COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW march 20, 2010 vol xlv no 12 19

Structural Roots of Violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Bhumitra Chakma

Bhumitra Chakma (B.Chakma@hull.ac.uk) is currently visiting fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Centre, Washington DC, and teaches politics at the University of Hull, UK.

The continued violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh is rooted in the state’s policy of erasing the ethnic identity of the indigenous people and usurping their land for settling Bengali-speaking populations. In this, Bangladesh has followed the same policy as Pakistan and used the army and state machinery to suppress and evict the local people from their land and livelihoods. Unless the structural roots of this violence are addressed by the Bangladesh state, the cycle of violence will not end.

On 19 and 20 February 2010, Ben-gali settlers backed by the Bang-ladesh armed forces attacked 14

indigenous villages in the Baghaichat region of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. Land grab was the motive of the attacks (for details, see ACHR 2010). Six indigenous people, including a wom-an, were killed in firing by the armed forc-es, at least 25 persons were injured (in-cluding a member of Bangladesh army personnel in civilian dress), and about 300 houses (including a UNDP-funded vil-lage centre) were burnt to ashes. A church was vandalised and a Buddhist temple was gutted. Violence expanded to other areas like Khagrachari district town, Kaukhali, etc, in the following days and caused widespread destruction including the death of a Bengali settler.

This incident is not an isolated event. Rather, it is the latest development in the long-running saga of violence against the indigenous communities of the CHT by Bengali settlers, directly and indirectly aided by the Bangladesh armed forces and implicitly acquiesced in, by the Bengali-dominated civil administration. At the core of the problem is the Bangladesh gov-ernment’s politically-motivated Bengali settlement policy in order to change the demographic character of the CHT, which inevitably leads to clashes over land. In practice, this policy has transformed into

one of “ethnic cleansing”, as the new im-migrants began grabbing the lands of the indigenous people through eviction with support from or complicity of various state agencies, particularly the army. From this standpoint, the Bangladesh state, instead of being the protector of the indigenous people, has become a key source of their insecurity and an active agent of ethno-cide. In what follows I explain the struc-tural roots of state violence against indig-enous communities in the CHT.

Independent Bangladesh and Indigenous People

Following the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the indigenous communities of the CHT demanded constitutional recognition of their identities. They placed the follow-ing demands to the first prime minister of the country, Sheikh Mujibar Rahman:

(1) autonomy of the Chittagong Hill Tracts with its own legislature; (2) retention of Reg-ulation 1900 in the constitution of Bangla-desh (This refers to the regulations under the Act of 1900 passed by the British to preserve the traditional sociocultural and political institutions of the indigenous people of the CHT, based on customary laws, common own-ership of land and so on. Regulation 1900 was often diluted between the period 1947-71 by the Government of Pakistan); (3) continu-ation of the offices of circle chief; (4) a consti-tutional provision restricting the amendment of Regulation 1900 and imposing a ban on the influx of the non-Hill people.

The prime minister not only rejected the demands of the indigenous people, but also advised them “to forget their ethnic identities” and merge with “Bengali na-tionalism” (al-Ahsan and Chakma 1989: 967). The Constitution that was adopted in December 1972 declared Bangladesh a mono-national and a mono-cultural entity,

Table 1: Massacres in the Chittagong Hill TractsPlace Date Number of Dead

Mubachari 15 October 1979 Number unknown

Kaukhali-Kalampati massacre 25 March 1980 200-300

Barkal massacre 31 May 1984 110

Panchari massacre 1 May 1986 Number unknown

Matiranga massacre May 1986 70

Commillatilla/Taindong massacre 18-19 May 1986 200

Hirachar, Sarbotoli, Khagrachari, Pablakhali massacres 8-10 August 1988 over 100

Longudu massacre 4 May 1989 over 30

Malya massacre 2 February 1992 30

Logang massacre 10 April 1992 138

Naniarchar massacre 17 November 1993 100Sources: Compiled from various sources, including The CHT Commission (1997, 2000), Life is Not Ours: Land and Human Rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, The report of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission; Amnesty International (1986), Bangladesh: Unlawful Killings and Torture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts; Mohsin (1999), The Politics of Nationalism.

COMMENTARY

march 20, 2010 vol xlv no 12 EPW Economic & Political Weekly20

allowing no space for the identity of the indigenous communities. Article 9 read:

The unity and solidarity of the Bengali na-tion, which deriving its identity from its lan-guage and culture, attained sovereign and independent Bangladesh through a united and determined struggle in the war of in-dependence shall be the basis of Bengali na-tionalism (Bangladesh Constitution 1972: 5).

Additionally, Article 3 (Part I) declared Bangla as the state language, and Article 6 (Part I) announced the citizens of Bangla-desh were to be known as “Bengalis”. The policies of the government of Bangladesh (GoB) towards the CHT directly flowed from the spirit and text of the constitution and its primary objective was to assimi-late the indigenous communities into the Bengali nation.

Rise of Resistance

The assimilationist policy of GoB soon led to the rise of resistance in the CHT. A r egional political party – Parbatya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti (PCJSS) (United Peoples Organisation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts), was formed in the early 1970s in reaction to GoB’s assimilationist policy. In the 1973 general elections, the PCJSS candidate, M N Larma, was elected to represent the CHT people in the national parliament. In parliament, he repeatedly demanded constitutional recognition of the separate

identities of the indigenous communities. When the demand went unheeded, the PCJSS organised a guerrilla force, Shanti Bahini (Peace Force), in the mid-1970s to pursue regional autonomy. Armed clashes soon ensued between this Shanti Bahini and the Bangladesh armed forces that continued till the signing of a peace accord in December 1997. In the interim years violence took structural root in the CHT.

Militarisation and Massacres

As soon as armed clashes between the guerrillas and the Bangladesh army began, GoB militarised the region by deploying 1,15,000 military personnel – one soldier for five to six hill persons (Levene 1999: 354). In the 1980s, the CHT was, effe ctively, turned into a large military garrison. As a result of this militarisation of the region, attacks on indigenous villages and deten-tion, torture, disappearance and killing of the hill people became almost routine oc-currences. From the late 1970s onward, the armed forces also started massacre as a policy instrument. On 15 October 1979, government forces massacred unarmed villagers in Mubachari, the first large-scale killing in the CHT (Samad 1980), and Amnesty International reported more such massacres in the subsequent years com-mitted jointly by the military and the Bengali settlers (Amnesty I nternational 1986). The

Kaukhali massacre on 25 March 1980 (ironically it was on this, day nine years previously, that Pakistani forces had at-tacked unarmed Bengalis in East Pakistan that eventually culminated into the emer-gence of an independent Bangladesh) sur-passed, according to a Chittagong University academic, “all previous records of brutali-ties” committed against indigenous people.1 The consistent pattern of these massacres in the 1970s and 1980s were indeed the crossing of the Rubicon from a “genocidal process” to “active genocide” (Levene 1999: 359). Table 1 (p 19) highlights the pattern.

Policy of Demographic Change

From the late 1970s, the Bangladeshi gov-ernment has consistently pursued a policy of “change the demography” in the CHT. The only objective of this policy appears to be to outnumber the indigenous people in their own land. Eviction from their homes and lands, and massacres were the most prominent measures of this broad approach pursued by the armed forces in collusion with the Bengali settlers.

From this period, the government began to settle Bengalis in the CHT and planned to provide five acres of hilly land, four acres of mixed land and 2.5 acres of paddy land to each settler family (Anti-Slavery Society 1984: 71-73). How vigorously the govern-ment pursued the policy can be observed in

Table 2: CHT Population: Hill and Non-Hill People (1872-Present)

Year Hill People Non-Hill People

Number % Number %

1872 61,957 98.26 1,097 1.74

1901 1,16,063 92.98 8,762 7.02

1951 2,61,538 90.91 26,150 9.09

1956 300,000 90.91 300,00 9.09

1981 4,55,000 61.07 2,90,000 38.93

1991 5,01,144 51.43 4,73,301 48.57

2001* – – – –

* Curiously the 2001 Census does not provide a figure categorising hill people and Bengalis in the CHT.Source: Adnan (2004: 15).

Table 3: CHT Soil Type and Land UseType of Soil and Land Use Class of Area in Area % Lands Acres

All purpose agriculture A 76,466 3.07

Terrace agriculture B 67,871 2.72

Mostly horticulture and partly forestry C 3,66,622 14.71

Only forestry D 18,16,993 72.91

Horticulture and forestry CD 32,024 1.28

Settlement 653 0.03

Water bodies 1,31,637 5.28

Total 24,92,266 100

Source: Adnan (2004: 112).

BBC Monitoring, headquartered in the south of England, monitors open source foreign media from over 150 countries throughout the world in more than 70 languages. We are recruiting Monitoring Journalists.

You will be based at the BBC Monitoring bureau in New Delhi. Working in line with customer needs, you will select news and information from source material. You’ll also translate, edit and write material in English. This role also includes shift work. We will consider candidates with right to work in India. We offer competitive pay and outstanding training opportunities.

The ideal candidate will have a good knowledge of international affairs especially in relation to Iran/South Asia and excellent Persian/Urdu/Pashto and English with proven translation skills.

Please apply by visiting the bbc.co.uk/jobs website under reference: 274459 or contact: careers@bbchrdirect.co.uk for any further details. Please mention the job reference number for all correspondence. Please note that the last date for application is 31 March.

COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW march 20, 2010 vol xlv no 12 21

the rapid change of the CHT’s demographic structure. Table 2 (p 20) highlights this.

The Bengali settlement programme not only quickly altered the demographic char-acter of the CHT, it also expedited the proc-ess of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, ethnic cleansing was ingrained in the GoB’s p olicy, because without evicting the indigenous people from their lands it was simply not possible to settle Bengalis in the CHT. Between 1980 and early 1984, a ccording to The Guardian, 4,00,000 Bengalis were set-tled in the CHT.2 Assuming four persons in a family, it means that about 1,00,000 fami-lies were brought during this period. If each family was to be given five acres of hilly land, four acres of “mixed” land and 2.5 acres of paddy land as planned, then following amounts of land were necessary:

Hilly land: 1,00,000X5 = 5,00,000 acres acres‘Mixed’ land: 1,00,000X4 = 4,00,000 acres acresPaddy land: 1,00,000X2.5 = 2,50,000 acres acres

But the trouble was that the amount of land that was necessary to settle the new immi-grants was simply unavailable in the CHT as Table 3 (p 20) on the CHT’s land availa-bility suggests. Bengali settlement continued after 1984 and indeed continues till date.

The government brought Bengalis for settlement in the CHT in large numbers but certainly could not provide the amount of land it promised to each settler family be-cause of unavailability of cultivable land. Hence, what the settlers simply did was that they began to grab the lands of the in-digenous people (for details on this, see Roy 1997: 167-208; Adnan 2004). And in this effort they got active support from the Bangladesh armed forces. Eviction, terrori-sation and massacres in the CHT were a part of this process. In the 1980s, terrorisa-tion led about 50,000 indigenous people to become refugees in India and Bengali settlers grabbed the lands left by them. Put simply, without grabbing the lands of the indigenous people it was not possible to settle any outsider in the CHT.

The intermittent eruption of violence in the CHT is the direct result of GoB’s policy of Bengali settlement. It is now structur-ally ingrained. Unless this structural root of violence is addressed it is unlikely that durable peace will return to the CHT. A

peace accord was signed between the GoB and the PCJSS in December 1997. In the last 13 years this accord has not delivered the intended peace in the CHT. Rather vio-lence has reappeared continuously in the region. One of the key reasons for this is that the accord failed to address the struc-tural cause of the problem in the CHT – settlement of Bengalis and their usurpa-tion of indigenous land. Without address-ing this, it is a simple equation that the peace accord will not only falter, the CHT will experience more violence and blood-shed in the years to come. And the process of ethnocide will continue.

Notes

1 The massacre occurred in a Buddhist temple in Kaukhali village. On 25 March 1980, the local com-mander of Bangladesh armed forces called the vil-lagers to reconstruct the aging temple. When the people gathered there, the members of Bangladesh armed forces started to shoot indiscriminately and killed and injured many hill people. A media blackout imposed by the Bangladesh government kept the outside world in dark about the massa-cre. Amnesty International managed to document the incident. A graphic description of the massa-cre can be found in an article of Chittagong Uni-versity academic, Hayat Hossein (see Hossein 1986). Bangladesh authorities did not investigate the Kaukhali massacre, but a fact-finding team of three opposition parliament members (Upendra Lal Chakma and Shahjahan Siraj of Jatiyo Sama-jtantric Dal and Rashed Khan Menon of Workers’ Party) independently carried out an investigation and demanded (fruitlessly) a full judicial inquiry of the massacre. The author has obtained a copy of the report of the independent enquiry by the three opposition p arliamentarians.

2 The Guardian (London), 6 March 1984.

References

ACHR (Asian Centre for Human Rights) (2010): Bang-ladesh: IPS Massacred for Land Grab, 23 February; accessed at: http://www.achrweb. org/reports/ bangla/ CHT012010.pdf.

Adnan, S (2004): Migration, Land Alienation and Con-flict: Causes of Poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, Research and Advisory Service, Dhaka.

al-Ahsan, S A and B Chakma (1989): “Problems of N ational Integration in Bangladesh: The Chit-tagong Hill Tracts”, Asian Survey, Vol 29, No 10, pp 959-70.

Amnesty International (1986): Bangladesh: Unlawful Killing and Torture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Amnesty International, London.

Anti-Slavery Society (1994): The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Militarisation, Oppression, and the Hill Tribe (London: Anti-Slavery Society Publication).

CHT (Chittagong Hill Tracts) Commission (1997, 2000): Life Is Not Ours: Land and Human Rights in the Chittagong Hill Tract, Bangladesh, Interna-tional Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.

Hossein, H (1986): “Problem of National Integration in Bangladesh” in Bangladesh: History and Cul-ture, Vol 1, S R Chakravarty and V Narain (ed.) (New Delhi: South Asia Publishers).

Levene, M (1999): “The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Case Study in the Political Economy of ‘Creeping’ G enocide”, Third World Quarterly, Vol 20, No 2, pp 339-69.

Ministry of Law (1972): The Constitution of The P eople’s Republic of Bangladesh, Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka.

Mohsin, A (1999): The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited).

– (2003): The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On the Difficult Road to Peace, Lynne Rienner, London.

Roy, R D (1997): “The Population Transfer Programme of 1980s and the Land Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts” in Living on the Edge: Essays on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Subir Bhaumik, Meghna Guhathakurtha and Sab-byachasi Basu Ray Chaudhury (ed.), Calcutta Re-search Group, Kolkata, pp 167-208.

Samad, S (1980): “What Is Happening in the Chit-tagong Hill Tracts?” (in Bengali), Robbar, 22 June.

CD-ROM 2006The digital version of Economic and Political Weekly is now available for 2006 on a single disk.

This electronic edition contains the complete content of all the issues published in 2006. The CD-ROM 2006 comes equipped with a powerful search as well as utilities to make your browsing experience productive. The contents are indexed and organised as in the print edition, with articles laid out in individual sections in each issue. Users can browse through the sections or use the sophisticated search facility to locate articles and statistics of interest.

Price for CD-ROM 2006 (in India)Individuals – Rs 285 (Rs 250 plus postage and handling charges of Rs 35)Institutions – Rs 535 (Rs 500 plus postage and handling charges of Rs 35)

International – US$ 40 (including airmail postage)

Also available 2003, 2004 and 2005 on three separate CDs, individual CD price as above

Any queries please email: circulation@epw.in

To order the CD-ROMs (please specify the year) send a bank draft payable at Mumbai in favour of Economic and Political Weekly. The CDs can also be purchased on-line using a credit card through a secure payment gateway at epw.in.

Circulation Manager, Economic and Political Weekly

320, 321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013, India