The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Refuge And Refugees

Originally Appeared in: Turning Wheel Magazine, Winter 2004
For many young people growing up in the West, notions of "home," "shelter," and "refuge" revolve around family connections, property, prosperity, and success. Although I am a white, English, middle-class young woman, my notion of "belonging" is quite different. I grew up in multicultural East London, which has the largest Bengali (the name for both the language and people of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India) community outside Bangladesh. At school, most of my friends were Muslims from the Sylhet district in Northern Bangladesh; I learned to speak the Sylheti dialect on the playground. Later I sang folksongs in Bengali with a Bangladeshi folk group. Over time, I developed a longing to visit this country that I felt an indirect connection to.My Work In South Asia
In 1994, I volunteered for a year as an English teacher at Bodhicariya School and Orphanage in Calcutta, for refugee tribal children from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), a highland area bordering India and Myanmar (Burma) in southeast Bangladesh. The CHT is the homeland of 11 different indigenous communities, covering more than 5,000 square miles-roughly 10 percent of Bangladesh-an area of mostly low-quality land, in contrast to the very fertile alluvial plains in the rest of Bangladesh.
This volunteer teaching job was my first journey away from the UK alone. I thought I was quite prepared for the experience. I knew I would have to adjust to the simple way of life in a village with no electricity or running water, but I found myself in a community I knew nothing about, made up of Buddhists, not Muslims. They spoke Chakma (the name for both the language and the largest indigenous group from CHT) instead of Bengali. They didn't look the same as my Bengali friends; the women wore their own hand-woven textiles instead of saris.
Since my childhood, I had heard that Bangladesh was a beautiful country, but also one of the poorest places in the world, frequently hit by devastating floods and cyclones. I was unprepared, however, to learn about the other side of Bangladesh: the continued government repression of indigenous communities. I learned to speak Chakma, and this gave me direct insight into people's lives. I have become accepted as a part of the CHT community and have grown attached to the way of life of these tribal people. I now feel much more at home there than I do in the West.
The contrast between CHT and the West is stark. Recently, while in CHT, I saw a BBC program discussing what American kids wanted for their future. I had been asking members of a CHT village the same question only an hour before. The American kids said they wanted a big house, a fancy car, the latest designer clothes, and a nice family that stays together. In contrast, the villagers I spoke to wanted safety, secure jobs, schools for their children, access to health facilities, and enough money to pay for the next meal.
I am currently working in conjunction with Shishu Koruna Sangha (SKS), a Buddhist children's welfare organization established in 1986 by human rights activists, Buddhist monks, and education workers in response to the Bangladeshi refugee situation in northeast India. We hope to establish a traditional herbal medicine clinic and vocational training institute for young people from CHT. (See the "Seeds of Change" section on p. 29 for more information on this project.)
For the last two years I have also been photographing and interviewing indigenous people in the CHT for a research program about social exclusion and extreme poverty (in association with Manchester University in England and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies). I ask people about their culture, their history, and how they, as indigenous and mainly Buddhist people, relate to notions of home and citizenship in a Muslim country in which "development" projects have damaged the ecosystem and caused mass dislocation and marginalization of native people.

The Jumma People and Traditional Agriculture
Jumma people are so called because of their use of the traditional slash-and-burn cultivation technique, jum. There are nearly 600,000 Jummas mostly Buddhists, with some Hindus, Christians, and animists-in the CHT. Traditionally, entitlement to land comes for Jummas as a result of hard work. If a Jumma family works on a piece of land, nurtures it, and lives off its produce, the land is registered in their name (although the land remains a communal asset, it doesn't actually belong to an individual in the sense of land title). After 10 to 12 years of jum cultivation, the land is left to rest for 5 to 10 years and the cultivators shift to a new location to start the process of clearing and planting again. This crop rotation system, which comes from a Buddhist ideology of not taking more than you need, maintains the fertility of the land.
The nature of shifting jum cultivation also demonstrates the Buddhist truth of impermanence. This traditional system of farming began to be dismantled in the 19th century, when the British separated CHT from the plains. They didn't approve of the practice of jum cultivation, which they said was primitive and environmentally unsound. The British encouraged plow cultivation, and European entrepreneurs took over ownership of the most fertile land for teak, tea, coffee, and orange plantations. CHT was opened up to Bengali settlers from the plains, who came to plow or lease land for commercial purposes. The Jumma were permitted to cultivate only a third of the original jum land in the traditional way. Today, jum cultivation is becoming increasingly difficult, as land is scarce.
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ANNEXE: HISTORY OF THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS
The Chittagong Hill Tracts in the South-eastern corner of Bangladesh bordering North East India is the homeland of 12 indigenous communities, numbering about 600,000 people, covering 5093 square miles (10% of the country) and rising as high as 3,000 feet in places.
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