Manipur newspapers refuse to publish after editors seized

INDIA: Six newspapers in India's revolt-hit northeast refused to publish Wednesday to protest at the kidnapping of their editors by militants.

The rebels, belonging to the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP), seized the editors after inviting them to a weekend news conference in the tiny state of Manipur, home to at least 19 militant groups, police said.

The influential KCP, fighting for a homeland for the majority Metei community in Manipur, demanded the editors' newspapers print a message from the group marking its 1980 founding.

After the newspapers complied Monday, it freed the editors from the room where they were locked. But the group then ordered a three-month ban on publication of the Imphal Free Press, the region's mass-circulation English daily, for allegedly misquoting one of its statements earlier.

After staging demonstrations and leaving their editorial spaces blank Tuesday to protest the rebel actions, the papers refused to publish on Wednesday.

"We decided against publishing to protest the highly condemnable incident involving confinement of six editors and banning of a newspaper by a militant group," said a spokesman for the All Manipur Working Journalists' Union.

The journalists' union was to decide later Wednesday whether the newspapers would reappear the next day or if they might adopt another form of protest. On Tuesday the Imphal Free Press defied the ban on its publication.

"We published our newspaper Tuesday and shall continue to do so. But there's a sense of insecurity after the rebel threat against us," editor Pradip Phanjoubam told AFP from Imphal, Manipur's capital.

"We won't be be cowed, although we know the underground group might target us for adopting such a stand," he said.

In February, KCP rebels claimed responsibility for severely wounding Ratan Luwangcha, bureau chief of the mass-local language daily Poknapham, in a gun attack after he wrote an article criticising some of the group's tactics. Guwahati, Wednesday, AFP