A 31-year-old school teacher and mother of three children belonging to the Hmar community was allegedly targetted by a group of Meitei armed men at Zairawn village in Jiribam district as her husband and the children managed to flee.
Guwahati: The killing of two women, one belonging to Hmar and another to the Meitei community, in less than 24 hours on Friday and Saturday (November 9 and 10) has once again brought to the fore how women have become targets of attacks and counter-attacks in the Meitei-Kuki conflict in Manipur since May last year.
A 31-year-old school teacher and mother of three children belonging to the Hmar community was allegedly targetted by a group of Meitei armed men at Zairawn village in Jiribam district as her husband and the children managed to flee.
The FIR lodged by the woman’s husband alleged that she was caught by the armed members of Arambai Tenggol, a Meitei radical group, raped and set on fire at around 9 pm on Friday. Her charred body was recovered from the burnt houses hours later. Hmars are ethnically linked to the Kukis.
Hours later, a 27-year-old Meitei woman farmer, Ongbi Sofia Devi was killed by suspected Kuki insurgents while she was harvesting paddy in her field in the Saiton area in Meitei-dominated Bishnupur district on Saturday morning.
Eyewitnesses told police that Kuki insurgents fired from a nearby hill targetting the woman and killing her on the spot. According to security forces, this could be a “revenge attack” and a “counter” to the Jiribam incident.
Although organisations representing both communities launched protests demanding action against their killers, two leaders of women organisations of both the Meitei and the Kukis told DH on Sunday these are not isolated cases and women have been targetted since the conflict started in May last year.
“The Meiteis have been carrying out ethnic cleansing of the Kuki-Zo communities and they are not sparing the women and children. Our women have been raped, paraded naked in public and even set on fire in the most barbaric and inhuman way. There seems to be no end to their brutality as no strict action has been initiated against such heinous crime so far,” Ngaineikim, president of Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights told DH from Kuki-dominated Churachandpur.