The discovery of human skulls and skeletons at a construction site of the government inside the campus of the Tombisana High School must have come to all as a shock but not surprise. Stories of people, mostly young men, who disappeared after being picked up allegedly by security forces, have been around too long in the state for such a revelation not to happen sometime or the other. Quite obviously, the needle of suspicion is on the security forces again, and as one report indicated, the school campus served as a make shift barrack for the security forces a few decades back. This fact should already be a very helpful clue on which the direction of investigation should orient for a start. The years that the school campus was used as a camp of the security forces can easily be determined from the government`™s record books, and if this time tallies with the age of the bones since burial, it should already be a clinching circumstantial evidence of the guilt of whoever occupied the campus at the time. We are not forensic experts, but thanks to the information age, even as laymen most of us are aware to a good extent the advances made in this field. Computer technologies are available today which can reconstruct the models of faces of people who died decades and even centuries ago from the skulls recovered. There are very interesting videos available on the internet on such cases, including one in which not just the looks but even the economic status of an early European immigrant family in America who were killed in a clash with Native Americans were determined by such computer modelling technology from available skulls and bones.
If this could be done here, it may even be possible to see which living persons these bones once belonged to but is unlikely such cutting edge technologies are already here. Even then there should be other ways of determining the histories of these mysterious skulls and skeletons discovered. Other than conclusions drawn from forensic studies of these bones, there could also be tell tale artefacts in the rubbles at the digging site such as a ring, a watch, a pen that putative relatives of the unfortunate souls might remember. This being the case, the demand by Families of Involuntarily Disappeared Association, Manipur, FIDAM that digging and construction work at the site of the discovery be stopped immediately should be given serious and urgent heed by the government. It is a surprise the police have not acted on its own to seal off the place the minute the bones were found. The digging, when it resumes, must be with a forensic mission, and this must continue until such a time the case is resolved comprehensively. Thereafter, normal construction work of the government can be given the green signal again.
It is too early to begin making allegations, although the circumstance does indicate these are some of the people made to disappear after arrest by the security forces. Depending on the findings from this case, those who have always believed in the benignity of the democratic Indian State and doubted custodial killing is a norm in the nation`™s counterinsurgency programmes, despite numerous court rulings establishing individual cases of death in custody, may have to change their stances. Even if they say these are collateral damage, it would still amount to an admission of the crime, for this is only another way of asking for exoneration from penal action on the legally lame plea the acts were nationalism driven. But amidst the cold calculus of political economy, what often has ended up forgotten are the unimaginable sufferings of individual families at losing their loved ones, most of them picked up on mistaken identity, in such an inhuman manner. There are two categories of custodial killings. In one, captives with established insurgent links are killed in supposed encounters, for various reasons, including for the prizes to be won for their elimination. This is bad enough, but the other is simply unthinkable. Innocent youths are picked up on mistaken identity, subjected to inhuman tortures, and then when their innocence is realised, to avoid legal retribution, made to disappear. Those bones found recently are likely to be of the latter variety.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/12/bones-of-contention/