Manipur Rights Defender Claims Threat from Meitei Leepun as 50 Men Gather

IMPHAL: Babloo Loitongbam, one of Manipur's most prominent human rights activists claimed to have been threatened by a local group named Meitei Leepun, or ML.

This came after he had offered legal assistance to a Norwegian citizen whom ML labeled as a "Christian Chin". Loitongbam claimed that about 50 men visited his house in Imphal and threatened his family.

According to him, it was after ML held a press conference a day before, where he falsely accused him and warned others against collaborating with him, that these threats were placed on him.

The Meitei Leepun (ML) claimed that Babloo Loitongbam, a long-standing human rights defender, had taken money from the Kuki tribes to work against the interest of the Meiteis. ML members said during a press conference on Monday that Mr. Loitongbam had been helping a "PDF Women Wing Commander" identified by them as a Myanmar national of Chin ethnicity, Mya Kyay Mon.

The PDF, or the People's Defence Force, is the armed wing of Myanmar's National Unity Government which now wages war against the junta.

Mr. Loitongbam dismissed all the above claims. Speaking of his thirty years of being an advocate for human rights, he said: "I am a defender of every person's right to claim asylum in another country where they can be away from persecution from their own country".

He referred to including asylum seekers in India from Myanmar, and that this should be through proper institutions, such as a fully functional Regional Foreigners Registration Office, or the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for humanitarian services in Manipur.

Mya Kyay Mon is a woman prisoner, whom Mr. Loitongbam calls 'referred to by Human Rights Alert (HRA) as a woman in distress while imprisoned.' He continued to explain how, as an empaneled lawyer under the Manipur Legal Services Authority, the HRA provided her with legal aid and got her released on bail, later sending her to a women's home in Imphal to await the trial.

He clarified that she is a Norwegian citizen with a Burma-Buddhist background, not a Chin nor a Christian as has been quite widely claimed around online forums. The only charge against her was overstaying her visa and to my best knowledge remains detained in Imphal jail.

He dismissed also the accusation that he had taken her to the UN and the US to solicit funding, saying that was factually wrong since she was still under judicial custody by the state authorities.

He also rejected another allegation by the ML, whom he described as a "figment of imagination, for he is in touch with the civil society group Manipur Meitei Association Bangalore regarding a "Naga-Kuki-Meitei meeting" which aims to pin down the Meitei community for genocide. The association issued a statement stating that no such meeting was on the cards and requested restraint in "misleading information being shared by vested interests seeking to divide the Meitei community and tarnish our reputation."

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