Independent, 12 August 2002
At a rally on the occasion of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, Bodhipriya Larma, the Chakma leader and Chairman of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regional Council called upon the government to implement all the promises made on the CHT peace agreement, including the land question in the three hill districts. The Chakmas or the Marmas, the majority tribes living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, do not exactly fall in the category of indigenous peoples. They are migrant communities who made the habitable parts of the Chittagong Hill Tracts their home less than five hundred years back, pushing out into the deeper jungles other indigenous tribes.
Chittagong Hill Tracts include the recognised homelands of Chakmas, Marmas and a dozen other tribes and subtribes. Their traditional method of jhum or shifting cultivation did not accord to the jhum cultivators any land rights beyond a period of 5 years upto which surface fertility from burning of shrubs and plants for jhum could be sustained. With settlers from the plains arriving and obtaining more permanent land right for plough cultivation, or recently-introduced step cultivation, complications have arisen over land use and rights between new settlers and tribal claimants, amongst other conflicts of cultural and political nature.
The continuing validity of the CHT peace treaty, as it was signed between a national committee appointed by the previous government and an insurgent leader, thereafter appointed in his present office as Chairman of the CHT Regional Council, has been questioned. But the spirit of that agreement has so far proved enduring, and the Acts legislating the formation of the Regional Council as well as amending the district council provisions for the three hill districts already in existence are in full force. Within their frame-work and by judicial investigation, it is necessary to settle the land issue in the Chittagong Hill Tracts fairly and squarely, apart from other matters, for the sake of peace and prosperity of both the old and the new settlers in those parts of Bangladesh.
Indeed, there are traces of ethnic minorities, unmixed with the mainstream population, who have retained traditional ways of life in coastal and hilly belts of the country as well as marginally in the plains. They are ill-equipped to resist exploitation and land-grabbing pressures by socially-connected individuals or intrigues. It is the duty of the state, and more particularly of the local governments and community-based organisations to do the needful to protect their rights and traditional practices including access to forest lands and the like.