Third World Quarterly

The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Case Study in the Political Economy of 'Creeping' Genocide Author(s): Mark Levene Reviewed work(s): Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 339-369 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3992921 . Accessed: 28/11/2011 03:33
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Third World Quartely, Vol 20, No 2, pp 339-369,

1999

The study

Chittagong
in the

Hil political

Tracts:
economy

case of

'creeping'
MARK LEVENE

genocide

ABSTRACT The destruction of indigenous, tribal peoples in remote and/or frontier regions of the developing world is often assumed to be the outcome of inexorable, even inevitable forces of progress. People are not so much killed, they become extinct. Terms such as ethnocide, cultural genocide or developmental genocide suggest a distinct form of 'off the map' elimination which implicitly discourages comparison with other acknowledged examples of genocide. By concentrating on a little-known case study, that of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (cHT) in Bangladesh, this article argues that this sort of categorisation is misplaced. Not only is the destruction or attempted destruction of fourth world peoples central to the pattern of contemporary genocide but, by examining such specific examples, we can more clearly delineate the phenomenon's more general wellsprings and processes. The example of the CHT does have its own peculiar features; not least what has been termed here its 'creeping' nature. In other respects, however, the efforts of a new nation-state to overcome its structural weaknesses by attempting a forcedpace consolidation and settlement of its one, allegedly, unoccupied resource-rich frontier region closely mirrors other state-building, developmental agendas which have been confronted with communal resistance. The ensuing crisis of state-communal relations, however, cannot be viewed in national isolation. Bangladesh's drive to develop the CHT has not only been funded by Western finance and aid but is closely linked to its efforts to integrate itself rapidly into a Western dominated and regulated international system. It is in these efforts 'to realise what is actually unrealisable' that the relationship between a flawed state power and genocide can be located.

nor Neither the ChittagongHill Tracts (CIIT) its 700 000 indigenous peoples are 13 widely known. In terms of physical geography the CHT'S 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 incorporationwithin Bangladeshis the historicalproductof the post-1860 British advance to the east and northeastof Bengal, in order to provide a buffer zone
Mark Levene is Senior Lecturerin the Departmentof History, Universityof Warwick,WarwickCV 4 7AL, UK.

0143-6597/99/020339-31 $7.00 ? 1999 Third World Quarterly

339

MARK LEVENE

(a less famous equivalent of its North-WestFrontier)for its burgeoning Indian empire. This artificial boundarydemarcationprefiguredthe political separation of the CIHT 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-culturalaffinities with other peoples of Sino-Tibetan origin in these states, and the lack of ethnic or religious identity with Bengalis, the Chakma,Marma,Tripuraand nine or 10 otherethnographically diverse tribal peoples of the CHiT found themselves instead in (East) Pakistan.' It is what has been happening to these peoples since 1947, and more particularlysince 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 monitoredtheir situationand in more than one instance have unequivocally accused the Bangladeshi government of commiting genocide against the jummas-the term of collective selfidentificationused by CIITpeoples in recent years.2Survival International, which works for tribal peoples worldwide, has noted their extreme plight claiming a figure of 125 000 fatalities since 1947. The InternationalLabour Organisation has spoken of 'the calculated annihilationof 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 reportat the height of the killings in 1986, which charged genocide in all but name. Scholars, notably the anthropologistWolfgang Mey, have added their voice.3 With little evidence that the 1989 change from militarygovernment to democraticrule had tangibly improvedjumma 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 reportLife is Not Ours, published in May 1991, spoke of 'a genocidal process'4which two sequels appearedto confirmas a long-termtrend. By contrast,the Bangladeshigovernmenthas vigorously refutedthese charges as 'totally baseless and preposterous allegations' a claim founded on the counter-chargethat their source was 'disgruntled', 'misguided' or 'miscreant' troublemakers.5 This has usually been a shorthandfor the ParbottyaChattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti (Jss), the largely Chakma-recruited ChittagongHill Tracts Peoples Solidarity Association which the Bangladeshi government has consistently accused of working in the interestsof 'a foreign power', namely India.6If the implicationhere is that the NGOS are credulousWesterndo-gooders who have been unscrupulouslyduped into meddling in matterswhich they do not understand, the Bangladeshi governmentis not alone in arguing that the threatto the jummas has been exaggerated. At the first conference of the Association of Genocide Scholars in 1995, Ted Gurrentirely excluded them from a long list of South east Asian minoritiesin danger,more recently placing them in a mediumrisk or even residual category only. Neither do the jummas appearin Harff and Gurr'slist of genocide and politicide victims since 1945, nor in the recent global survey by Helen Fein. Adjudicatingon which story to believe is not helped by the fact that the CHiT has been a militarily controlled area, mostly off-limits to would-be independent observers, since 1964. Reports of atrocities and massacres reach the outside world either via the iss which might be argued to have a vested interest 340

'CREEPING' GENOCIDE THECHITTAGONG IN IHILL TRACTS

in their exposure, or a Bangladeshi governmentobversely intent on denying that anything of the kind took place or, if it did, blaming it on the Shanti Bahini (literally 'Peace Force'!), the jumma guerrillaarmy closely linked to the iss. But the problem is seriously compoundedby Western perceptions of Bangladesh. A new state founded in 1971 out of an extremely bloody secession from Pakistan, Bangladesh has always been considered in the camp of the 'victims' not the 'perpetrators.' 1971 itself, with its mass rapes and murders to the tune of possibly three million fatalities, began this process.8This genocidal traumawas succeeded by a series of other 'natural' disasters which led to the death or economic ruination of further millions. With a massive population increase, insufficient industrialcapacity with which to absorb the excess and 85% of its development funds coming from Western aid,9 Bangladesh has often been treated as a basket case which, in the circumstances, could be excused its proclivity towards authoritarianmilitary rule. What happened in the CHT, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was thus clouded not simply by Bangladeshi but also Western agendas to commence radical remedial programmes aimed at pulling the country clear of the dependency trap. The case for genocide
Normative contemporary assumptions as to the 'necessity' of development undoubtedlycomplicate any analysis of the conflict in the CHT.But there are, in

fact, three interrelated questions here. First, what is meant by genocide or at least a 'genocidal process' and is its usage appropriatewith regard to the region? Second, to what extent-if having made the case-can its causation be rooted in a state-led developmental agenda? Third, if that too is the case, might we not consider what has happened to the jumma as a special category of genocide, or perhaps, find another term such as 'ethnocide' to describe it? In spite of the existence of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide there is no scholarly consensus on what constitutes or causes the phenomenon.10 Running through the debate is a basic fault-line between those who emphasise the role and responsibility of specific, named and usually ideologically motivated perpetrators and those who concentrate rather on the economic and social

configurationsand interests within which those perpetratorsoperate. Often lost or deprioritisedin these readings is the nature of the relationship between the 'perpetrator'state and the 'victim' community. The oversight may seem understandablewhen one considers, for instance, the Holocaust-the twentiethcentury that the only dynamic interaction between the genocide par excellence-given Nazi regime and Jews took place entirely in the paranoidheads of the former. On one level, this may tell us something unusual about the Holocaust. On another,the very fact that the Nazis believed-or at least proclaimed-that Jews qua Jews constituteda genuine and mortalthreatto their existence, regardlessof
all empirical evidence to the contrary,11 might offer comparison with other genocidal regimes which have similarly charged ethnic, religious, or social groups with malicious intent to subvert or destroy their own state and society.

Determining whether a regime's (or broader society's) cultural notions or

political assessment of such groups is accurate, inaccurate, inflated, confused, 341

MARK LEVENE

contradictoryor even entirely illusory-not least because in some instances of genocide the alleged group has been dreamt up out of thin air-represents one of the most thorny problems for the analyst. Nevertheless, the issue of interaction, whetherreal or imagined,cannot be ducked. This is why I have arguedthat 'genocide occurs where a state perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate population-defined by the state in collective or communal terms-seeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical eliminationof that aggregate,in toto or until such time as the group no 12 longer is perceived to representsuch a threat'. While this is not so much a definition of genocide as an attempt to identify victims and moment, it also begs the questions at what point, its perpetrators, and indeed why, genocide becomes such. Harff and Gurr argue that the necessary evidence for a prima facie case of genocide requires a sustained patternof killing over a given period of weeks or months.'3My own formulation implicitly supports this thesis. Yet Raphael Lemkin, the creator of the term 'genocide' and chief lobbyist for the UN Convention,althoughhe consideredthe phenomemon 'a coordinatedplan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilatingthe groups themselves', posited that these actions did not necesarily entail 'immediate destruction' but were part of an overall plan to cause 'the
disintegration of the political and social institutions of the group', including the

'destructionof the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups'.'4 While I would argue that what Lemkin is describing here is not genocide per se so much as a 'genocidal process,' his explanationshould persuasivelyremind us that the moment of mass systematic annihilation can never be viewed in isolation. Even in the most far-reaching examples, notably 1915 Ottoman Armenia, the Holocaust, and 1994 Rwanda, genocide represents rather the extreme end of a continuumof repressive state strategies, which might include marginalisation,forced assimilation, deportation and even massacre. Usually pursued over many decades, these strategies latent if not explicit aim is, at the very least, to neutralise if not to 'get rid' of a perceived 'problem' population. Yet it is only, usually, in extreme crisis circumstances, suggesting that these other strategieshave demonstrablyfailed or been exhausted,that the state resorts to genocide. Even then, most genocides do not follow an absolute trajectorybut are usually aborted at some point or, possibly, succeeded by a returnto other carrot and stick strategies of forcible integration or exclusion, even in some instances, runningparallel to, genocide itself. If this already sounds messy, not to say contradictory,it is well to remember that the regime's 'preponderant access to the overall resources of power',15 may determine that the victim community's only practicalresponse is to negotiate. Certainly, this has been a major ingredientof the CIIT tragedy.Paradoxically,however, this also reinforces the sense of a genuine perpetrator-victimdynamic and in so doing runs the added risk of strikinga moral equivalence between the actions of the two where Yet if it does not entirely legitimate, or even vindicate that of the perpetrator. genocide is, as the UN Conventionclaims, not only 'a crime under international law' but 'an odious scourge','6 surely we should be seeking to indict the not perpetrators, blame the victims? 342

'CREEPING' GENOCIDE IN THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS

The starting-pointof most genocide research does indeed involve analysing the ideological underpinnings and or authoritariantendencies of genocidal regimes, or, as with the seminal work of Leo Kuper, the nature of ethnically plural societies where the dominantethnic group is unable or unwilling to share state power with others. However, while these foci for research are legitimate and appropriate, would posit that an alternativefirst premise might be found in I Kuper's starkassertionthat the sovereign territorialstate has 'as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide . . . against peoples underits rule and that the United Nations for all practical purposes defends this right'.17 Kuper's statement is unsettling because it seems to pose the potentiality for genocide among all modem states, though firmly in the context of an international system of such states. Moreover, it seems to contradictthe very terms of the UN Convention, whose collective opprobriumand repugnance towards any system memberwho transgressesit should representa powerful disincentive to any would-be perpetrator. not only was Kuperright to argue that genocide Yet is generally allowable within the system, one might go on from this to argue that it is the system itself which provides the primaryand most powerful reasons for states to attempt it. Thus, I would argue that states commit genocide because they see it as being in their developmental interests to do so. Genocide is, of course, like war, a high-risk strategyand, as already noted, undertakenas a symptom of the state's frustrationand last-ditch desperation.Yet it is also based on the premise that, like successful war, it will make the state and nation stronger,more streamlined, more capable of surviving the vicissitudes of a harsh international political economy, even enabling it to compete more effectively within it. Genocide, in other words, provides a means to catch-up and make good what is perceived as lost ground between the state and its competitors in an international system which by its very nature and historical evolution is heavily weighted in favour of some states and not others. Indeed, it is the attempts of particularlydriven regimes to find some short-cut, accelerated movement, or alternative route to achieve these goals which explains why genocide, as a byproduct of these efforts, is such a peculiarly twentieth century phenomenon.18 The Bangladeshi agenda with regard to the CHT fully-but paradoxicallyillustrates these tendencies. Bangladesh operates on the notion that it is a nationally homogeneous and hence unitary state, a statement which would be true were it not for the relatively small number of adivasi ('tribal' peoples) which include the jumma of the CIIT in the east, as well as other groups such as the Garo and Santal peoples in the north. Yet while Bengali ethnic prejudice against the adivasi as a whole is an element in our genocidal equation, it is notable that the Garo and Santal, despite their acute degradationand marginaliThe sation, have not been targetedfor elimination.19 jummas' dubious distinction lies in the fact that they traditionallyinhabit and claim land rights in the CHT which amount to 10% of Bangladesh's territory and whose assets the state specifically wishes to realise and consolidate in the interests of its nation- and state-building.Or, as two senior army officers are alleged to have proclaimed at a public meeting in Panchariin 1979, 'We want the land and not the people of
the
CHT .20

It is Bangladesh's developmentalagenda, ratherthan the specific attributesor 343

MARK LEVENE

ideological leanings of particularmilitary or civil administrations,which have determinedthat the state's long-term objective with regard to the CHT includes 'getting rid' of the jumma. But different actors, especially during the period of military rule from 1975 to 1989, with varying formulationsof how most rapidly and effectively to achieve this goal, have shaped its increasingly genocidal tendencies. The contradictionsin the situation are as follows. First, the state officially considers all citizens of Bangladesh as full members of the Bengali nation. But it acknowledges that the adivasi are culturally distinct and so proposes to resolve the discrepancy by leading them rapidly into the mainstream." 'Getting rid' of the jumma, in other words, has always been intended to follow the least toxic, least genocidal but nevertheless compulsory path-assimilation. Second, at no time, even during the worst years of military atrocity in the CIIT between 1979 and 1986, has there been a sustained moment of genocide in the way that I and Harff and Gurr describe it. Does my argument about genocide or genocidal process, therefore, not collapse at this juncture?My answer is an unequivocal no. Although there has been no single 'moment' of genocide and though successive governments' behaviour with regard to the CHIT been complicated by intermittent,usually has clandestine (and more recently official) negotiationsfor a settlementwith the iss or Shanti Bahini, the overall situation has been one of more than 20 years sustained crisis in which the state has employed the gamut of genocidal strategies described by Lemkin. These include the militarisationof the whole region, swamping it with Bengali immigrants, placing the jummas in cluster villages under military surveillance and denying them access to the commons and forests to sustain their livelihood and life integrity, persistenthuman rights violations, including disappearances, repeated rape, vandalisation and desecration of religious (especially Buddhist) sites and shrines, destruction of villages and property, physical and mental abuse of individuals, repeated killings, especially though not exclusively of known jumma activists, leaders, professionals, monks and nuns, and finally some 13 major massacres extended over the period 1980 to 1993. These actions taken together would certainly constitute genocide within the meaning of the 1948 Convention. Nevertheless, given that my argumentproposes a distinction between 'genocide' and 'genocidal process' are there not grounds for categorising events in CIHTmore precisely? Kuper, Fein, Dadrian, Harff and Gurr have all treated genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples as a distinct category within their various typologies, Fein, for instance, calling this category 'developmental' genocide.22These scholars do not seek, hierarchically,to order the annihilation of indigenous peoples as less significantor less noteworthythan other genocides, and indeed in some instanceshave compiled detailed 'fourthworld' case studies. Yet do not these categorisationscarry with them certain assumptions, even a certain culturalbaggage about the natureof 'fourthworld' versus 'third' or even 'first world' interaction? Indigenous peoples in the Indian subcontinent and beyond have been the subject of received wisdoms largely emanating from 19th century anthropologists. These claim for the 'tribes'-itself a patronisingand problematicterm-an originality to their inhabitated region (quite false in the jumma case) plus 344

'CREEPING' GENOCIDE IN THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS

evolutionist notions which stereotype them as the remnant or residue of the oldest, most primitiveelements of humankind.If this depiction, on the one hand, would have them 'closer to nature' and even 'noble' in their savagery, on the other, it demotes them to the bottom of the civilisational heap, at best as exotic anachronisms,at worst as backward but marginal obstacles in the patlhof an ineluctable progress.23This essentially Western narrative is, however, closely In mirroredin a Bengali counterpart. this, the 'innocence' and 'naivety,' of the hill tribes is clearly indicatedby jhuming, the shifting cultivation using slash and forests. The alleged evolutionburn techniques traditionallypracticedin the CHIT ist gap between this 'inefficient' economic mode and the more 'advanced' plough cultivation of the plains in turn provides the rationale for a specifically
Bengali version of la mission civilisatrice in which the childlike and jangli

natives are offered the guiding, not to say uplifting, hand of their more sophisticatedneighboursas they are inducted into the benefits of civilisation and Implicit in both Western and Bengali narrativesis the assumption modernity.24 that tribalculturesare doomed in the face of modernityand that survival for their of membersis dependenton the rapid abandonment their traditionalways of life. Indeed, translatedinto a debate on genocide, some scholars have gone further, by claiming that the destructionof native societies is inevitable. Tony Barta, for instance, attemptingto apply Marxist analysis to conflict in the Australianoutback, has argued that the impact of white capitalist settlers on aboriginesprecludescoexistence between the two, leading only hunter-gathering to 'relations of destruction'.His assertion that 'incompatible forms of economy and society' are at the root of the problem shifts responsibility for aboriginal exterminationfrom the state to the dominant society, as does Harff and Gurr's contention that it is settlers who usually initiate exterminatoryaction, often 'out of private animosities'.25But if the state is relegated to the backgroundor if the killing happens without any one authorityconsciously or deliberately willing it, where is the genocide? The UN Convention is clear that intention must be involved and althoughit is silent on the role of the state, it is difficult to imagine a systematic onslaught on a populationwhich does not involve its resources and capabilities. If the destructionof native peoples is simply an inexorable, even deus ex machina by product of modernisation,we would be forced to concur with the view of Glaser and Possony that it is not genocide.26Theirs, in fact, is a minorityview. But the scholars who emphasise intent in their analyses provide little guidance as to how tribal annihilation is part of the main plot. Fein's and identificationof war, totalitarianism ethno-conflictas genocide's three major post-1945 causes is of only tangentialhelp with regardto the CHT, while my own assertion that genocide requires a dynamic of real or imagined interaction between state and communityis seemingly refuted in Harff and Gurr'scharacterisation of indigenous peoples as passive, inactive or ineffectively resistant in the face of destruction.27 One weakness with the 'inevitability' thesis is that it fails to take account of examples where, at least to date, the resource demands of the dominant society or state have not been overriding,as has been the case with the Garo and Santal in Bangladesh or where, as in neighbouring India, the state has found a pluralistic, albeit precarious, accomodation with its many scores of 345

MARK LEVENE

'scheduled tribes'. Another more telling failing with the thesis is its rather one-dimensional underestimationof the indigenous peoples themselves. The vibrancy, resilience and self-assertionof India's adivasi against 'developmental' encroachmenthas been a crucial factor in the state's recognition of their group rights.28In Bangladesh by contrast, it is the jummas' very refusal to cave in under similar pressures which provides one key to our genocide. Germanannihilation Mark Cocker, recently writing of the turn-of-the-century of the Hereroin South-WestAfrica (Namibia), has noted how 'paradoxicallythe critical factor driving them towards a genocidal policy was a concern that these tribal peoples had shown a potential well beyond their allotted station'.29This has been exactly the story with the jumma. Far from behaving according to a supposed 'passive' tribal type, they have not only absorbed and adapted the language and tools of modernityin orderto make good their perceived ancestral claim to the CIITbut, where this has clearly been a losing battle against greater odds, have tenaciously struggled, sometimes violently, to impede the state and dominant community's political, cultural and demographic penetration of it. Indeed, the struggle of the jumma is directly comparablewith that of the Mayan Indians of Guatemala, the Kurds in Iraq, the Tibetans, the peoples of East Timor and Irian Jaya (West Papua) as well as, looking back a century, that unsubdued Indian tribes in the USA. All these societies, of the remnaining whether we would describe them as 'third world' or 'fourth world,' have, historically or contemporaneouslya commonality in their evolving sense of collective peoplehood and identity forged in the crucible of another more dominantsociety's state and nation-buildingprogrammes.The demands of each for national recognition or even national self-determinationon the territory which they inhabit have thus not simply collided with the state's assumptionas to its primacy but with its very definition of what constitutes the 'nation'. In none of these instances, we may note, did the state set out to exterminatethese people simply on the groundsof their ethnic difference or 'otherness'. That they have increasinglydone so, in part bears witness to these communities' obdurate refusal to be coerced into the national mainstreamon terms determinedby the state, combined with their coherent political and political-military resistance to deny it hegemonic control over the land and resourceswhich they consider to be theirs. It is this state-community dynamic which has led, in each instance, here as a 'genocidal process', to througha series of state strategiescharacterised their culmination,at some stage, in the actuality of genocide. In the case of the jummas, the only distinction lies in the fact that this actuality is difficult to isolate to a single sequence of events. This is why I have called it a case of 'creeping genocide'. In all other respects, the critical preconditionsand characteristics of genocide are evident, regardless of the victim groups' 'tribal' background. Indeed, in terms of typology, jumma resistance, would certainly qualify the CHT to be placed within Fein's category of 'retributive'genocide, in addition to her 'developmental' category, while examination of the perpetrator'sagenda might equally entitle it for consideration within her 'ideological' category. Equally, Harff and Gurr'shegemonial genocide or repressive/hegemonialpoliticide categories would fit the CHT case-history. Ringfencing the exterminationor 346

'CREEPING' GENOCIDE IN THE CHITTAGONG IhILLTRACTS

attemptedexterminationof 'fourth world' groups may have a moral function in highlighting the prevalence of such extermination but at the same time may serve to undermine its often shared affinity with examples of genocide erroneously assumed to be more mainstream.Modern genocide is rooted in general patternsof development. But the reason why it occurs in some situationsand not in others is very much a byproductof a state's specific developmental agenda, often focusing on a geographicalarenawhere its desire for rapid implementation confronts the people, usually its notional 'citizens', who happen to live there. Understanding-not condoning-a genocidal outcome thus requires an examination of the motives of the perpetratorsas well as the cries of the victims.
CHT:

the view from Bangladesh

The successful secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 was seen by its political elites as a preludeto a process of rapidnation- and state-buildingwhich would enable the new country to take its rightful place in the international community.Its progresstowardsthis goal would be gauged by economic indices evaluating its growth and vitality and by the creation of an institutional and juridical frameworkconfirming its political stability. These, at least, would be the primarycriteria of the dominating Western powers and major fiscal institutions in the global political economy. Yet the country's ability to engage with, let alone compete in such a system, was from the start confounded by basic structural,environmentaland above all demographicweaknesses. The population of Bangladesh, the eighth largest in the world, ought to have been its chief asset. But, numbering 123 million today compared with c 40 million in the 1950s, and estimatedto double again from its present figure in the space of the next 40 years, possibly not stabilising until it reaches the 340 million mark, its growth represents not simply a drain on the economy but a portent of absolute disaster. Historically, the land of the immensely fertile riverine delta area which constitutes most of a country only the size of Nicaragua, provided for a large, agriculturally based population. But this traditionalresource base is now rapidly shrinking,the most dramaticsymptoms of which have been a series of floods and cyclones which, in 1988 for instance, displaced some 40% of the population.The two majorlong-term causes of these ecological and climatic changes, however, can be traced to the deforestationof the up-river Himalayan states, leading to severe land erosion in downstream Bangladesh,as well as to global warming,the effects of which, even with a mere one metre rise in sea level, could turn some 10% of its population into permanentenvironmentalrefugees.30Even the most optimistic projectionscould not hope to absorb more than a fraction of the many millions of peasantry alreadydisplaced via industrialor postindustrialenterprise.There has been some developmentof this kind, particularly recently, but unlike many other South east Asian states, no obvious economic take-off. One of the poorest nations in the world, with 80% of its population below the poverty line, the economic prospects of Bangladesh have been described as 'elusive', while its efforts to 'catch up' have resulted in a $16.135 billion external debt, costing $700 million to service in 1991.31 347

MARK LEVENE

None of this grim outlook necessarily on its own accounts for the country's chronic political instability,althoughit may do much to explain why the CHThas remained a subject of consistent fascination, not to say obsession, among its political elite. At 10% of the country's total land mass, yet with a physical geography in utter contrast to the alluvial monsoon-flooded plains, the deeply forested ravines and valleys of the CHT representthe nearest thing Bangladesh has to a wild west, a 'final frontier',even an El Dorado.The CliT supposedly has a 'huge potential for development'.32 A recent government-sponsoredreport claims that its 'forest and mineral resources' make it 'vital in a geo-political sense' while its 147 inhabitantsper squaremile, comparedwith 1567 per square mile in the rest of the country, demand that its future 'should be viewed from a total national perspective'.33 The implication of these comments is clear. While on a level of social engineering the CIJT iS proposed as an at least part solution to Bangladesh's overpopulation,via a mass relocation of plains people to the hills, on another more obviously economic one, its supposed untappedwealth, particularlyin the form of oil and gas, is representedas an opportunity(and possibly a final one) What is of reversing the country's fortunes in favour of a major breakthrough. missing from this pictureis the indigenous population.This seems strangein the light of a (then Pakistani) government-commissionedstudy which in 1967 confirmed that the CIIT was in practice 'as constrained as the most thickly populated district' in Bengal.34 Yet if the received wisdom states that the supposed emptiness of the CIIT iS 'a myth', the perceived wisdom holds firmly to the notion that it is a territorium nullius, ie unoccupied land crying out for industriousBengalis to inhabit and develop it. The discrepancyis itself instructive, underscoring a state leadership preference to believe what it wants to believe because the alternative,namely coming to some power-sharingaccomodation with the jumma, would mean relinquishingits much cherished dreams of national fulfillment. This is not, however, a simple case of collective wish-fulfillmentpersisting in unreason. It is grounded in an acute sense of historical injustice done to Bengalis, contrasting with a single moment of good fortune which all good Bangladeshi nationalists would claim as their birthrightand inheritance. This was in 1947 at the time of Partition and involved a decision by the British commissioner, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, to award the CIIT to Muslim Pakistanrather The CHT, than to India in his settlement of boundariesbetween the two states.35 in other words, was a windfall from colonialism. This is interestingfor no other reason than the fact that Bangladeshi nationalists blame colonialism, either British or Pakistani, for most of the problems that have afflicted their country since independence, especially in the CHT. Yet it was these same colonialisms which providedthe conception, direction and parametersfor the developmentof the region which subsequentlyshaped the Bangladeshiperiod of administration. By ignoring the inconvenientfact that Bangladeshis a willing successor to these colonialisms, beginning when the CHT was broughtfor the first time, throughits annexation to British India, firmly within the Bengali political sphere of influence, this Bangladeshi version would seek to claim that it was these same colonialisms which stymied the development of the region in its legitimate 348

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Bengali interest. In this version, however, the jumma are less 'invisible' and more the pawns of colonial or other outside powers intent on malevolent disruptionof this correct trajectory. Accordingly, phase one of the Bangladeshiversion-the period of British rule from 1860 to 1947-emphasises the way the imperial power sought to isolate and exclude the CHT from the rest of Bengal. From the beginning, the British did in fact operate a special administrativestatus for the region, codified and made legally binding in its 1900 'Regulations', affirmedagain in its 1920 declaration of the region as a 'backwardTract' and confirmedagain in its 1935 classification of it as 'a totally excluded area'.36 This, nationalists argue, was mistaken and dangerouson two counts. First, it unbalancedthe traditionaleconomic and social development interplaybetween hill and plains, impeding Bengali entrepreneurial of the region and fossilising outmoded economic practices based on jhuming, which therebypreventedwhat should have been the naturalabsorptionof the hill tribes into the more 'advanced' society and polity of the plains. Second, the British gave to the 'tribes', especially the chiefs whose power they had advanced in order to administer the Regulations and collect taxes on their behalf, the erroneousnotion that they had provided for a special autonomous-statusfor the region, as present day jummas continue to contend. This was doubly misplaced because not only were the Regulations entirely self-interested-in typical imperial fashion they were designed to divide and rule, keep other parties out, while preservingthe region's forest assets for the British-but also it was these very same Regulations which struck at the heart of the tribes' self-sufficiency. As this was dependent on traditionalusufructrights to the forests which, under the terms of the Regulations,had been largely sequesteredas crown property,the tribes found that the practice of jhum was no longer sustainable,precipitatinga destabilisationof the region which has continued to the present day.37 If one strand of this argument is to point out that it is the British not the Bengalis who should be blamed for the decline of the hill tribes, another is to lament the willingness of their leadership, nonetheless, to be the imperial power's dupes. And, as if this was not bad enough, they kept on repeating the mistake in the post colonial experience by aligning themselves with those most inimical to the future Bangladeshi nation. It happened in 1947 itself when tribesmen attemptedto resist CHT incorporationin Pakistan by running up the Indian flag in the main towns, thereby embedding in Bengali consciousness the conviction that the jumma as a whole were a pro-Indianfifth column, while in 1971, when Bangladesh was struggling for its very existence, a number of Chakma and Marma chiefs advertised their hostility by allowing themselves to This be recruitedas rakajars-irregulars-on the side of the Pakistanimilitary.38 apparentalignment with Pakistan was not only unforgivable in the light of the genocidal massacres then being perpetratedagainst Bengalis but because the whole period from 1947 to 1971 was conceived of by Bengalis as phase two of a rampant-this time internal-colonialism in which Bengal and its CHT hinterland were utterly subordinatedto the political and economic will of Islamabad. Indeed, in this view, Islamabad'spolicy with regardto the CHT demonstratedthe regime's single-minded marginalisation of the Bengali interest at its most
egregious.

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Although Pakistan's military dictator,Ayub Khan, retained the special status of the CuITuntil 1962, its designation by him in the late 1950s as a concession area which would be opened up to international finance, pointedly excluded the involvement of Bengali administrativeand financial elites. At the core of the regime's developmentalagenda was a plan to throw a dam across the Karnaphuli river, at the region's heart, in order to create a huge hydroelectricproject. The completion of the Kaptai dam in 1963 was thus intended as the infrastructural baseline for a rapid industrialtake-off.39However, not only was this seen by Bengalis as being for the benefit of the Pakistani regime rather than for the nationaldevelopmentof its easternpart,the economic and environmentalimpact Forestal reportlater acknowlon the region itself, as the government-sponsored edged, was both massive and devastating.Forty percent (or 54 000 acres) of its prime agriculturalland was submerged,displacing 100 000 indigenous, mostly Chakmapeople. Not only were they not consulted about the dam they were not compensated either financially or with other land. In fact, there was no other obvious land to offer to these sedentary rice-growing farmers; only a vastly oversubscribedresidual forest area where jhuming was proving unsustainable. The Bangladeshiverdict on Pakistanirule in the CuITiS thus to blame it for errors and mismanagement which turned almost one-sixth of the population into environmentalrefugees, militarising it and opening up the sale of its land to 'outsiders'.4A However, righting these wrongs would not be broughtabout by an end to development per se but rather by the region's full integration into an independentBangladesh. Only this could save its indigenous tribes from complete destitution. Bangladeshiself-justificationwith regardto the treatmentof the jumma would thus begin with the vociferous denial that they intended any harm to their physical well-being or culturalexistence. On the contrary,the independentstate of Sheik Mujibur Rachman and his successors might be composed mostly of Muslims, might celebrate its near-linguistic and cultural homogeneity, but its constitution guaranteed equality before the law, economic and educational opportunity, as well as the free practice of the religion of one's choice, regardless of ethnic background.4' The implicit message to the peoples of the CIIT was that there would be no distinction between them and the Bengali majority and nothing to prevent their full access to the social and political life of the country. What wrecked this profferedembrace was the recalcitranceand hostility of the tribal chiefs themselves. It was they who demandeda renegotiawithin Bangladesh as an 'autonomoustribal zone', tion of the status of the CIUT of they who wanted a returnto the anachronism the British-imposedRegulations, they who took up arms against the state in 'a conspiracy against Bangladeshi sovereignty'.42If the nascent state's militaryrespondedwith search and destroy missions in the CHT, this was because the tribal leaders had broughtthem upon themselves. If these operationsturnedinto a long-term counter-insurgency, this was because the Shanti Bahini, from its formation in 1973, not only violently challenged the integrity and cohesion of the state but did so with the covert assistance of a foreign power, India, which, after its initial patronage of Bangladesh, had turnedinto its main enemy. The Shanti Bahini's guerrillawar, its repeated violent attacks on army outposts and later on Bengali settlers, 350

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conclusively proved that it was not the Bangladeshi state but the Shanti Bahini which was culpable of provocation. In the circumstances, Bangladesh was entitled to respondas would any sovereign state: in legitimate self-defence of the body-politic.

Weaknesses in the Bangladeshi version The Bangladeshi version of the CHT problem cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, not least because there are elements of the overall picturehere. In addition, it offers an importantinsight into the workings, including the anxieties, of the Bangladeshi state mind. The flaw lies in its assumption that the obstructive behaviour of many jummas is primarilya matterof political manipulationby a mischievous leadershipand not a legitimate response to impossible developmental pressures which, moreover, represent not a repudiation of the British and Pakistaniprogrammesin the CHT but rathertheir intensificationby Bangladesh. The wanton destruction of the subcontinent's forests by the British forced them to reconsidertheir policy in the late 19th century in an attemptto preserve this depleted resource. Their creation of 'reserved forest,' as in the CHT, was aimed at maintaininga market economy of profit and not a moral economy of survival. From the first, therefore,the British were not interestedin its people or their jhuming culture which, interfering with their monopoly, they vigorously attempted to destroy or shift in the direction of settled agriculture.43The Pakistaniregime followed this same trajectorybut with the added remit to their Canadianconsultants, Forestal Inc., to create 'a master plan for the integrated development of the area' based on 'optimum land-use possibilities'. Interestingly, Forestal's reportnoted that under optimumconditionsjhuming was highly sustainable.44 However, its recommendationproposed that it should be phased out in favour of industrial development in the vicinity of the dam, and fruit production elsewhere, as the best way of maximising the region's resource potential. Since 1971 there have been various modifications to this agenda, including plans for afforestation, rubber plantations and fruit farming, interspersed with more recent talk of 'ecological biodiversity', as Bangladesh has increasingly sought to promote itself to Western financial institutions.45 However, its basic thrust has not changed. It assumes the terminationof a sustainable, localised economy, based on a long-term human adaption to the forest environment, in favour of 'a fundamentalswitchover from both wet rice and shifting cultivation technology to a modem agro-industrial technology'.' In practice, this has meant not only the coercion of the tribalpeoples in orderto make them relinquishjhum but also the reconfiguringof the very lands they inhabitin favour of fruit gardens or rubberplantationsowned or controlled by the state or its nominees. 'Forced into a dependency on the marketeconomy', their only remaining role, so far as or one exists at all, is as sharecroppers day labourersin this system. This, avows the CHT Commission, is at the root of the 'structuralviolence' in the territory.47 One might wish to reply that this sort of social engineering is hardly peculiar to the CHT. Millions of rural people, especially in today's third world, have
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suffered exactly this sort of economic strangulation and consequent social degradationas their usually postcolonial governmentshave struggledto enter the global marketplacein the interestsof state-buildingand development.Almost by their very nature, these top-down, state-led programmes,whether capitalist or socialist, have demanded a politically neutralised,pliant and, where necessary, moveable labour force. The 'inevitability' argumentis also strong. The popular Bengali writer, Abdus Sattar, for instance, claimed in the 1970s that the CHT tribes were living an antediluvian and timeless existence, protected by their sylvan isolation from the realms of history and the ways of the world; the implication being that, even if broughtkicking and screaming into it, what was being done for them was, like with children,for their own good.48Even the most egregious facets of this process, such as the jummas' forcible eviction from their native homes and subsequent resettlement in military-supervisedjoutha kamars-cluster villages-are neither unique to the CHT nor, in themselves, genocidal. However, to view these features in isolation from the broader contours of Bangladesh's state-buildingambitions would be mistaken. Indeed, the great paradox-and hence danger-of the pivotal role allotted to the CHT in its developmentalprogrammelies in the enormous gulf between the aspiration and the actual ability to implementit. Or put anotherway, the Bangladeshilurch towards genocide in the CuIT has been less the result of ineluctable forces of modernisation per se and more the result of an extremely weak state striving to realise what may well be unrealisable. From its inception through almost to the present day, the most visible symptoms of this weakness have been factional and extremely fractious party politics, a lack of democracy, lawlessness and endemic violence, governments which have repeatedly abused their office through corruption and nepotism, bloody coups and, above all, between 1975 and 1989, dictatorialmilitary rule, first under General Zia and then, after his assassination, under General Ershad. The speed with which a post-liberation,populist-based polity, which had no notable military tradition and whose armed forces represented only a tiny fraction of the population,went down this praetorianroute is itself noteworthy, as is the close similarity between these military regimes and those of Pakistan. However, the generals moved into the driving seat in the power structureof the nascent state and took on the mantle of custodian and shaper of its national destiny not only because a specific civil regime was weak but because of much deeper structuralproblems.49 Unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh lacked a strong bourgeoisie with which to develop major industrialor commercial enterprisesor to provide native capital for key infrastructural programmes.From the first, the state was requiredto be 'the leading sector for capital accumulation and development'.50This entailed foreign, primarilyWestern aid and investment which would only begin to flow once conditions of stability and prospects for repayment were ensured. Sheik Mujib's initial Awami League regime failed to provide these preconditions, while the radical politics and internecine strife of the other party machines offered no obvious grounds for confidence. However, the Bangladesh Defence Forces (BDF) were unusually placed to provide the necessary guarantees.Their organisationalcapabilities were already pivotal as the only body in the country 352

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capable of mountingpost-cyclone or flood relief operations.And, given the lack of credible alternatives, their supervision of a dirigiste-style state capitalist development seemed plausible. Their commitment to this course, enshrined in Zia's slogan 'develop or perish' was not in doubt.5" Nor, as it turned out, was their ability to tap external developmental funds. It is no accident that the attemptedrapid developmentof the CIIT, with its concomitantcreeping genocide came in the years of the generals. But it is erroneous to read into this outcome an out-of-control military putschism or a distinct but narrow 'hard regime' ideology. The generals' power rested on and indeed was closely intermeshedwith the dominantsocial forces in the state: the zamindar class of rich landowning families who monopolised patronage in the countryside and the large urban lower middle class who had provided the backbone of the national independencemovement. Because these social forces were themselves relatively weak, their reliance on the military regimes to enrich them throughpatronage,status and jobs was consequently all the more pronounced.52 if private gain acted as a partialgoad to develop the Yet region, perceived national imperatives shared by the civilian elites as much as the militarywere its primarycatalyst. Certainlythe generals were at the helm as the CIIT campaign took on an accelerated, forced-pace momentum and as the struggle withlthe Shanti Bahini intensified. But the generals also gave responsibility for the formulationof development strategy to a bureaucraticand technocratic elite, many of whom had held senior positions under the previous Pakistaniadministration and now dominatedpolicy and decision making in key institutions such as the National Economic Council and Planning Commission, as well as in advisory and governmentalroles in the president's secretariatand cabinet.53 It was thus a civil-military bureaucraticregime with a united sense of its leading role as guardianof the interests of the Bangladeshi nation-statethat in 1976 launched the CIHTDevelopmental Board (CIHTDB)with a declared aim of 'boosting the socio-economic uplift of the region' through its designation as a 'special economic zone'.54 This sounded not dissimilar to previous Pakistani plans. The difference was that this agenda was now an urgent priority with the aim of fully andfinally consolidatingthe peripheralregion and its resources into the life of Bangladesh. This was signalled in Zia's creation of a special presidential-ledCabinet Committee for the CHT which, as the highest decisionmaking body on matterspertainingto it, continues to function to the present day of civilian democratic administration,and is still advised by the army chiefs, including the GOCDivisional Commanderin Chittagong,who also acts as CHTDB chairman.55 This close military supervision of the CHT's development programmeunderscores the degree to which its post-1976 implementationwas being seriously opposed by the Shanti Bahini, who also gave the conflict an increasingly geopolitical dimension as it became apparentthat they were able to make raids into the CIHTand then escape to bases either in Burma or, more particularly, across the Feni river into the Indian state of Tripura. In response, what was broadcastby the governmentas legitimate efforts to seal these borders in order to isolate and defeat the insurgents,masked not only a military build-up in the 353

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CIIT-to an estimated 115 000 army personnel or almost one soldier for every

five or six tribals56-but a governmentcounter-insurgency campaignin which all jummas were potential targets. The role of Western aid The extent of the BDF build-up ought to have signalled that something was seriously awry with the BangladeshiCuiT agenda. By the late 1970s the relevant NGOS were reportingpersistent lhuman rights abuses and military atrocities. By this time, too, major internationalorganisationssuch as the World Bank were supposed to mnake careful assessment of the environmentalimpact of development programmeson sensitive regions before lending money, while abhorrence of undemocratic,authoritarian regimes should have left Zia or Ershadfirmly out in the cold. In fact, neitherfactor impeded lavish assistance from Westerndonor governments, banks and even humanitarian agencies. The first five-year CIITDB plan, for instance, was funded entirely by Western aid, even though, as the Jss claimed, 80% of it (and subsequent aid) was spent on infrastructural projects such as all-weather roads, bridges, electricity and telecommunications specifically beneficial to the BDF.57 The question has to be asked why. Without detailed information,answers are inevitably speculative but might include the following: (a) There were precedentspredatingthe existence of Bangladesh.Ayub Khan in particular had been very successful in cementing links to the USA, and had built the Kaptai Dam largely on the basis of a loan from the its Agency for International Development, (USAID). Another major contributor to CuIT developmentunderPakistanwas the JapanesedominatedAsian Development Bank (ADB).58 (b) Praetorianregimes were regularly considered in a positive light among Westerngovernmentsand agencies. Where their states were consideredto be weak and undeveloped but where the West had geostrategic or economic interests (ie more or less everywhere), a 'safe pair of hands' in the form of an an Ayub Khan, a Pinochet or a Suharto was considered infinitely preferable to a populist left-leaning or communist regime, whether or not the general in question had ridden roughshodover human rights or even committed genocide. If the perceived trade-off between democracy and stability always favoured the latter, a further Western rationalisation posited the supposedpopularbenefits of strongmanregimes with a reputationfor 'getting things done'. The Turkish supremo, Kemal Atatuirk, provided the role-model for this praetorianroute to Third World modernisation.59 Assessing Zia and Ershad in a similar light may well have coloured Western perceptions. (c) In the context of the late 1970s and early 1980s the resilience if not Reaganite resurgence of cold war mind-sets, especially following the American debacle in Indo-China,led to the almost automaticlabelling of rural guerrilla movements and their grassroots supporters, whether in Southeast Asia or Central America, as communists and, therefore, ipso 354

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facto forces of destabilisation and subversion. Elements of the Shanti

Bahini did enunciate communist and Maoist tendencies, while receiving significant grassrootsjumma support.This concretised ratherthan weakened Westernbacking for the Bangladeshipush in the CIT and meant that its use of Western-derivedcounter-insurgency doctrine, with its emphasis on 'draining the sea to starve the fish', would be covertly countenanced and even assisted by Western governments, regardless of the lack of discriminationbetween combatantsand civilians.60 (d) There were powerful economic incentives. Global-scale exploration, by translational corporations(TNCS) for minerals,oil and gas in the 1960s era of Western economic boom was acceleratedby the oil crisis of the early 1970s to embrace areas formerly consideredtoo inaccessible or remote to offer a substantialreturn on their extraction. In the case of the CHT not only were the military regimes, via Petrobangla, the state's own oil exploration and development agency, able to excite the interest of Shell and other companies in these ventures, they were also able to elicit some $23 million of World Bank money and an additional$9.2 million from the Saudis for exploratorypurposes. The oil prospects may also have been a spur to a number of donor government-assistedprogrammesin the CHT, notably road-buildingby the AustralianDevelopment Assistance Bureau (ADAB) and the significant afforestationundertakenby the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA). Most of these operations were curtailed when the Shanti Bahini began posing a threat to their Western personnelor, in the Swedish case, when domestic pressurestartedto affect the govemment's supportfor the Bangladeshiagenda.61 However, TNCS, as a general rule, have a record of silence when people are dispossessed, made destitute, sick, or even massacredby governmentsupon whom they depend to provide security for their operations.62 (e) Western anxieties about world overpopulationmeant that relevant donor bodies were willing to give a sympatheticear to Bangladeshi proposals to relocate vast numbers of Bengali peasants from the ecologically fragile delta region to the supposedly land-rich plenitude, safety and potential prosperityof the CHT. These proposals were supportedwith the stock-intrade but entirely spurious argument that the hills were lying idle and uncultivatedand, in the interestsof the 'productivityand development' of 'the national economy', urgently required'new additionalhands ... to be exported there'.63 This argument seems to have been accepted at facevalue by Western agencies in spite of the fact that it did not take into account whether plains farmers would be able to adapt to the entirely different conditions of the hills (even assuming they would be given enough land and initial seed with which to ensure long-term survival)64 or that the generals' reasons for wanting a large Bengali population there were primarilystrategic and not demographic.In the early 1970s Bengali settlers still only representedaround11% of the total CHTpopulation.With funding from the ADB, USAID, the World Health Organisationand Unicef, beginning in 1980 a major state-supervisedsettlement programmein the CHT introduced 100 000 settlers, succeeded by a further 100 000 the 355

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following year. By this time the incoming element of the population accounted for one-thirdof the total CHT population.Zia had been instrumental in these plans but Ershad,installed in power in 1981, intended to force the pace still further,projecting250 000 settlers for the year 1982.65 By then, however, the CIIT was in chaos. The view from the jummas Rumours were rife among the jummas in the late 1970s that President Zia intended to make them a minority in their own land. But the actual relocation agenda suggested starker prospects still. Under military supervision the most fertile valleys would be repopulatedwith Bengalis, as would the remote borders. Neutralised throughthis demographic force majeure, the hill tribes would have to submit to the will of the Bangladeshi nation-state and accept their own relocation into joutha khamarswhere their ultimatefate would be determinedby the BDF.66How should this agenda be interpreted? have noted that on paper We the aim was for jumma integrationinto the life of the nation-perhaps 'encapsulation' might be a more appropriatedescription-67 not extermination. But another way of approachingthis official version might be to hypothesise that what actually was being asked of them was to 'disappear',and that what was at stake by 1980 was the manner in which this would happen. One importantconsiderationis to note the apparentabsence of alternativeor lateral options. Back in 1947 the CliT tribal chiefs had petitioned the British against incorporationin Pakistan, proposing instead a confederationof Indianled tribal states linking the CIuT with neighbouringTripura,Assam and Cooch Behar. There were obvious ethnic and religious reasons for this request,not least because, in terms of the Muslim-Hindudivide which propelledthe drive towards Partition, the jumma as a mix of Hindu, Buddhists, animists and Christians clearly fell on one side of it and not the other. This did not necessarily point towards the inevitability of some Kulturkampf between Muslim Bengalis and tribal peoples. The historic relationshipbetween them has been described as one of 'uneasy symbiosis',68while good intercommunalrelations in the wake of a smaller wave of plainspeople settlement in the 1960s suggested that social coexistence was possible. Clearly this argument has its limits. The frequency with which, from the 1970s, Buddhisttemples, monasteriesand Christianchurcheswere desecratedby gangs of settlers as well as the army, to say nothing of a persistent genderspecific mistreatmentof the jumma in the form of rape, forced marriage and forced conversion, all suggest a racist contempt for the hill people which seems to have intensifiedwith the increasingpost-1975 Islamisationof Bangladesh.Yet there are also grounds for arguing that, ratherthan these attacks being random outpouringsof popularsettler hostility, they were actually part of a well-orchestrated BDF campaign to emasculate the jumma politically and socially as a preludeto their complete marginalisation, not physical annihilation.69 if What all informed commentatorsagree is that the cause of the Bangladeshi anti-jumma drive was not about ethnicityper se but only about that ethnicity in the context of control of jumma-held land.70Obversely, the jumma leadership sought an 356

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autonomous status and separate legislature for the CHT based on the 1900 Regulations, not simply to protect their right to be ethnically and culturally differentbut as the best guaranteefor preservingtheir land rights. So long as the region was within Pakistan, its distance from the power-centre to some extent cushioned the jumma from the full implications of this dichotomy. When, however, soon after the creationof Bangladesh, 12 tribal leaders sought to plead the autonomycase with Sheik Mujib,his notoriouslybrusqueresponse-'We are all Bengali ... we cannot have two systems of government... forget your ethnic identity, be Bengalis' 7- crystallisednot only the new reality but the true nature of the impasse. Few dominant elites in modern states are prepared to negotiate pluralist power-sharingor special status for subordinateentities, let alone with regard to the demands of usually relatively small groups of native peoples. Nor could the jumma have derived consolation from the knowledge that new polities in their drive towards social cohesion and development have nearly always treated tribalism, segmental loyalties and intermediatearrangementsas at best suspect and at worst directly inimical to national integrity and unity.72Manobendra Narayan Larma's formation of the Jss as a political party to campaign exclusively for the interestsof CHTindigenouspeoples came in the wake both of Sheik Mujib's refusal to consider autonomyand of a series of sweeping and indiscriminate reprisal raids against the CHITfor alleged complicity with the Pakistanis. That the iss in turn spawned a military wing, the Shanti Bahini, under the leadership of Manobendra'sbrother,Shantu Larma, only underscores the jummas' conviction that the Bangladeshi state had ruled out either compromise or coexistence. However, the emergence of these overtly radical organisations cannot be viewed in isolation. A groundswell of political activism in the CHiThad been developing since the 1950s. Paradoxically,the Pakistani and Bangladeshi states had fuelled these tendencies through the creation of schools and technical colleges and in the extension of adult suffrage to the whole population. In this sense, it could be argued that their assimilative promises were as good as their word. On the other hand, the conscious exclusion of jumma graduatesfrom state office or employment, or the simple lack of openings, helped swell the ranks of the CHT Students Association, the Women's Federation, and the Rangamati CommunistParty.Given the pressuresthe jumma were then under, as well as the broaderpolitical climate of the 1960s and 1970s, it is hardly surprisingif these movements took on an increasingly combative Marxist-Leninist or Maoist orientation.73 But even if these overtly political mobilisationswere largely limited to student or professional circles, they were indicative of a social and cultural shift in the CHT. Traditionally,it was the tribal chiefs, whose power had been advanced and cemented under British rule, who provided the interface between the state and tribal peoples. It was they who had first contested the Radcliffe Award in 1947 and had attemptedto set up the first CHT Peoples Association to fight incorporation into Pakistan. Yet while these ideas continued to command broad jumma supportinto the Bangladeshi era, the manifest failure of the chiefs to plead their case to either Sheik Mujib or his successors was compoundedby the loss of their 357

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district commissioner for the region actual power in favour of a state-appointed with virtually unlimited powers. Many of the chiefs, moreover, were bought off with largesse channelled through the CIITDB.74With the traditionalleadership thus discredited,the growing ranks of the iss sought new strategies with which to combat the social and enviromentalonslaughtthreateningto overwhelm tribal society. The collapse of jhum and with it the first reportedcases of starvation; the inroadsof the BDF and, in the wake of their newly macadamedroads opening up the remote interior,Bengali logging merchants,settlers and foreign company personnel;the flight of thousandsof refugees into Tripura;and, finally and most dangerously, the forced relocations into joutha khamars, all seemed to demand a more urgent and comprehensivecounter-response. On one level this was supplied by the Shanti Bahini, its active operations, from the mid-1970s, succeeding in containing the BDF to their encampmentsor to the main towns, while also creating its own administrative, judicial and fiscal framework in 'liberated' areas of the CIIT, backed by village militias and financialexactions made from tribespeopleand settlers alike. Yet the insurgency was never sufficiently strong, numericallyor logistically, to take on the BDF in classic military terms, while its very existence arguably representeda provocation which made a genocidal backlash against the populationit was claiming to defend all the more probableand imminent.If the verdict on the efficacy of the Shanti Bahini is thus mixed, that on its parentorganisation,the Jss, is much stronger. In the early 1970s, Manobendra Larma could publicly voice in parliament:'I am a Chakma. A Marma can never be a Chakma. Chakma can never be a Muron and Chakmacan never be a Bengali.'7s Yet within less than a decade a history of disparate,fragmentedand often warringtribalor sub-tribal loyalties had been reshaped through the idea of being a jumma (i e someone whose CIIT roots lay in the practice of jhum) into one not only of shared victimhood but of common historicalidentity. For the native peoples of the CIUT this 'imagined community' represented not only a repudiation of the state's equally 'imagined' notion of a homogeneous Bengali or Bangladeshipeople but offered an alternativeunitary formula in its stead.76Or to take the argumenta stage further,the very idea of jumma nationhoodcombined with the ability to struggle for it, not only threatenedto wreck the developmentalagenda of a new but already highly unstable Bangladeshi state but even its theoreticalunderpinnings.

The dynamnics genocide of It might, therefore, be argued that it was the collision between an already existent, post-secessionist nation-state, trying to overcome the limitations implicit in its febrile existence, and a still emerging stateless nation, attemptingto transcend its limitations by either renegotiatingits relationship to that nationstate or seceding from it altogether,that finally led to an explosion of genocide. For the Bangladeshi regime not only was the challenge to its monopoly of violence posed by the Shanti Bahini totally unacceptablebut even more so their ability to hold to ransom the settlementprogrammeitself. The long-term future of their one and only allegedly resource-richfrontier was being put in serious
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doubt. But the flight in the early 1980s of key companies and donor agencies from the CIIT, following attacks on ADAB road builders and other Westem contractors,may well have been the last straw. Turning the tide in order to get their agenda-and with it, paradoxically, the support of the West-back on course seemed to demand desperate remedies. Evidence that the BDF was meeting Shanti Bahini raids with mass reprisal attacks on villages and with the detention, tortureand often Central Americanstyle 'disappearance'of thousandsof targetedjumma teachers, studentsand civil servants had been mounting since 1977.7 But the military regime arguably crossed the Rubicon from 'genocidal process' into active genocide on 25 March 1980, at the village of Kaokhali Bazar, west of Rangamati.Here a junior army officer using the pretext of a Shanti Bahini ambush of an army unit some weeks earlier, orderedtribal elders form the area to meet to discuss mattersof law and order, and then proceeded, without warning or provocation,to have his soldiers gun down everybody in the village. The massacrewas extended to 24 neighbouring villages, resulting in between 200 and 300 deaths, all of unarmed men, women and children. Mass rape and mutilation, including of nuns and monks, accompanied this sequence, as did the ritual desecration and/or destruction of Buddhist and Hindu temples. The participation of local police and Bengali settlers in these atrocities suggested its close pre-planning.78 While events at Kaokhaliexcited both Bangladeshi and foreign attention,they did not lead either to internationalcensure or to an end to the killings. On the contrary,the initial operation seems to have provided a model for much larger and more extensive massacres perpetratedwith regularityover the next decade and more. Between 10 and 22 December 1980, for instance, furtherarmy raids in the Harina Valley area left some 800 villagers dead. These massacres also coincided with the introductionthroughparliamentof a 'DisturbedAreas Bill', which gave army officers, down to NCO level, the authority to shoot without warning anybody engaged in 'unlawful activity'. The bill did not specifically mention the CIHT, although Mey argues it was primarily aimed at curbing the insurgencythere.79 Although it was never in fact passed, the martiallaw declared in the wake of the 1981 Ershad coup gave the BDF the carte blanche it was seeking. A new wave of atrocitiescommittedaroundMatiranga,in late June, and repeatedin the Feni valley, in September,again involved gangs of armed settlers alongside the BDF and this time panicked at least 17 000 jumma to flee to Tripura,bringing the total number of refugees in the border states to 40 000.80 Throughoutthis sequence the regime countered charges of genocide levelled against it by claiming that its military operations were of a counter-insurgency nature only and were concentrated on the northern, most heavily (Chakma) populated part of the CHiT because this was where the Shanti Bahini were strongest. The blame, thus, was on the insurgentsthroughtheir switch to direct attacks on Bengali settlers and Western contractorswhom the government was duty-boundto protect. Moreover, Ershad's regime sought in 1982 to refute any allegation of ill-intention towards the jumma by abandoning state-sponsored settlement and ruling that there would be no new land grants made to settlers. In the following year there was an offer of amnesty to the Shanti Bahini, which was taken up by several thousand of its more hardline faction, while in 1987 359

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Ershad went so far as to appoint a national committee to look into the conflict and its underlying causes. Its recommendationsincluded the protection of the 'ethnic, culturaland religious heritageof tribalpeople and the promotionof their in substantiveparticipation the runningof the local governmentand development
programme'.8'

If all this was aimed to supportthe Bangladeshicontentionthat stories of mass killing were part of a foreign-inspireddisinformationcampaign of which it was the victim, the mounting NGO dossiers painted a quite different picture. Shanti Bahini raids were certainly recognised as a significant ingredient herein but primarily as a pretext for operations which included the ethnic cleansing of whole districts to make way for Bengali settlers. In the summer of 1983, for instance, helicopter gunship bombing in the Panchariarea to flush out jumma villagers was supportedby para-militaryAnsars (auxiliaries). In army reprisals the following year, Ansars again figured prominently in scorched earth operations which left hill people either dead or starving. As on previous occasions, mass rape, especially of young girls, often accompanied by their mutilation and/or subsequent murder,was a persistent and prevalent atrocity. Its purpose, on as previously perpetrated Bengalis by the Pakistaniarmy in 1971, was clearly to defile and punish whole communities. But, in the double knowledge that could not be readmittedinto their own families or communities defiled womnen and therefore that mass rape would prevent births, and that rape survivors and those aroundthem would suffer long-term psychological trauma,these assaults Attempts to were clearly part of a state-sponsoredeliminatory programme.82 argue otherwise, as when in 1986 a governmentsubmission to an investigating Amnesty Intemationalteam claimed that massacres around Khagrachari,Panat chari and Matiranga,in so far as they had occunTed all, were the fault of rogue junior personnel in paramilitaryor volunteer units were, in Amnesty's view, entirely unconvincing. The sheer scope, scale and intensity of these operations, on the contrary,suggested thatgovernmentviolence against the populationof the CHIT had become endemic.8The aftermath of genocide? Some concluding remarks When all is said and done, the irony of the BDF anti-jummacampaign is that it failed abysmally. The insurgency was not crushed. The jumma did not 'disappear'. On the contrary the thousands languishing in Indian-controlledrefugee the camps in Tripurafurtherinternationalised issue, while also providing India with a powerful stick with which to beat Bangladesh in favour of its own geostrategicinterests.Nor did the Bangladeshigovernmentcome anywherenear to completing its agenda inside the CHT. If the majorityof the remaining,usually
starving, jummas were now in joutha khumars, where they were now dependent on military-supplied food aid, 300 000 Bengali settlers found themselves incarcerated in 78 similar 'cluster villages', this being the only way the BDF was able

to protect them.84 Did this spell an end to the creeping genocide? The evidence as before is
contradictory. On the one hand, reforms initiated from 1989 onwards suggested

that the eliminationist strategy of previous years had been abandoned.Ershad's

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into three districts, Rangamati,Khagrachariand Bandarban, division of the CHIT each of which was to be run by councils whose powers supposedly amountedto 'considerable autonomy', sounded promising.85Moreover, the subsequent collapse of his regime and its replacementby the first civilian government in 15 years under Begun Khaleda Zia also seemed to offer genuine prospects for a legal jumma participationin an emerging democracy. This changing political climate may have helped persuade the Shanti Bahini to declare a unilateral ceasefire in August 1992, though a more likely cause was the intense internationalpressureupon the new governmentto engage in talks with the Jss. After the free elections in June 1996, in wllich Sheik Hasina Wajed (the daughterof Sheik Mujib) was returnedas prime minister, these talks resulted in a peace deal now in the early stages of implementation.86 Yet, if this implicit recognition that the jumma have a case and that there is a possibility that the future of the CHT might involve a partnershipwith them, suggests a major shift in government thinking, the Jss leadership has until recently remained adamantthat 'so-called reforms' were nothing more than a cosmetic sop for Western consumption. Thus, the District Councils have been imposed without consultation,and, far from offering a special autonomousstatus were actually designed to integratethe region more fully into Bangladesh in line with the 61 district councils created by the military regime for the rest of the country. Similarly, Ershad's 1989 annullmentof the 1900 Regulations left the jumma with less, not more protection,not least because the real authorityin the region remained the military.87With 85 000 troops in the region, regular firefightsc-despite the supposed ceasefire-with the Shanti Bahini, continued and maltreatment killing of jumma, including three massacres after the advent of 'civilan' rule, one of them, at Logang village, Khagrachari,in April 1992, the largest single massacre of all,88military, if not governmentintransigenceagainst compromise has remained the rule. In fact, the main superficial difference compared with previous years has been the BDF'S operation of its anti-jumma campaign behind proxy bodies. One of these is the ParbatyaGana Parishad,the Hill Tracts People's Council, a militant organisation for defending Bengali settlers, largely recruitedfrom membershipof the fundamentalistJamat-e-Islami party. Another is the so-called Tiger Force, a militia composed of Marma and Mru tribesmen,whose traditionalrivalries with the Chakmaand hence ChakmaNot that it has stopped the BDF intervendominated iss are clearly exploitable.89 on its own account. On the very day of the June 1996 elections, Kalpana ing Chakma, the young and popular organising secretary of the CHT Women's Federation,was abductedfrom her home in Baghaichariby military personnel. Although the new government promised an enquiry, Kalpana Chakma has not been seen since.90 Even if one might wish to excuse such 'incidents' as symptoms of a very democracy, struggling to get a grip on an fragile, still very BDF-dependent endemically lawless country,thatvery fragility must pose a majorquestion mark over the degree to which a genocidal trajectoryin the CHT can be avoided in the future. We have already noted that such a prognosis is dependent on factors which go well beyond the political vagaries or even economic imperatives of Bangladesh itself. The cataclysmic nature of the 1998 flooding underscoresthe 361

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degree to which acute, long-termenvironmentaland populationpressuresin the whole sub- Himalayandelta region are no respectorof internalor international borders.The technically illegal spillover from Bangladesh, in recent decades, of some millions of plainspeopleinto the hill countryof neighbouringIndianstates, notably Assam, and the death of many thousandsof these settlers at the hands of hill tribesmen,suggests that the interrelationship between these pressuresand national minorityconflict is lhardly limited to the CHT.91 Nor has the Bangladeshi government been slow to recognise their importance. 'It seems crazy that aid donors would want to endangerthe survival of millions of Bangladeshisjust for the sake of the hill tribes-who are 0.5% of our population,' said an official
spokesperson in 1994.92

While endorsing the immensity of its population problem, this analysis has disputed that this factor alone has determinedsuccessive regime's response to the CIuT either in the recent past or into the forseeable future. Certainly it is convenient for a governmentdependenton Westernaid to presentthe issue thus and offer itself as the best hope for a humanitarian solution. Yet in practice no Bangladeshi government has ever shown particular interest in assisting the poorest elements of society, 50% of whom are virtually landless. On the contrary, because of the state's continuing dependence on the zamindari, to whom the poor are heavily in debt, or in other ways beholden, its response to rural peasant mobilisation has always been unremittinglycoercive.93 Nevertheless, social relations in the Bengali countryside do feed into the goveriment's CHITpolicy in a critical way. The majority of plains settlers there come not from the very poorest strataof society but slightly up the social rung. These marginal farmers have also suffered unrelenting and usually crossgenerationaldebt to zamindari from which the offer of resettlementin the CIT has providedan apparentlyattractiveescape route. By Bangladeshistandardsnot only does this involve relatively generous government assistance, plus the promise of up to five acres of free land, but most importantly,it offers complete release from their debt burden. It could be argued that in this way the government is, after all, attemptingto solve something of its population crisis while providing a better future for those fortunate enough to be relocated. Unfortunately, the flaws in this position are manifold. The settlers have not adapted well to hill conditions, which do not favour a replication of lowland agriculture,while their position has become increasingly untenable as jumma resistancehas grown. In July 1988, for instance, 233 Bengalis were killed by the Shanti Bahini.94 Worst of all, the settlers have burnttheir bridges to their former homes in the plains by renouncingwhateversharecropping tenancyrights they or formerly possessed, this being the arrangementby which they received their necessary certificate of relocation to the CHT, stamped by their local Union parishad(district) chairmanwho, very often, was also their landowner.95 Thus, cynical as it may sound, resettlement in the CuiT has neither been beneficial to the migrants themselves nor to Bangladesh's overall population problem, which is so vast that even the transfer-were it possible-of several million Bengalis to the CI-IT would make no appreciabledifference. However, it has served two closely interelatedinterests; that of the dominant class and the state. For the roughly 10% of the population who already own 50% 362

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of it, the land transferredby departing migrants has helped consolidate their holdings (as well as their economic control over remainingpeasant farmers), as well as giving them a stake and vested interest in CHT exploitation. More importantly,for the state, settlers have provided the necessary malleable fodder with which to strategicallyswamp the natives and thereby secure control of their land and borders. The figures speak for themselves. In 1951 the ratio of new settlers to native inhabitantswas 1:90. By 1981 it was 28:72. In 1994, many years after sponsored settlement had officially ended, the Bengali population in the CHT numbered468 825 or 48% of the region's total of 967 420. Indeed, in two out of the three districts, Khagrachariand Bandarban,the more fecund settlers now outnumberjummas.96In response to Jss cries of foul play, the governmenthas respondedby claiming that Bangladeshiswere simply exercising their right to travel to other parts of their own country.97Implicit in this statement,however, is the furtherinsinuationthat the 'tribals' are either not part of that constituency or by their behaviourhave put themselves outside of it. On one level, as we have already suggested, there is a half-truthhere. The roots of genocide in the CHTdo rest in part in the refusal of the jumma-eitherto lie down and die quietly, or alternatively,to accept a place within the Bangladeshi scheme of things, for instance as colourful but otherwise harmless exotica, weaving carpets and dancing for the tourists, in some ethnographiczoo.98 Instead, their tenacious and bloody fight-backagainst state and settler encroachmentalike, and their articulationof their political right to self-determination,has challenged the very notion of a religiously and culturallyunified Bangladesh. Herein lies their
jummas' cardinal sin. By enunciating a separate and illegitimate nationhood

apart from the given, authorised version, they have outlawed themselves and thereby become 'enemies of the people', not unlike Turkish and Iraqi Kurds, Tibetans in China, the Maubere in Indonesian East Timor and the Karen in neighbouringBurma. All these peoples and many more have suffered genocide. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that any of them have done so simply because of the principle at stake. Why, after all, cannot modern polities who see themselves as part of an internationalcommunity,concede that they are made up of heterogeneousethnic or even national parts and that the logical solution is to decentralise and/or federalise in the interestsof inter-communal peace and stability?The answer lies not simply in abstractions but in assets. For Bangladesh to concede jumma demands for some form of self-determinationwould not simply entail abandoning future hopes of settlement, while putting previous settler programmesinto reverse, reinstating jumma land rights and evacuating the BDF in favour of a locally run and staffed police force. It would mean handing over partial if not complete control of the CHTDB, in other words, denying to the state itself the potential wealth to be realised from the region's as yet unextractedresources.99 And in this lies the essential conundrum.At what point can any modern state relinquish its nation and state-buildingagenda? Can we imagine a USA in the expansion in order to 1870s calling a halt to its final surge of transcontinental strike a deal giving genuine territorialautonomy to the Lakota and Cheyenne? The idea sounds palpably absurd. The USA, of course, was already by then a very powerful and unfettered state and the consolidation within it of these 363

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central territoriessimply made it more powerful and wealthy. Bangladesh is a weak state. But it also desperatelydesires to be strong. All the more so because its situation is getting worse. Predictions of economic growth, founded in the early 1990s on an emergent, largely self-propelled garment industry, have proved something of a false dawn. Agriculturalproductionhas dropped,foreign aid been cut back. Darkerclouds beckon still with the advent of global economic instability.If the Bangladeshieconomy is really 'coming to a crisis""?as one of its leading economists has predicted,the need for some miraclecure may be seen by its elites as all the more urgent and necessary. This is why the issue of the CHT and with it the genocidal threatto its native peoples is unlikely to go away. For all of its history Bangladesh has looked to the territoryas a panacea for its economic ills. Much more powerful countries have similarly looked to their supposedly virgin frontiers,or territoriesbeyond, as the route by which to transcendmundanelimitations on the accomplishment of great national projects. The idea that the CHT could be key to Bangladesh's 'great leap forward'101 thus continues to hold elite imagination. With the big Western oil companies again queueing up to get back in to the CUT,102and with renewed prospects for Western aid and investment,the onus on the state and its military arm finally to complete the Bangladeshisationof the territory as its short-cut to economic take-off is great. Yet achieving this desired goal is now also complicated by a different set of Western desiderata.Although Bangladesh continues to be a majorrecipient of Western aid, Western bankersand sponsors have been scrutinising its democratic and more specifically human rights credentials more thoroughly, not least because of its past CUiT record. New criteria include the return of the 54000 jumma refugees from Tripura and a peace agreementwith the iSs. But there is clearly something schizophrenichere. On the one hand, TNCS want the CIJT pacified and insurgent-free,on the other, Western institutionsunder pressurefrom NGOS, want Bangladesh to stop killing the people for whom the insurgents have been fighting. This article has argued that a formulationof genocide as that which is done by active perpetrators against passive victims, while it may sound commonsensical, is often too simplistic. Clearly the jumma have been victims but this does not mean that they have behaved as one-dimensional, plaster-cast saints. Nor should we expect them to have done so, considering the pressures they have been under. In response to the Bangladeshi onslaught on their homeland, their militant wing, the Shanti Bahini, not unlike elements of the American plains Indians in an earlier time, have killed hundreds of settlers and soldiers, undoubtedlyused coercion against some of their own people, on occasion fought bitterly among themselves, and done their utmost to maximise the stories of BDF-committed atrocity in order to draw intemational attention to their cause. But the state of Bangladeshhas also gone out of its way to demonise the jumma as criminal agents of an Indian conspiracy and to scapegoat them for an instability which is actually the fault of its own development programme. Projection is a classic ingredient of genocide. But so is state frustrationat its own inability to achieve its goals by other means. What happened in the 1980s when the BDF tried repeatedly to mass murderits way towards the conquest of the CIIiT was both a declarationof its right as a sovereign state to operate with 364

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impunity within its own territorialboundariesand at the same time a broadcast to the world that it was unable to make the necessary breakthroughby this radical method. If this study in failure could be considered the best deterrent against a further attempt, it is also, obversely, a likely advert for a repeat performance.Genocide feeds off failure. In Bangladesh's case it also paradoxically feeds off its own history of secession from Pakistan, a precedent it is unlikely to allow the jummas to repeat in the CHT. Victims, after all, can become perpetrators. Secession, however, is not what the jummas are seeking so much as a redefinitionof the Bangladeshi state. And in this lies a challenge not just to it but to some basic assumptions associated with contemporarythird world-and first world-development. To seek autonomy as the jumma are doing carries with it not just a plea for cultural and religious diversity but ideas for practical implementation which might involve decentralising power from the centre, sharing resources between different groups and perhaps even considering the political economy of human scale. That would be asking a great deal of Bangladesh and not just with regardto the CHT. Indeed, implicit in the notion is the one thing that might genuinely transformthe lives of millions of Bengali peasants; basic radical land redistribution.At stake in this course would not simply be the vested interestsof Bangladesh's dominantlandowning classes but the whole thrust-and indeed rationale-of its post-independencemodernising and -regulated agenda, geared towards competing within the Western-dominated global political economy. To abandonthat agenda is as remote for Bangladesh as it for the West to reconsider the terms of its hegemony. Thus, while on the one hand Bangladesh needs the internationalcommunity to assist it in paths of conflict resolution and the jumma need it as guarantorfor their sheer survival, on the other, it is the internationalsystem which has provided the motor which has driven the Bangladeshi car towards its genocidal CHT precipice. Perhaps democratic government, with its eyes on international aid signposts, may miraculouslymake good its CHT peace deal and steer the whole country towards a safer route. Alternatively, as the road becomes ever more bumpy and perilous-implicitly suggesting poor signposting-the likelihood of the car's steering-wheel being wrenched from its current occupant by its military codriver, possibly with backseat encouragementfrom a Jamat-e-Islamipassenger, may lead in turn to one last-ditch effort to realise the unrealisable.103

Notes
This article was originally given as a paper at the second conference of the Association of Genocide Scholars at Concordia University, Montreal in June 1997, with research funding from the University of Warwick Research and Innovationscommittee. I gratefullyacknowledge the advice of David Hardiman,lhelen Fein and Roger W Smith, who read draftsof the article;Ruth Durant,IftikharAhmed, MananGanguli, ZiauddinAhmed Sophie Grigg, who provided importantbackgroundmaterial;and my research and from Survival International, assistant, Jenny Ivory whose Amazonia and Australasiainvestigations provided valuable reference points for this study. 1 For general backgroundinformationon the CtiT and the jumma, see Anti-Slavery Society, The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Militarisation, Oppression and the Hill Tribes, London: Anti-Slavery Society, 1984; CHiT Commission, Life is not Ours'; Land And Human Rights in the CHT Bangladesh, Copenhagen and

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MARK LEVENE Amsterdam: Chittagong lill Tracts Commission, 1991; and Father R W Timm, The Adivasis of Bangladesh, London: Minority Rights Group, 1991. 2 Willem van Schendel, 'The invention of the "jummas":state formation and ethnicity in southeastern Bangladesh', unpublishedmanuscript,Departmentof Hiistory,RotterdamUniversity, 1990. 3 'Genocide in Bangladesh', SurvivalInternationalReview, 43, 1984 pp 7-35; Timm, Adivasis, p 28; The Anti-Slavery Society, ChittagongHill Tracts, p 69; Amnesty International, Bangladesh: UnlawfulKillings and Torture in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, London: Amnesty International, 1986; Wolfgang Mey, 'Genocide in Bangladesh:the CuITcase,' paperpresentedat the 7th EuropeanConferenceon ModernSouth Asian Studies, 7-1 1 July 1981; and Gowher Rizvi, 'Bangladesh:Insurgencyin the CfiT,' The Round Table, 305, 1988, pp 39-44. 4 CIIT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 57. 5 Bangladeshisubmissionto the IJN WorkingGroupon IndigenousPeoples, August 1985. Cited in Amnesty, Bangladesh, p 11. 6 Anti-Slavery Society, ChittagongHill Tracts,pp 7, 67; and Life in the ChittagongHill Tracts, Probe News Agency, Dhaka, 1994, pl, which accuses the iss of wanting to falsely inflate the numberof jumma deaths for NGO or broaderinternational & consumption.The claim is also made in Abdul M IHafiz Nahid Islam, 'Environmental degradation and intra/interstateconflicts in Bangladesh', Environment and Conflicts Project, (ENCOP), Occasional PaperNo 6, Zurich, May 1993, p 74. and in an unspecifiedgovernmentreport forwarded by the Bangladeshi High Commissioner in London to the author, 14 August 1995. See BTI -21.6 Refugees Studies DocumentationCentre, Oxford, for the Jss reports themselves. 7 BarbaraHiarff Ted Robert Gurr, 'Victims of the state: genocides, politicides and group repression from & 1945 to 1995; in Albert J Jongman (ed), ContemporaryGenocides: Causes, Cases, Consequences. The Hague: PIOOM, 1996, p 55; liarff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theories of genocides and politicides: identification and measurementof cases since 1945', International Studies Quarterly, 32(3), 1988, pp 359-371; and HlelenFein, 'Accounting for genocide after 1945: theories and some findings', International Journal on Group Rights, 1, 1993, pp 79-106. 8 See, for example, ZiauddinAhmed, 'The case of Bangladesh:bringingto trial the perpetrators the 1971 of genocide,' in Jongman, ContemporaryGenocides, pp 95-115. 9 Timm, Adivasis, p 71. More generally, see Rehman Sobhan, The Crisis of External Dependence, The Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh, Dhaka and London, Zed Press, 1982. 10 For majorinterpretations Leo Kuper,Genocide: Its Political Use in the TwentiethCentury,New lIaven. see CT: Yale University Press, 1981; Isidor Wallimann& Michael Dobkowski (eds), Genocide and the Modern Age, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987; Israel W Charny (ed), Genocide; A Critical Bibliographical Review, London: Mansell, 1988; FrankChalk & Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, New Ilaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990; Helen Fein 'Genocide; a sociological perspective', Current Sociology, 38(1), 1990, pp 1-126; and George D Andrepoulos(ed), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, Philadelphia,PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. i See, for instance, Norman Cohn's classic study Warrantfor Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, London: Penguin, 1967. See also Roger W Smith, 'Fantasy, purity, destruction:Norman Cohn's complex witness to the Hlolocaust',in Alan L Berger (ed), Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939-1989, ILewiston, Queenston and Lampeter:Edward Mellen Press, 1990, pp 116-123. 12 MarkLevene, 'Is the lIolocaust simply anotherexample of genocide?', Patterns of Prejudice, 28 (2), 1994, p 10, emphasis added. liarff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theory,' p 359. IA 14 Raphael Lcmkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Washington,DC: Carnegie Endowmentfor International Peace, 1944, p 79 (emphasis added). 15 Vahakn N Dadrian,'The structural-functional componentsof genocide', in Israel Drapkin& Emilio Viano (eds), Victimology:A New Focus, Vol IV, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975, p 123. 16 For the text of the UN Convention see Chalk & Jonassohn, History and Sociology, pp 44-49. 17 Kuper, Genocide, p 161. 18 See MarkLevene, 'Connectingthreads:Rwanda,the Holocaust and the patternof 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 renditionof this argument. 19 Julian Burger,Reportfrom the Frontier: The State of the World's IndigenousPeoples, London:Zed Press, 1987, p 129; and Timm, Adivasis, pp 10-11. 20 Cited in CuiT Commission, Life is not ours, p 41. 21 Anti-SlaverySociety, ChittagongHill Tracts, pp 85-88, appendix6; and CHITCommission,Life is not Ours, 1994 update, p 31. 22 Helen Fein, 'Scenarios of genocide: models of genocide and critical responses', in Israel W Charny (ed), Toward the Understandingand Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the InternationalConference on

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'CREEPING' GENOCIDE IN THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS the Holocaust and Genocide, Boulder: Westview Press, 1984, pp 4-5. See also Vahakn N Dadrian, 'A typology of genocide', InternationalReview of Modern Sociology, 5(2), 1975, pp 201-212. The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India. Oxford: Oxford 23 See David Hiardiman, University Press, 1995, ch 1; Ajay Skaria, 'Shades of wildness: tribe, caste and gender in western India', Journal of Asian Studies, 56(3), 1997, pp 726-745; and John H Bodley, Victims of Progress, Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1982, for furtherdiscussion of these themes. 24 Schendel, 'Invention', pp 9-10; and CHITCommission, Life is not Ours, pp 88-89. 25 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. 26 Kurt Glaser & Stefan T Possony, Victims of Politics: The State of Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, ch 27. 27 liarff & Gurr, 'Towards empirical theory,' p 363. 28 Hardiman,The Coming of the Devi, esp pp 10-15, 216-217. 29 Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal Peoples, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998, p 348. 30 Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmentaldegradation', 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 Vidal, 'Floods that have broughtmisery and mayhem to millions the world over', Guardian, 19 September 1998. 31 Vidal, 'Floods'; and Timm, Adivasis, p 8. 32 M Mufazzalul Huq, 'Changing nature of dominant social forces and interventionsin the CHT', Journal of Social Studies (Dhaka) 56, April 1992, p 71. 33 Life in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 12, 49. 34 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 26. 35 See Manan Ganguli, 'The Chittagong Hill Tracts: before and after Bangladesh', Fourth World News (Cambridge),December 1995, pp 5-8. 36 Mey, 'Genocide,' p 5. 37 See Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 72-75; Schendel, 'Invention,' pp 17-21; and Burger, Report from the Frontier, p 130, for critical confirmationof these contentions. 38 Hluq,'Changing nature', pp 80, 90. 39 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 32-33; Bodley, Victims, p 8. 40 Mrinal Kanti Chakma, 'Counter-insurgency:a multidimensional process of marginalisation of the CIHT jummas', unpublishedpaper, Calcutta Research Group, 1996, pp 9-10 notes the importance of the land acquisition regulation specific to the CuIT of 1958, which provided a definitive break with the region's ,special status'. 41 Timm, Adivasis, p 9. 42 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 57, quoting Sheik Mujibur Rahman. 43 MadhavGadgil & Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp 116-134, 150-153. 44 Quoted in Bodley, Victims, p 8. This contradicts the usual Bangladeshi refrain that the greatest threat to the sustainabilityof the forest come from jhum itself. See for example, Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmental degradation',p 20. 45 CIT' Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 71-86; Life in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, pp 50-51. 46 liuq, 'Changing nature', pp 84-85. 47 CIlT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 75. 48 Schendel, 'Invention', p 10. See also Raja Devasish Roy, 'Forests, forestry and indigenous people in the ChittagongHill Tracts', Earth Touch,February1996, p 40 for his comments on the attitudesof government officials. 49 Veena Kukreja,Civil-Military Relations in South Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, New Delhi: Sage, 1991, ch 4, 'Militarism in Bangladesh'. 50 Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 81; and Kukreja, Civil-Military Relations, p 140. 51 Kukreja,Civil-Military Relations, p 164. 52 Two specific examples of this with regard to the CIIT were the way the state, despite supposedly strict controls protecting its own monopoly, dispensed direct land grants for large-scale rubberplantations and provided licences and permits for commercial logging. See Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 81, 85. 53 Kukreja,Civil-Military Relations, pp 154-156. 54 Untitled Governmentof Bangladesh report, forwardedto author August 1995. 55 CHITCommission Life is not Ours, p 39. 56 ibid, p 41. See Mey, 'Genocide', p 11, for fuller details on the composition of BDF forces in the CuHT. 57 Cited in 'An invitation to InternationalPeace Conference on Chittagong Hill Tracts: working towards peace', unpublishedreport, Bangkok, 23-26 February 1997, p 9. 58 Burger, Reportfrom the Frontier, p 256; Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 32.

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59 See Lord Kinross, Ataturk:Rebirth of a Nation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964, for a classic
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enunciation. So much so that counter-insurgency courses at the Defence Staff college, Dhaka, were taught by seconded members of the British military and included studentsfrom abroadwhile the CDlT itself was on the regular itineraryof invited foreign officers. See CulT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 42. For the broaderpicture, see Noam Chomsky, Turningthe Tide: US Interventionin Central America and the Strugglefor Peace, Boston, MA: 1985; and Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, London: Vintage, 1992. ' Anti-Slavery Society ChittagongHill Tracts, pp 38-41. 62 The World Council of IndigenousPeoples has identifiedTNCS as 'the most serious threatto the survival of the indigenous nations of the Fourth World'. Burger, Reportfrom the Frontier, p 178. 63 Huq, 'Changing nature', p 84. 64 Nietschmann,'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 inadequateto meet their start-upneeds. 65 Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 6-7; CiiT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 19. 66 ClIT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 16. 67 See Robert Paine, 'The claim of the FourthWorld,' in Jens Brosted et al (eds), Native Power, The Quest for Autonomyand Nationhood of Indigenous Peoples, Oslo: Universitetsflorlaget AS, 1985, pp 49-66 for this argument. 68 Schendel, 'Invention', p 13. 69 Sexual humiliation and degradationof women, especially in the wake of 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, is now well recognised as a major,consciously appliedinstrumentin such 'softening up' processes. See Roger W Smith, 'Women and genocide: notes on an unwrittenhistory', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 8(3), 1994, pp 315-334; Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, London: University of NebraskaPress, 1994. For its specific applicationand other gender-related crimes in the CHT see CHT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 106-109. 7() Huq, 'Changing nature', p 67; ciT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 58. For more general confirmationof this point with regard to other third world state versus community struggles see David Maybury-Lewis, 'Living in Leviathan: cthnic groups and the state,' in Maybury-LIewis (ed), The Prospects for Plural Societies Washington, DC: The American Ethnological Society, 1984, pp 224-225. 71 Quoted in CIIT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 14. 72 For development of this theme see chapters by Leo Kuper, Peter Worsley and Maybury-Lewis in Maybury-Lewis,The Prospects for Plural Societies. 73 See Anti-Slavery Society, ChittagongHill Tracts,pp 44-54; and CUlTCommission, Life is not Ours, pp 16, 103-106 for jumma political developments.Mey 'Genocide', p 15 also notes the Shanti Bahini's links with the non-tribaland outlawed Marxist-Leninst SarboharaParty. 74 CIlT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 84; and Mey 'Genocide', p 9. 75 Quoted in Ali Murtaza, 'CiHT: tracking the past', Dhaka Courier, 18 November 1994. 76 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities,London: Verso, 1983, for the general argument; and Schendel 'Invention', pp 26-31, for its applicationto the jumma. 77 The Shanti Bahini claimed between 12 000 and 15 000 jumma were detained without trial in 1979-1980. Anti-Slavery Society, ChittagongHill Tracts, p 60. 78 For details of the Kaokhali and subsequent massacres see ibid, pp 55-66; CuIT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 17-19, 21-23; Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 10-30; and Survival International,Genocide. 79 Mey, 'Genocide', pp 22-23; and Amnesty, Bangladesh, pp 5-6. 80 Additionally, the iss claimed that a further 10 000 people, mostly children, had died as an indirect result of the massacres,either in flight, or throughneglect and traumain the Tripuracamps. Anti-SlaverySociety, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 64. 81 Quoted in Survival InternationalNews, 20, 1988. See also CIIT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 20-21 for Ershad's amnesty policy. 82 For instance, eyewitness survivorsof the BDF massacre at the village of liet 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. 83 See the conclusions of ibid p 34. CIIT Commission, Life is not Ours, p22 and SurvivalInternationalNews, 13, 1986 report 534 separate incidents of rape and torturein the period February-December1985 alone. 84 ClIT Commission, Life is not Ours, pp 24, 74-75. 85 Hafiz & Islam, 'Environmental degradation',p 67. 86 Jumma Peoples Alliance, Special Issue 2, unpublished,document, 25 October 1997. 87 Ibid; and CIwT Commission, Life is not Ours, 1992 update, p 7. 88 Survival Action Bulletin, May 1992, noted that 1200 people were burntalive in their homes in the Logang massacre.See also Survival Action Bulletin, January1994 for reportson the massacresat Mallya (February 1992), and Naniarchar(November 1993). 89 See CUITCommission,Life is not Ours, p 36, and 1994 updatc,p 20. See Survival International, 'Chittagong

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'CREEPING' GENOCIDE IN THIECHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS Hill Tracts revisited', unpublishedfield trip 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', p15, for instance, notes that the Taungchengya clans have their own separate guerrilla force which has at times fought the Shanti Bahini. The latteralso has poor relationswith the triballybased Mizo National Frontover the Indian border in Mizoram. 90 Amnesty Urgent Action bulletin, 'Fear for Safety', Index ASA 13 July 1996; and 'Kalpana Chakma remains untraced', Earth Touch, February 1997, pp 21-22. 91 Suzanne Goldenberg, 'Immigrantsbear brunt of Assam's culture of mutiny', Guardian, 17 April 1996. More generally, See Nietschmann, 'Indonesia, Bangladesh', pp 96-97; Thomas FraserHiomer-Dixon,'On the threshold: environmentalchanges as causes of acute conflict', International Security, Fall 1991, pp 76-116; and RichardL Rubenstein,The Age of Triage, Fear and Hope in an OvercrowdedWorld,Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983. 92 Quoted in Tim McGirk, 'Fear-filled returnhome for exiles', Independent,25 February 1994. 93 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 27. 94 CliT Commission, Life is not Ours, p 24. 95 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagonig Hill Tracts, pp 27-28; Huq, 'Changing nature', pp 83-84. 96 Huq, 'Changing nature', p 82. An additional complicating variable in this demographic picture is the 100 000 Rohingyas, the Burmcse Moslem refugees expelled from Buddhist Burma who have fled into an area adjacentto the CHT. CUITCommission,Life is not Ours, 1994 update,pp 8, 29, has questioned whether the Bangladeshi government might use these refugees against the jumma. 9 Anti-Slavery Society, Chittagong Hill Tracts, p 87. 98 CIIT Commission Life is not Ours, pp 91-92 notes government sponsorshipof ethnography,weaving and dance. For the issue more generally, see George Monbiot, 'Tourist trap', Guardian, 12 December 1998. 99 See Charter of modifiedfive point demands and a brief outline of Regional Autonomy with a Regional Council, Jana Samhati Samiti, 15 October 1996. 'o? Cited in Suzanne Goldenberg, 'Rivalry and corruption cripple the self-help economy', Guardian, 17 February 1996. 101 See statementof Colonel (retd) Oli Ahmed, the CommunicationsMinisterand Presidentof the governmentcreated special committee on the CIIT with responsibilty for talks with the iss. Bangladesh Times, 31 December 1992. 102 'Two foreign firms to explore oil in CHT', Dhaka Observer, 31 July 1995; iss, 'Situation in CHT', unpublished report, 28 October 1995, Survival Internationalarchive, London. The TNCS in question are Shell, Amoco and BIIP. 103 See Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster, A Preface to Hope, London: Verso, 1983, for the relationshipbetween genocide and state efforts to 'realise the unrealisable'.

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