Indian completes 10 years on hunger strike
GUWAHATI, India — A human rights activist in northeast India who is dubbed the "Iron Lady of Manipur" has completed 10 years on hunger strike and vowed to continue her protest, her supporters said Wednesday.
Irom Chanu Sharmila, from the remote state of Manipur, which borders Myanmar, began her fast on November 2, 2000 after witnessing the killing of 10 people by the army at a bus stop near her home.
Now 38, she was arrested shortly after beginning her protest -- on charges of attempted suicide -- and was sent to a prison hospital where ever since she has been force-fed vitamins and nutrients via a nasal drip three times a day.
Sharmila is frequently set free by local courts, but once outside the hospital prison she resumes her hunger strike and is rearrested.
She is campaigning for the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) that enables security forces to shoot on sight and arrest anybody without a warrant in impoverished and heavily militarised Manipur.
"She decided to continue with her fast-unto-death mission until the draconian legislation is repealed by the government," Babloo Loitongbam from local human rights group Human Rights Alert told AFP.
"She made her intentions pretty clear as she completed 10 years of hunger strike," Babloo said after visiting Sharmila on the 10th anniversary of the start of the fast on Tuesday.
AFSPA was passed in 1990 to grant security forces special powers and immunity from prosecution to deal with raging insurgencies in the northeast of India and in Kashmir in the northwest.
The act is a target for local human rights groups and international campaigners such as Amnesty International, which says the law has been an excuse for extrajudicial killings.
Amnesty has campaigned vociferously against the legislation, which it sees as a stain on India's democratic credentials and a violation of international human rights law.
Several rights groups held sit-in demonstrations in Imphal, the capital of Manipur, to express their solidarity with Sharmila on Tuesday.
"She is Manipur's crusader for peace and rights violations by security forces," said Anita Devi, a women's rights activist.
She is currently being held in an isolated cabin at the Jawarharlal Nehru Hospital in Imphal.
Manipur is home to 2.4 million people and about 19 separatist groups which have demands ranging from autonomy to independence. An estimated 10,000 people have been killed during the past two decades of violence.
AFSPA is also deeply unpopular in Kashmir, where senior politicians have campaigned for it to be withdrawn.
It was seen as one of the factors that fuelled mass street protests in the Muslim-majority region over the summer in which more than 100 people died, most of them in shootings by security forces.
Hunger strikes were used effectively by India's independence movement during British colonial times, particularly by Mahatma Gandhi, whose use of the technique was an integral part of his non-violent resistance.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.
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