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By Khademul Islam The bamboo has flowered, rats have invaded the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The indigenous people here are suffering severe food shortages. Around 600,000 have left their homes in search of food
 About a year ago reports, like faltering beeps from distant galaxies familiar to Hollywood sci-fi movie buffs, began filtering into Dhaka from the Chittagong Hill Tract (CHT). The ‘tribals’, it was said, were alarmed about an invasion of rats. What, the chatterati exclaimed, rats? Well, yes, came the hesitant reply from the few Bengalis who cared to listen to the indigenous folk of the CHT. Reluctantly, some in the capital’s major media outlets and others half-asleep at government listening posts tuned in. The script line was that rats were coming to the hills and a terrible event was in the offing. Added to this was something else about bamboo groves flowering. Unable to make sense of it, the chatterati switched off again. Those ‘tribals’! Who had time to listen to such folk tales! There were far more important things to cover, like the continuing daily political soap opera in the capital city; real things like the breakdown of the political system, the court intrigues, the palace coups . . . even the summer heat and the frequent power failures in the city made far better copy than these mutterings, this faint flicker of lightning in distant skies, from the ‘tribals’. For the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, this silence is nothing new. Silence is what blankets the CHT. It is a product of ignorance and prejudice against the Outsider, against the Other, especially against a Marginalised Other, of age-old stereotypes festering in the public and private domains. It is also a product of active official and semi-official censorship and suppression of news from a region whose native peoples are systematically being stripped of their lands, a stripping that is tantamount to ethnic cleansing. And the pall of silence is literal, too, since mobile phone networks are banned in the CHT as part of the army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, doctrines fashioned by the British during their anti-communist ‘Malay wars’ in the 1950s and later honed by the Americans at their Fort Benning military witchcraft complex, which decrees that ‘insurgents’ be denied all space. This is the context of a 20-year guerrilla war waged by the more rebellious of CHT’s native population against the Bangladeshi state. That insurgency officially ended with a peace accord in 2007, but reality continues to belie the accord as a grimly unremitting army occupation oversees the continuing and inexorable immigration of Bengali settlers into the area and the forcible uprooting of an entire people from their ancient lands.
The only news that comes out of that region is that generated by isolated, and at times courageous, civil society and human rights groups which occasionally foray into the area to report, hesitantly and unsurely, the latest atrocity committed on the CHT folk. A press conference is held and some newspaper coverage afforded. Beep, beep, the faint signals lock in for its 15 minutes of exposure in Dhaka, then fade away again. Yes, we know it’s a crying shame, but really, who has the time? And now comes this spooky cry about rats and bamboo flowers. But of course it turns out that the ‘tribals’ were right. Turns out Claude Levi-Strauss was right about the ‘modern’ mind not being able to comprehend what it labels as the ‘primitive’ mind. In fact, the proposition can be taken a step further: that the ‘modern’ mind can actually be the ‘savage’ one in its brutal incomprehension of the Other, in its non-interrogation of the self and assumption of superiority (borrowed partly from Western concepts of statehood, modernisation and development) in which lie buried tragedies of human extinction. In the mid-1960s, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan, we lived for a couple of years in the port city of Chittagong. Then, the hills and forests were near, surrounding the sleepy provincial port town. Narrow roads snaked through the densely-forested hills in head-spinning spirals and loops. Some weekend mornings my maternal uncle and his friends would honk horns outside our house, and pack us into cars and jeeps and zoom out, Uttam Kumar style, in their 50’s Ray Bans and scarves, with us and our mothers in tow. The children would shiver and dare each other to look down the sheer drop on both sides of the road. We would stop at the foot of the hills and race up the hundreds of steep steps to little temples on top, leaving our panting elders far behind. Once, we came upon a mother-and-baby elephant pair sprawled smack dab in the middle of the road, with no room to pass them on the narrow strip. So we unloaded our picnic food and spread it out on the road, and ate and talked till they leisurely took off nearly four hours later. I remember we would see the Chakmas(for we were ignorant about the 12 different ethnic communities that inhabit the hills, each with their own distinct culture, language and religion, which meant that to us, they were all Chakmas) walking by the side of the road with loads of wood strapped on their backs. We would see them walking, single file, in the distance too, with a steady, unflappable rhythm to the upward slant of their steps. For the first time in my life, I saw women light up cheroots which would go out and which they would light up again. Once, when my uncle tried one and gagged on the industrial strength nicotine intake, the grandmother who gave it to him nearly doubled up with laughter. They had the calmest villages, set on high at the water’s edge or by the sides of the hills, where light from the setting sun would hit the bamboo and turn it, momentarily, into the same colour as their serenely chubby-cheeked babies. Sometimes, smoke trails would rise in the distance as they burned forest clearings for their jhum cultivation. Today, when I mention wild elephants hunkering down in the middle of the road to the younger generation of native CHT people, they shake their heads in wonderment. All they have seen are guns, uniforms, discord and violence. It is a measure of the change that has taken place there within the last three decades. 1971 saw the triumph of a fiery Bengali nationalism against Pakistani domination and the birth of Bangladesh. It was in that very birth of an independent Bengali nation that were laid the seeds of the death of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ distinct identity. The British annexed the area in 1860 and gave it a special status in 1900, a regulation that the native CHT folk took as a guarantee of their land rights, separate identity and culture. Then came the Congress-led anti-colonial nationalist movement, and the subsequent Partition on the basis of Hindu-Muslim identity. Since the CHT folk did not regard themselves as Muslim, they hoisted the Indian banner on August 15, only to be bewildered when they found out they were to be part of Pakistan. Islamabad, now looking at the CHT with beady eyes, began the process of legal amendments which stripped the tribal folk of their special status. In 1960, the World Bank-funded Kaptai Dam was constructed for electricity generation, flooding 40% of the cultivable land and uprooting hundreds of thousands of indigenous people. When in 1971 Bengali nationalism took up arms against a genocidal Pakistan army occupation, the Chakma King Tridiv Roy bet the wrong way and sided with the Pakistani regime. He fled to Pakistan after independence in 1971. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation and the man who championed a separate Bengali identity, presided over a constitution where the indigenous CHT people were denied special status, and were summarily ordered to be ‘Bengalis’. In 1972, the ‘hill people’ formed the Parbatya Chottogram Jana Samhati Samity (PCJSS), and by 1973 their armed wing, the Shanti Bahini, had come into being. The war was now underway. In August 1975, Mujib and his family were wiped out in a military coup, and his party, the Awami League, was cast into the political wilderness. There followed long decades of army rule under General Zia and General Ershad, a period which saw the struggle turn into a continuous low-intensity conflict which, consequently, rapidly militarised the area. This called for the application of the supreme counterinsurgency doctrine: denial of space. Villages were uprooted and ‘model’ resettlement programmes instituted which herded the people of the CHT into government camps in order to deny the guerrillas natural cover and camouflage. Hand in hand with this came ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’: the building of roads into the interior, the instituting of programmes for work and education for the ‘uplift’ of the ‘backward Paharis’, funded by international donors. These were means of strategic control, with military commanders in charge of the programmes. And there was massive, government-sponsored Bengali migration into the area, with promises of free land, in order to erect supportive local political machinery for the state. Though after the Peace Accord the pace of human rights abuses and atrocities has slowed down, they still occur. Cholesh Richil, a prominent adivasi campaigner against the building of an ‘eco park’ in the CHT, died in ‘joint forces’ custody at the beginning of 2008. Civil society and human rights groups have consistently pointed at the continued targeting of activists as widespread arrests after the caretaker government came to power in January 2007 spread panic among the CHT inhabitants. This April four Pahari villages in Sajek were reportedly torched by Bengali settlers, but the government said it was the work of ‘external terrorists’, insisting that ‘communal harmony’ prevailed overall in the CHT region. The 1997 Peace Accord remains unimplemented, especially with regard to activating the Land Commission (which would slow down the process of land grabbing) and the withdrawal of “temporary” army camps. Environmental degradation has become the norm, as the Bengali settlers, financed by developmental programmes, denude the forests and hills to plant crops and clear areas for pineapple and rubber plantations. Meanwhile, the bamboo has flowered and the rats have come. The Chittagong Paharis have a term for it—indur banya, or the rat flood. Across the border, in Mizoram and parts of Manipur, Tripura and Assam which are also experiencing a rat invasion, they call it mautam, or bamboo flowering. It is a natural cycle where every 50 years, bamboo groves -- the Melocanna baccifera, one of the 40 species of bamboo in the transborder region -- flower and burst into a protein-rich, avocado-like fruit. Rats eat this fruit and become gigantic. The 93-year-old Raja of one of the CHT tribes, the Marma, emphatically recalled the last time it happened, with the rats “big as pigs.” Rats give birth to two or three litters in a year, but in the year of the bamboo flowering they give birth to up to eight or nine litters, with the numbers in each litter expanding to 12 or 13 from the usual three or four. Furthermore, due to the abundance of food, with rat manna falling from above over hundreds of thousands of acres, baby rats are not eaten or cannibalised by parent rats. Given the confluence of all these factors, rat populations multiply at an exponential rate in size and numbers and lay waste to rice paddies, grain harvests and food stocks. Seeds for next year’s planting cannot be stocked, while seeds from the ‘plain-lands’ cannot be transplanted for use in the Pahari areas, where the rice strains are different. This is especially disastrous in an economy with low money circulation, where families have no cash savings to fall back on. Mizoram has been declared a disaster area by the Indian government, but no such announcement or priority has been accorded to the affected areas by the Bangladesh government. While the current caretaker government has undertaken an extensive food relief programme, and international agencies such as the UNWFP and European Commission for Humanitarian Aid are distributing food, acute food shortages are now being reported from 31 unions under seven upazillas of Rangamati and Bandarban. An estimated 6 lakh people have left their homes for neighbouring areas due to food shortage. There is hunger in the land, with Pahari villagers subsisting on one meal a day and foraging in the forests for tubers, roots, herbs and leaves.
Aid may be too little too late. But then, the folks of the CHT are used to that too. What makes this particular event a tragedy is that, unlike Cyclone Sidr, unlike other natural disasters, this one was not sudden, the Grim Reaper swinging its scythe unawares. This one had a warning in both India and in Bangladesh. This one is part of a natural cycle, and surely measures could have been taken beforehand. But that would have entailed listening carefully to what the ‘tribals’ were telling us, urging us. Who would listen? They don’t look like us, they don’t talk like us, they don’t dress like us, they don’t do anything like us at all . . . Besides, who has the time? The folks of the CHT have seen it all before. Nationalism, communalism, modernisation and development have long been the death of them all! (Khademul Islam is the Literary Editor of The Daily Star, Dhaka) InfoChange News & Features, August 2008
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