JUNE 24, 1997: LEST WE FORGET:

Thangkhanlal Ngaihte

JUNE 24, 1997: LEST WE FORGET: Ten years ago, June 24 was a Tuesday. I still vividly remember what that fateful day was like. I was home on vacation in Lamka after finishing my first year in college. It must be around 6 in the morning when I got awake with a start. I could hear the plip-plop sound of running footsteps and there were some shouting. The air seemed to be suddenly, eerily still. We were yet to know that 10 people had been lined up beside a dirt road and shot dead at Saikul village, about 7 kms to the northeast of Lamka the previous night(there were four others who survived the shooting with injuries). Among those killed was a Class IX reading boy who used to live next to our house at New Lamka.

By the time me and my elder brother reached Lamka College grounds, an enraged mob had already marched off to Phailian locality nearby to give vent to their anger. Soon, columns of smoke emerged from on top of a few houses. We spent the entire day running about–in panic response to rumors of an incursion here, a planned attack there or an unusual sighting in the paddy field. In the afternoon, we gaze up, exhausted, at Mission Compound locality as it burned.

The ethnic conflict that exploded thus between the Kuki and Zomi communities continued intermittently for the next 15 months. After a series of peace initiatives that failed to hold, the conflict formally came to an end with the signing of a MoU between the Zomi Council and Kuki Inpi on October 1, 1998.

According to records compiled by H. Nengsong, then chairman of the Inter-church Peace Committee–whose findings were endorsed by both ZC and KI–the number of people killed during the conflict was in excess of 500 (about 450 confirmed deaths and the rest unaccounted for)and more than 6000 dwelling houses burnt. The value of properties destroyed was put at rupees fifty crores.

These are the immediate costs of the conflict that can be put down in numbers and data. Ten years on, the ethnic conflict of 1997-98 continues to ravage and hobble the entire social, political and economic life of Churachandpur district.

During the conflict, the entire resources and manpower of the warring tribes were mobilized with the sole aim to survive, and win. Nothing else matter. Creativity and innovation were at their height in the form of local-made weapons and guns. With the conflict on, there was a sort of war discipline that came into play automatically. It was after the conflict ends, when people began to relax and tried to pick up their lives, that its cumulative immobilizing impact hit them with a hurricane force.

The first was breakdown of social discipline. The conflict has spawned an army of young men who recognize no authority. They had trained in the use of firearms, took part in village raids, see people shot or knifed to death and houses burnt. Now, the conflict is over and they are on the loose with many of them having nothing to call their home. Is it possible at all that these baptized-in-blood young men will quietly return to the class room and do as the teacher commanded them to do?

Not surprisingly, the immediate aftermath of the conflict saw mass-copying practices in board exam halls. Many students openly came into the hall with books and knives and dared the teachers to interfere with them. It was only from around 2002 that effective checks could be placed at the institutional level to arrest the menace.
It was also during and after the conflict that drugs and substance abuse among the young reached pandemic levels. One easy way to see how it was is to compare the number and population of de-addiction/rehabilitation centres in Lamka town in 1995 and 2005.

There inevitably was also a proliferation of militant groups and gun culture. Apart from the marked increase in violent activities and killings, what is chillingly remarkable is the sheer brutality with which the killings and executions came to be done. A single shot on the head is no longer enough. Tortured to death, eyes gouged out, limbs cut off or bones broken before killed etc. The graphic description of recovered bodies in the newspapers bears testimony to this.
Economically, it was only after the conflict that beggars came to be actually seen in the streets of Lamka.

Ten years have passed since the conflict, and we are still haunted by it in all spheres. Lamka is still a town that shuts down at the fall of dusk, no cinema and recreational houses dare operate, prostitutes, drug addicts and armed men rule the roost after dark and addiction care centres and orphanage homes became the most successful enterprises. And to think that Lamka had been, once upon a time, known as the Abode of Peace in all of Manipur!!
Do we learn anything amidst all this? Maybe someone should go and ask around at Moreh.