The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) on Sunday sought a Supreme Court monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT), drawn with police officers of proven integrity from outside Manipur, to investigate all the significant criminal cases registered in the wake of the ethnic violence there.
The SIT should necessarily investigate the May 3 incident in Churachandpur; the sexual violence incidents reported across Manipur; and the Khamen Lok massacre, PUCL president Kavita Srivastava and general secretary V. Suresh said in a joint statement.
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The PUCL also called upon the State and Central governments to fulfil their constitutional responsibility in ensuring that the perpetrators involved in murder, torture, beheading, sexual violence, and violence against women and children, were arrested. It condemned the use of sexual violence as an instrument of control, terror or ethnic cleansing.
The PUCL also called for the immediate cessation of hostilities between different groups in Manipur.
The State and Central governments must be held accountable for their absolute failure in preventing the breakdown of constitutional machinery, it added.
Considering the difficult nature of the terrain, and the large number of victims who still live in their thousands in camps for internally displaced persons (IDP), the PUCL requested the Supreme Court to appoint a team of Advocate Commissioners based on suggestions by civil society, and to visit all the camps and record the statements of victims.
The State must prepare a comprehensive policy for relief and rehabilitation urgently. “In providing compensations, the policy should look at the loss of homes, loss of livelihood, loss of possessions, trauma caused, loss of lives/limbs and a separate category of survivors of sexual violence,” the PUCL said.
