandalay`s international airport (The long-range aircraft can cover the distance from Russia to Myanmar without stopping or refueling). The plane was off-loaded at night and the cargo was trucked away in a military convoy.

It is not known exactly what the plane carried, but well-placed Myanmar sources suspected at the time the secret cargo could have included anti-aircraft missiles or parts for such missiles, or radars for the Myanmar military`s Bureau of Air Defense. Another more likely explanation is that the plane carried Mi35/24 Hind helicopter gunships, then already destined for use against the Kachins and other ethnic rebels in the border areas.

Whatever cargo the huge plane carried, it shows that Myanmar`s purchases of sophisticated military equipment from abroad have not ceased despite Thein Sein`s recent charm offensive with the United States and European countries and that much of it is meant for use against ethnic resistance forces.

Incompatible positions

There are two fundamentally opposed and seemingly incompatible views on how Myanmar`s decades-long ethnic quagmire should be resolved. The KIA and other ethnic groups want autonomy within a federal union, while the government wants to uphold the present 2008 Constitution, which lays the foundations for a centralized system.

Critics argue that the ceasefire agreements that the government has reached with a dozen or so ethnic armies other than the KIA have merely frozen underlying problems without providing lasting solutions to what is essentially a political problem. Those ceasefires thus remain fragile and could end in the same way as the now collapsed agreement with the Kachins. There are at least 50,000 men and women under arms across the country in various ethnic armies, according to foreign military observers.

Earlier there was hope among ethnic groups when Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in the old capital Yangon in November 2010. She then called for a second “Panglong Conference,” a reference to an agreement that her father, Aung San, who led Myanmar`s fight for freedom from colonial Britain, signed with representatives of several of Myanmar`s many ethnic minorities at the small market town of Panglong in Shan State on February 12, 1947. The agreement paved the way for a federal constitution that came into effect when Myanmar declared independence on January 4, 1948.

Aung San was assassinated by a political rival in July 1947, but his Panglong Agreement was honored in Myanmar`s first constitution. Some ethnic minorities, notably the Karen, resorted to armed struggle anyway, and parts of the country were plunged into civil war. In March 1962, Myanmar`s experiment with parliamentary democracy and federalism ended abruptly in a military coup. The new government, led by Gen. Ne Win, adopted a strictly centralized power structure and the insurgencies flared anew, especially in the Shan and Kachin states, which until then had been relatively peaceful.

When Suu Kyi first broached a “Second Panglong” she received the backing of several ethnic leaders and organizations, but government authorities branded her a “traitor” for resurrecting the idea of autonomy for the minorities. She has since gone quiet on a “Second Panglong” and her silence has cost her the popular support she once enjoyed in ethnic areas.

The muted response by the international community has also been a disappointment for many Kachins. In an interview published on January 9 in the Irrawaddy, an independent website and journal, US ambassador to Myanmar Derek Mitchell expressed “concern” over the situation in Kachin State but stopped short of condemning the attacks. Two years ago, before the US`s engagement with Myanmar, observers say Washington would have strongly condemned the escalation.

Myanmar has since distanced itself from its previous reliance on China. There are no doubt concerns in Western capitals that any harsh criticism of the Myanmar military`s actions could push the country`s rulers back into the arms of the Chinese.

On January 9, The Wall Street Journal quoted a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yangon saying that “there have been signs of only limited displacement of people so far in the state.” Wunpawng Ninghtoi, a community-based organization in Kachin State, however, have documented tens of thousands of internally displaced persons, most of them in KIA-controlled areas.

The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think-tank, announced in late November that it would present Myanmar President Thein Sein with its top honor at an annual “In Pursuit of Peace Award Dinner” in New York in April this year. ICG did not respond to questions submitted by Asia Times Online whether the group will go ahead with the award, or withdraw it because of the government`s airstrikes and bombardment of Kachin rebel positions and civilian settlements near the Chinese border. In an open letter to ICG, Kachin community groups and Southeast Asian human-rights advocates have condemned the group`s decision to honor the Myanmar president.

The 2008 constitution devised by the country`s previous military leaders remains the main obstacle to resolving the ethnic issue. Significant clauses, including those concerning state structure and ultimate military control over the decision-making process, cannot be considered without the approval or more than 75% of all parliamentarians in both the Upper and Lower Houses.

Any amendments would then need to be approved through a national referendum. In practice, this makes any fundamental constitutional reform impossible without the explicit consent of the military as 25% of parliament consists of military officers appointed directly by the commander-in-chief of the Defense Services.

Scrapping the 2008 constitution and drafting a new charter based on a federal concept is the only viable way ahead to resolving Myanmar`s seemingly endless ethnic problems, ethnic group representatives argue. But judging from the government`s response to such demands and the relentless offensive in Kachin State, that is not likely to happen any time soon. And with Suu Kyi now seemingly on the side of the military, the gap between majority Burmans and ethnic minorities has never been wider.

Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and author of several books on Burma/Myanmar, including Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (published in 1994, 1999 and 2003), Land of Jade: A Journey from India through Northern Burma to China, and The Kachin: Lords of Burma`s Northern Frontier. He is currently a writer with Asia Pacific Media Services.

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