A Requiem for the Discordant Accord

I have written on the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord of 1997 numerous times, especially in the early 2000s, right up to the 2010s, and have had articles published in Bangladesh and abroad, including through Cambridge University Press. Perhaps having a premonition of what was in the offing, I had dubbed the agreement "the discordant accord".

Now I am searching for adjectives to describe the failed accord. If it were a song, I could have called it a dirge or a requiem. It's not. It really doesn't matter what you call it though. The fact is, politically, at the current moment, it's an instrument that the government of Bangladesh, and particularly the government security forces, consider to be a major obstacle to achieving their goal of "development" of the hill region. Take the case of the Marriott-linked hotel and amusement park that is under construction on the Chimbuk-Thanchi highway in Bandarban district—a glaring example of the anti-CHT Accord "development" that the Mro people and other ecology and human rights supporters are being literally forced to swallow.    

I have spoken and written many times about the "half-empty or half-full glass" rhetoric about the status of the implementation of the agreement. The government eulogises the half-full feature of the accord's implementation status, while the major regional political party harps on its half-empty feature. I disagree with both. It's not a quantitative matter. You can't measure implementation or non-implementation by counting how many clauses were implemented or not, how many subjects were transferred or not (to the Hill District Councils). You have to ask, qualitatively, whether the agreement, in substance, has been implemented or not. You have to ask that to the ordinary people of the region. If they say "no", please accept the answer at face value.

But you might say, "Hold on, this is not so simple a matter." All right, let me then assess the implementation status substantively. If I equate the CHT Accord with a meal that the CHT people, especially its indigenous Jumma or Pahari peoples, wished to feast on, I would say that it is not the meal that they thought would be delivered. It doesn't matter, quantitatively, how much parboiled rice ("sheddho chaal") is offered—or for that matter, how much Biriyani, Tehari, Machher Jhol, etc. has been given—if the meal lacks Ngappi (shrimp paste: Belachchan), dried fish, upland rice, upland chilly peppers, etc. The hill people will not consider the CHT Accord to be a proper meal at all if certain ingredients are missing, as aforesaid.

And that is what the problem is with government-led "development" in the region. Take, for example, the roads (another name for natural resource plunder), buildings (architectural monstrosities that are aesthetically and health-wise unsuitable for the CHT), tourism spots (spot the garish, unnatural, coloured walls and roofs), etc. None of these personify the Hill Tracts' history, traditions, culture, and ecology. It's simply a kind of cultural and ecological rape being perpetrated against a region and its peoples, whose ethos is to be visibly felt nowhere except in the remotest corners of the region where there are no roads, and hence no violent economic, social and cultural incursions, and no cultural and ecological rapes. But this will change, I fear, for "security" or "border trade", if not for anything else. I hope and pray that I don't live to see these places becoming un-peopled and un-ecologied in my lifetime. But perhaps I am living in a fool's paradise.

Twenty-three years ago, then Minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir invited me to a discussion over dinner at a leading hotel in Dhaka, asking me, on behalf of the government (also then led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina)—with the consent of the Jyotirindra Bodhipriya Larma ("Shantu Larma")-led Jana Samhati Samiti—to help facilitate the last stages of negotiation which would ultimately lead to the signing of the CHT Accord. Upon laying down certain preconditions, which were accepted, I agreed to do what I could to help. Two or three days later, the agreement was signed. It was December 2, 1997.

Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina got UNESCO's Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize for signing the CHT Accord. It was one of the highly visible successes of her government. But can we now try to find some similar prize to bestow on our Honourable Prime Minister, which would facilitate her effective role, this time to implement the accord? I don't know.

In the longer run, the non-implementation of the CHT Accord will, I believe, not only bring doom for most of the indigenous peoples of the CHT, but also destroy or degrade the remaining hill forests of the region, including the major rivers and streams, and make our borders with our neighbouring countries unstable.

If the indigenous peoples of the CHT become further minoritised and otherwise marginalised, the CHT is likely to become a spawning ground for radical, right-wing elements, which will create numerous conflicts with communities across the border, from Tripura State, Mizoram, Chin State to Rakhine State.

And if anyone has ideas of a Bangladeshi Bengali lebensraum in Burma (Myanmar) or Northeast India, I would ask them, from a purely Bangladeshi perspective, to weigh the chances of success and failure. We ought to take lessons from Rakhine State, Tripura State and Mizoram, and take steps to keep our international boundaries secure, and hopefully with no tension with our international neighbours.

Stable borders will provide stable frontier regions. Stable frontier regions will provide economic and social stability and progress. Instead of pursuing hawkish policies with amateur "security specialists" running programmes that ought to be vetted by professional foreign policy, human rights and trade experts, we, as a nation, ought to practice what we preach.

In the long run, I believe that only if the indigenous peoples of the CHT can remain the dominant ethno-cultural group in the CHT can we protect the ecology of the region, as well as its stability and integrity. And if the so-called "security specialists" are allowed to rule the roost, the indigenous peoples will pay the price, as will the people of the rest of the country. That may cause irreparable damage to the Bangladeshi state, as well as to its citizenry and its ecology. I hope our government under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will be wise and prevent that from happening, for the wellbeing of all citizens and denizens of the Hill Tracts, and for the country as a whole.

Raja Devasish Roy is Chakma Raja and Chief, the Chakma Circle, as well as an advocate at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. The author wishes to thank Sushmita S. Preetha, Md Zafar Iqbal and CR Abrar for their illustrative pieces on the land grabbing of areas where the Mro people have lived, on the Chimbuk-Thanchi Highway in Bandarban, to construct a Mariott Hotel-branded tourist resort.