Appeals for peace settlement based on ‘formalization of the Peoplehood of the Nagas’
Mokokchung, November 2 (MTNews): The Global Naga Forum (GNF) on Wednesday submitted a memorandum to the President of India, Droupadi Murmu who is on a two-day visit to Nagaland, appealing for her help in the on-going negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the seventy-five year old Indo-Naga political problem.
In the letter to the President, GNF said that it recognizes the critical role the combined power and resources Government of India and the Nagaland state government bring to bear on the larger Indo-Naga relations. GNF then stated that there is one clear pathway to a peaceful resolution of the longstanding Indo-Naga political problem – Demilitarization and a legally enforceable constitutional structure with a timetable for recognition and implementation of the Peoplehood of the Nagas, with a self-determined governance system in an undivided ancestral homeland comprising all the Naga territories in India and Myanmar. All other solutions are contingent upon this fundamental one, GNF said.
“Our hopeful expectation and appeal are that the peace settlement be based on resolving the fundamental issue of the Indo-Naga conflict, namely the formalization of the Peoplehood of the Nagas,” GNF stated.
While welcoming the President to Naga homeland on her first official visit as President, GND also mentioned in the letter that many other competing interests and problems have accreted over the years, which will need to be addressed with integrity and skilled diplomacy from the stakeholders at the negotiations. “But these conflicts are contingent problems, not fundamental to it,” the GNF said.
“What was from the start, still is, fundamental in the Indo-Naga conflict has been the Government of India’s unyielding determination to deny the Naga people the human right of self-determination in their ancestral homelands,” GNF held.
The GNF said that the conflict started with India’s opposition by military force to the original political aspiration of the Nagas to live in peace as one people, and to grow and build mutually beneficial relations with one another and with neighbors, as well as with the larger world.
“This was and continues to be the crux of the tragic Indo-Naga conflict,” GNF wrote.