The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A case study in the political economy of 'creeping' genocide

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 339-369

  Levene, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENOCIDE; POLITICAL ECONOMY; STATE-LOCAL RELATIONS;

BANGLADESH; CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS;

EID: 0032807858     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436599913794     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. For general background information on the CUT and the jumma, see Anti-Slavery Society, The Chiltagong Hill Tracts, Militarisation, Oppression and the Hill Tribes, London: Anti-Slavery Society, 1984; CUT Commission, Life is not Ours'; Land And Human Rights in the CUT Bangladesh, Copenhagen and Amsterdam: Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, 1991; and Father R W Timm, The Adivasis of Bangladesh, London: Minority Rights Group, 1991.
2. Willem van Schcndcl, 'The invention of the "jummas": state formation and ethnicity in southeastern Bangladesh', unpublished manuscript. Department of History, Rotterdam University, 1990.
3. 'Genocide in Bangladesh', Survival International Review, 43, 1984 pp 7-35; Timm, Adivasis, p 28; The Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 69; Amnesty International, Bangladesh: Unlawful Killings and Torture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, London: Amnesty International, 1986; Wolfgang Mcy, 'Genocide in Bangladesh: the CUT case,paper presented at the 7th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, 7-11 July 1981; and Gowhcr Rizvi, 'Bangladesh: Insurgency in the CUT,' The Round Table, 305, 1988, pp 39-44.
4. CHT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 57.
5. Bangladeshi submission to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, August 1985. Cited in Amnesty, Bangladesh, p 11.
6. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 7, 67; and Life in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Probe News Agency, Dhaka, 1994, pi, which accuses the jss of wanting to falsely inflate the number of jumma deaths for NGO or broader international consumption. The claim is also made in Abdul M Hafiz & Naliid Islam, 'Environmental degradation and intra/intcrstatc conflicts in Bangladesh", Environment and Conflicts Project, (ENCOP), Occasional Paper No 6, Zurich, May 1993, p 74. and in an unspecified government report forwarded by the Bangladeshi High Commissioner in London to the author, 14 August 1995. Sec FBT1-21.6 Refugees Studies Documentation Centre, Oxford, for the jss reports themselves.
7. Barbara Harff & Ted Robert Gurr, 'Victims of the state: genocides, politicidcs and group repression from 1945 to 1995; in Albert J Jongman (cd), Contemporary Genocides: Causes, Cases, Consequences. The Hague: PIOOM, 1996, p 55; Harff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theories of genocides and politicidcs: identification and measurement of cases since 1945', International Studies Quarterly, 32(3), 1988, pp 359-371; and Helen Fein, 'Accounting for genocide after 1945: theories and some findings'. International Journal on Group Rights, 1, 1993, pp 79-106.
8. See, for example, Ziauddin Ahmed, 'The case of Bangladesh: bringing to trial the perpetrators of the 1971 genocide," in Jongman, Contemporary Genocides, pp 95-115.
9. Timm, Adivasis, p 71. More generally, sec Rchman Sobhan, The Crisis of External Dependence, The Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh, Dhaka and London, Zed Press, 1982.
10. For major interpretations see Leo Kupcr, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981; Isidor Wallimann & Michael Dobkowski (eds), Genocide and the Modern Age, Wcstport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987; Israel W Chamy (cd), Genocide; A Critical Bibliographical Review, London: Manscll, 1988; Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990; Helen Fein 'Genocide; a sociological perspective", Current Sociology, 38(1), 1990, pp 1-126; and George D Andrcpoulos (cd), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
11. See, for instance, Norman Cohn's classic study Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders ofZion, London: Penguin, 1967. See also Roger W Smith, 'Fantasy, purity, destruction: Norman Cohn's complex witness to the Holocaust', in Alan L Berger (cd), Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939-1989, Lewiston, Quecnston and Lampcter: Edward Meilen Press, 1990, pp 116-123.
12. Mark Lcvcne, 'Is the Holocaust simply another example of genocide?', Patterns of Prejudice, 28 (2), 1994, p 10, emphasis added.
13. Harff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theory,' p 359.
14. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944, p 79 (emphasis added).
15. Valiakn N Dadrian, 'The structural-functional components of genocide', in Israel Drapkin & Emilio Viano (eds), Victimology: A New Focus, Vol IV, Lcxington, MA: Lcxington Books, 1975, p 123.
16. For the text of the UN Convention sec Chalk & Jonassohn, History and Sociology, pp 44-49.
17. Kuper, Genocide, p 161.
18. Sec Mark Lcvene, 'Connecting threads: Rwanda, the Holocaust and the pattern of contemporary genocide', in Roger W Smith (ed), Genocide: Essays Toward Understanding. Early Warning and Prevention, Williamsburg, VA: Association of Genocide Scholars, forthcoming, 1999, ch 3, for a fuller rendition of this argument.
19. Julian Burger, Report from the Frontier: The State of the World's Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Press, 1987, p 129; and Timm, Adivasis, pp 10-11.
20. Cited in CUT Commission, Life is not ours, p 41.
21. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 85-88, appendix 6; and CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, 1994 update, p 31.
22. Helen Fein, 'Scenarios of genocide: models of genocide and critical responses', in Israel W Chamy (cd), Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on
23. the Holocaust and Genocide, Boulder Wcstvicw Press, 1984, pp 4-5. Sec also Vahakn N Dadrian, 'A typology of genocide'. International Review of Modern Sociology, 5(2), 1975, pp 201-212.
24. See David Hardiman, The Coming of the Dcvi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, ch 1; Ajay Skaria, 'Shades of wildncss: tribe, caste and gender in western India', Journal of Asian Studies, 56(3), 1997, pp 726-745; and John II Bodley, Victims of Progress, Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1982, for further discussion of these themes.
25. Schendcl, 'Invention', pp 9-10; and CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 88-89.
26. Tony Barta 'Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia', in Wallimann & Dobkowski, Genocide, pp 237-251; and Harff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theory," p 363.
27. Kurt Glaser & Stefan T Possony, Victims of Politics: The State of Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, ch 27.
28. Harff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theory,' p 363.
29. Hardiman, The Coming of the Dcvi, csp pp 10-15, 216-217.
30. Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal Peoples, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998, p 348.
31. Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmental degradation', pp 31-49; Bernard Nietschmann, 'Indonesia, Bangladesh: disguised invasions of indigenous nations, third world colonial expansion', Fourth World Journal, 1(2), 1985, pp 96-97; and John Vidai, 'Floods that have brought misery and mayhem to millions the world over', Guardian, 19 September 1998.
32. Vidai, 'Floods'; and Timm, Adivasis, p 8.
33. M Mufazzalul Huq, 'Changing nature of dominant social forces and interventions in the CUT', Journal of Social Studies (Dhaka) 56, April 1992, p 71.
34. Life in the Chiltagong Hill Tracts, pp 12, 49.
35. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 26.
36. See Manan Ganguli, The Chittagong Hill Tracts: before and after Bangladesh", Fourth World News (Cambridge), December 1995, pp 5-8.
37. Mey, 'Genocide,' p 5.
38. See Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 72-75; Schendcl, 'Invention,pp 17-21; and Burger, Report from the Frontier, p 130, for critical confirmation of these contentions.
39. Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 80, 90.
40. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 32-33; Bodley, Victims, p 8.
41. Mrinal Kami Chakma, 'Counter-insurgency: a multidimensional process of marginalisation of the CUT jummas', unpublished paper, Calcutta Research Group, 1996, pp 9-10 notes the importance of the land acquisition regulation specific to the CUT of 1958, which provided a definitive break with the region's 'special status'.
42. Timm, Adivasis, p 9.
43. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 57, quoting Sheik Mujibur Rahman.
44. Madhav Gadgil & Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp 116-134, 150-153.
45. Quoted in Bodley, Victims, p 8. This contradicts the usual Bangladeshi refrain that the greatest threat to the sustainability of the forest come from jhum itself. See for example, Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmental degradation', p 20.
46. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 71-86; Life in the Chiltagong Hill Tracts, pp 50-51.
47. Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 84-85.
48. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 75.
49. Schcndel, 'Invention', p 10. Sec also Raja Dcvasish Roy, 'Forests, forestry and indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts', Earth Touch, February 1996, p 40 for his comments on the attitudes of government officials.
50. Vccna Kukrcja, Civil-Military Relations in South Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, New Delhi: Sage, 1991, ch 4, 'Militarism in Bangladesh'.
51. Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 81; and Kukrcja, Civil-Military Relations, p 140.
52. Kukrcja, Civil-Military Relations, p 164.
53. Two specific examples of this with regard to the CUT were the way the state, despite supposedly strict controls protecting its own monopoly, dispensed direct land grants for large-scale rubber plantations and provided licences and permits for commercial logging. See Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 81, 85.
54. Kukreja, Civil-Military Relations, pp 154-156.
55. Untitled Government of Bangladesh report, forwarded to author August 1995.
56. cirr Commission Life is not Ours, p 39.
57. ibid, p 41. See Mey, 'Genocide', p 11, for fuller details on the composition of BDF forces in the CUT.
58. Cited in 'An invitation to International Peace Conference on Chittagong Hill Tracts: working towards peace", unpublished report, Bangkok, 23-26 February 1997, p 9.
59. Burger, Report from the Frontier, p 256; Anti-Slavery Society, Chillagong Hill Tracts, p 32.
60. See Lord Kinross, Aiatiirk: Rebirth of a Nation, London: Weidcnfcld and Nicholson, 1964, for a classic enunciation.
61. So much so that counter-insurgency courses at the Defence Staff college, Dhaka, were taught by seconded members of the British military and included students from abroad while the CUT itself was on the regular itinerary of invited foreign officers. See CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 42. For the broader picture, see Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, Boston, MA: 1985; and Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, London: Vintage, 1992.
62. Anti-Slavery Society Chitlagong Hill Tracts, pp 38-41.
63. The World Council of Indigenous Peoples has identified TNCS as 'the most serious threat to the survival of the indigenous nations of the Fourth World'. Burger, Report from the Frontier, p 178.
64. Huq, 'Changing nature', p 84.
65. Nictschmann, 'Indonesia, Bangladesh', p 108, notes that incoming Bengalis were to receive 2.5 to five acres of land and six months food supply, which proved inadequate to meet their start-up needs.
66. Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 6-7; CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 19.
67. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 16.
68. See Robert Paine, 'The claim of the Fourth World,' in Jens Brosted et al (eds), Native Power, The Quest for Autonomy and Nationhood of Indigenous Peoples, Oslo: Univcrsitctsfiorlaget AS, 1985, pp 49-66 for this argument.
69. Schcndel, 'Invention', p 13.
70. Sexual humiliation and degradation of women, especially in the wake of 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, is now well recognised as a major, consciously applied instrument in such 'softening up' processes. See Roger W Smith, 'Women and genocide: notes on an unwritten history', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 8(3), 1994, pp 315-334; Alexandra Stiglmaycr (cd), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. For its specific application and other gender-related crimes in the CUT see CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 106-109.
71. Huq, 'Changing nature", p 67; CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 58. For more general confirmation of this point with regard to other third world state versus community struggles sec David Maybury-Lcwis, 'Living in Leviathan: ethnic groups and the state,' in Maybury-Lcwis (ed), The Prospects for Plural Societies Washington, DC: The American Ethnological Society, 1984, pp 224-225.
72. Quoted in CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 14.
73. For development of this theme see chapters by Leo Kuper, Peter Worsley and Maybury-Lcwis in Maybury-Lcwis, The Prospects for Plural Societies.
74. Sec Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 44-54; and CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 16, 103-106 for jumma political developments. Mcy 'Genocide', p 15 also notes the Shanti Bahini's links with the non-tribal and outlawed Marxist-Lcninst Sarbohara Party.
75. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 84; and Mey 'Genocide', p 9.
76. Quoted in All Murtaza, 'CUT: tracking the past', Dhaka Courier, 18 November 1994.
77. See Benedict Andcrson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983, for the general argument; and Schcndel 'Invention', pp 26-31, for its application to the jumma.
78. The Shanti Bahini claimed between 12000 and 15000 jumma were detained without trial in 1979-1980. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 60.
79. For details of the Kaokhali and subsequent massacres sec ibid, pp 55-66; CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 17-19, 21-23; Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 10-30; and Survival International, Genocide.
80. Mey, 'Genocide', pp 22-23; and Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 5-6.
81. Additionally, the Jss claimed that a further 10000 people, mostly children, had died as an indirect result of the massacres, cither in flight, or through neglect and trauma in the Tripura camps. Anti-Slavery Society, Chitlagong Hill Tracts, p 64.
82. Quoted in Sunival International News, 20, 1988. Sec also CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 20-21 for Ershad's amnesty policy.
83. For instance, eyewitness survivors of the UDF massacre at the village of Het Baria, near Rangamati, on 31 May 1984, reported soldiers screaming 'no chakmas will be born in Bangladesh', as they raped, then bayoneted their victims. Amnesty, Bangladesh, p 14.
84. See the conclusions of ibid p 34. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p22 and Survival International News, 13, 1986 report 534 separate incidents of rape and torture in the period February-December 1985 alone.
85. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 24, 74-75.
86. Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmental degradation', p 67.
87. Jumma Peoples Alliance, Special Issue 2, unpublished, document, 25 October 1997.
88. Ibid; and CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, 1992 update, p 7.
89. Survival Action Bulletin, May 1992, noted that 1200 people were burnt alive in their homes in the Logang massacre. Sec also Survival Action Bulletin, January 1994 for reports on the massacres at Mallya (February 1992), and Naniarchar (November 1993).
90. See cirr Commission, Life is not Ours, p 36, and 1994 update, p 20. See Survival International, 'Chittagong
91. Hill Tracts revisited', unpublished field Irip report, 18-27 October 1992, on the Tiger Force. Government efforts to utilise the smaller tribes against the Chakma, who constitute 60% of the jumma, deserve further attention. Within the Chakma itself there are also exploitable antipathies. Mey 'Genocide. pl5, for instance, notes that the Taungchengya clans have their own separate guerrilla force which has at times fought the Shanti Bahini. The latter also has poor relations with the tribally based Mizo National Front over the Indian border in Mizoram.
92. Amnesty Urgent Action bulletin, 'Fear for Safety', Index ASA 13 July 1996; and 'Kalpana Chakma remains untraccd'. Earth Touch, February 1997, pp 21-22.
93. Suzanne Goldenbcrg, 'Immigrants bear brunt of Assam's culture of mutiny'. Guardian, 17 April 1996. More generally, See Nictschmann, 'Indonesia, Bangladesh', pp 96-97; Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, 'On the threshold: environmental changes as causes of acute conflict'. International Security, Fall 1991, pp 76-116; and Richard L Rubcnstein, The Age of Triage, Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983.
94. Quoted in Tim McGirk, 'Fear-filled return home for exiles'. Independent, 25 February 1994.
95. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 27.
96. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 24.
97. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 27-28; Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 83-84.
98. Huq, 'Changing nature', p 82. An additional complicating variable in this demographic picture is the 100000 Rohingyas, the Burmese Moslem refugees expelled from Buddhist Burma who have fled into an area adjacent to the CUT. CUT Commission, Life is not Ours, 1994 update, pp 8, 29, has questioned whether the Bangladeshi government might use these refugees against the jumma.
99. Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 87.
100. CUT Commission Life is not Ours, pp 91-92 notes government sponsorship of ethnography, weaving and dance. For the issue more generally, see George Monbiot, 'Tourist trap'. Guardian, 12 December 1998.
101. Sec Charter of modified five point demands and a brief outline of Regional Autonomy with a Regional Council, Jana Samhati Samiti, 15 October 1996.
102. Cited in Suzanne Goldenbcrg, 'Rivalry and corruption cripple the self-help economy', Guardian, 17 February 1996.
103. See statement of Colonel (retd) OH Ahmed, the Communications Minister and President of the governmentcreated special committee on the CUT with rcsponsibilty for talks with the Jss. Bangladesh Times, 31 December 1992.
104. 'TwO forcign firms to explore oil in CUT', Dhaka Observer, 31 July 1995; Jss, 'Situation in CIIT', unpublished report, 28 October 1995, Survival International archive, London. The TNCS in question are Shell, Amoco and BMP.
105. Sec Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster, A Preface to Hope, London: Verso, 1983, for the relationship between genocide and state efforts to 'realise the unrcalisable'.