by MARK LEVENE
Bangladesh map. Chittagong Hill Tracts, the area in purple, is the home of the indigenous people. Wikipedia
Neither the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) nor its 700 000 indigenous peoples are widely known. In terms of physical geography the CHT’ s 13 221 square kilometres are part of a much larger, heavily forested but largely inaccessible and remote mountain range, stretching for 1800 kilometres from western Burma to an area where it merges with the eastern Himalayas in China. Its present-day incorporation within Bangladesh is the historical product of the post-1860 British advance to the east and northeast of Bengal, in order to provide a buffer zone (a less famous equivalent of its North-West Frontier) for its burgeoning Indian empire. This artificial boundary demarcation prefi gured the political separation of the CHT at the end of British rule, in 1947, from Myanmar (Burma) to the south, and the Indian states of Tripura and Mizoram to the north and east. Despite their close ethno-cultural affinities with other peoples of Sino-Tibetan origin in these states, and the lack of ethnic or religious identity with Bengalis, the Chakma, Marma, Tripura and nine or 10 other ethnographically diverse tribal peoples of the CHT found themselves instead in (East) Pakistan.1
It is what has been happening to these peoples since 1947, and more particularly since the Bengali secession from Pakistan to form an independent Bangladesh in 1971, which is this article’ s subject. A number of concerned nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have closely monitored their situation and in more than one instance have unequivocally accused the Bangladeshi government of commiting genocide against the jummas–the term of collective self-identification used by CHT peoples in recent years.2 Survival International, which works for tribal peoples worldwide, has noted their extreme plight claiming a figure of 125 000 fatalities since 1947. The International Labour Organisation has spoken of `the calculated annihilation of the tribals’ . In 1984 the Anti-Slavery Society forecast that genocide would result if nothing was done. Amnesty International, always more circumspect in its choice of terms, nevertheless issued a report at the height of the killings in 1986, which charged genocide in all but name. Scholars, notably the anthropologist Wolfgang Mey, have added their voice.3 With little evidence that the 1989 change from military government to democratic rule had tangibly improved jumma fortunes, and by this time with an estimated 10% of them refugees in neighbouring Tripura, a number of agencies came together as the CHT Commission to investigate the situation fully at first hand. Their report Life is Not Ours, published in May 1991, spoke of `a genocidal process’ 4 which two sequels appeared to confirm as a long-term trend.
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