Jayanta Roy Chowdhury | Chittagong Hills Burning, As B’desh Frontier Crisis Builds

Last week, as much of the Indian subcontinent celebrated the victory of good over evil on Dussehra, the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh were burning again.

Police firing on the eve of Durga Puja at Khagragachi, in the Chittagong Hills, on an unarmed crowd demonstrating against the rape of a Chakma schoolgirl set the hills on fire once again. Within days, that single case, shocking but not unprecedented, had morphed into the trigger for something far larger — violent demonstrations against decades of demographic dispossession, heavy-handed Army rule, and broken promises of autonomy in the country’s most sensitive border region.

Bangladesh’s leadership under chief adviser Muhammad Yunus tried to hush it up with a series of claims ranging from “there was no rape” to blaming the unrest on “external influences, including India or fascist elements”.

However, as bizarre as these pronouncements sound, the fact is that the ever-restive Chittagong Hill Tracts, strategically located at a tri-junction of mainland Bangladesh, India’s Northeast and Myanmar’s rebel Rakhine province, has once again come into focus at a time when global geopolitical forces are locked in a shadowy war in the larger region over Myanmar’s treasure trove of critical minerals.

The CHT, tucked into Bangladesh’s southeastern corner, has long been an uneasy borderland. It is home to about a dozen indigenous groups — Chakma, Marma, Tripuri, among others — who are ethnically, linguistically and culturally distinct from the Bengali-speaking majority.

The tribals, mostly Buddhist, comprise over 95 per cent of the population living in the 13,000 square km of CHT’s hills and dales in 1947. On August 15 that year, these tribals naturally felt they would be part of Independent India and decided to raise the tricolour at Rangamati, the headquarters of the Hill Tracts, to signify their new citizenship.

However, on the evening of August 17, it became known that the Radcliffe Award, which demarcated the boundary between India and Pakistan, had made over CHT to the latter. Within a few days, the Baluch regiment marched in to tear down the Indian flag and replace it with Pakistan’s.

That was not the end of the Chittagong Hills’ sorry saga. In 1957, the Pakistan government started building a dam on the Kaptai river in the hills, which eventually flooded hundreds of villages and submerged more than a tenth of CHT’s land, forcibly displacing tens of thousands of Chakma villagers who fled to India.

Independent Dhaka’s response to the restive hill region was militarised demographic engineering. The plains Bengalis were encouraged, and at times directly settled in the hills by the Bangladesh Army under Gen. Zia-ur Rahman who took over power after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975.

Indigenous villages saw their lands taken away forcefully and resorted to armed insurgency led by the Shanti Bahini, leading to a cycle of guerilla warfare and repression over two decades before a peace was brokered in 1997.

Twenty-eight years later, most of these commitments made in the peace deal remain unfulfilled. A land commission to decide on rival claims over land rights remains mired in bureaucratic paralysis. The military, which was supposed to return from the hills, remains heavily deployed. Plains settlers continue to move in, often backed by local officials.

For the hill people, the sense of betrayal runs deep. That pent-up rage against a securitised state burst out into the open late this September. The social media circulated slogans not only for justice but also for autonomy, and even reunification with India, where large Chakma communities live, underlining how alienated many indigenous communities feel from Dhaka.

A volatile regional context: What makes the current flare-up more dangerous for both actors and onlookers is its timing. The world’s largest superpowers — China and the United States — are locked in a shadowy war in neighbouring Myanmar, which more often than not spills over into CHT. Just across the porous border in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where a brutal three-way conflict is raging. The Myanmar military, tacitly backed by China, is battling the Arakan Army (AA), a powerful ethnic Rakhine force which has taken over 90 per cent of the rebellious province.

At the same time, the Rohingya insurgent group Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), encouraged by Islamist militant groups in Bangladesh, continues to stage raids into the Rakhine state from bases in the Chittagong Hills.

This despite attempts by Western agencies, interested in creating a supply corridor from Chittagong to the Rakhine state, to broker a peace between ARSA and the Arakanese, has not been to the liking of either AA or Western interlocutors who want to see both Rohingyas and Arakan Army on the same page against Myanmar’s junta.

For Bangladesh, which already shelters nearly a million Rohingya refugees in camps in Cox’s Bazar, Ramu and other areas in CHT, straining its economy and patience, this is combustible and risks another refugee influx.

Dhaka also fears that the indigenous grievances in CHT could be exploited by Arakanese and other Myanmar tribal rebel groups, blurring the line between local protest and regional insurgency.

For India, the CHT rebellion sounds alarm bells as its own backyard in the North-east, though long peaceful, could see a spillover.

At the heart of this conflict, however, remains great power rivalry over Myanmar’s rare earth riches, much of which is mined in its Kachin province, north of Rakhine. China, which currently is the sole buyer of these riches, accounting for 11 per cent of globally mined critical minerals, is loath to give over the control over these mines and has been bearing down in favour of its ally, the Myanmar military junta.

The Kachin Independent Army, which is trying to wrestle control over these critical mines, is intertwined with the Arakan Army, which has been building links with Western intelligence agencies against their common enemy — the Chinese-backed Myanmar state.

The path to strengthen KIA and the Arakan Army, of course, runs through the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Hence, what happens in these hills is of interest not only to India and Bangladesh, but also to Myanmar and to the global superpowers.

If Bangladesh’s interim government handles the situation with sagacity, it could paper over old fault lines and ensure Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize was not given in vain. On the other hand, if the government of the day makes the mistake of vilifying indigenous tribals or India, it risks reviving an insurgency which could run for decades, bleeding its ill-trained army and ushering in a global proxy war along with its untold miseries closer to its doorsteps.

The writer is a senior journalist and Bangladesh watcher