CHT Land Commission work, and the power struggles, contradictions, and tensions around it

Hana Shams Ahmed

It was a scorching hot Choitro day in Rangamati this year when 30 Indigenous Jumma head(wo)men and karbaris gathered for a four-day-long training programme organised by a Dhaka-based Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO). They had come to listen to resource persons talk about a wide range of topics involving the rights and responsibilities of headmen and karbaris. These included knowledge of the state’s civil and criminal laws, customary laws that govern the Indigenous-inhabited land of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), the CHT Regulation, the importance and process of submitting petitions to the Land Dispute Resolution Commission (Land Commission) about land disputes under their administrative authority, measurement of land and gendered aspects of laws and policies. The timing of the training programme was not convenient for this group. They would be celebrating the end of the year two days after the training ended, but each day they stayed for the entire time and participated in the process of learning through listening and questioning. Some of them, including most of the women, were new to this leadership role and eager to take their responsibility seriously.[1]

In 2016, the headmen (mouza heads) and karbaris (para heads) played a very crucial role in mobilising people from their own administrative units to submit abedons (petitions) to the office of the Land Commission following the amendment to the Land Dispute Resolution Commission Act of 2001.[2] The amendment in 2016 was a watershed moment for activists from the CHT as it finally recognised the customary rights of the Indigenous Jummas and confirmed that land disputes in the hills would be resolved “in consonance with the law, custom and practice in force in the Chittagong Hill Tracts”.[3] Earlier, another important milestone was the revoking of the clause that the Chairperson of the Land Commission would be able to unilaterally make decisions about the land disputes replaced with a quorum of the Chairperson and three other members of the Commission.

While the Land Commission called for petitions to be submitted to their offices, the deadline within which to submit the complaints was very short. It took very meticulous efforts from the Chakma Circle Chief’s office, the Headman and Karbari Network[4] and the individual headmen and karbaris themselves to go to their own administrative units, inform the people of the villages about the decision by the Land Commission and the process through which they can submit complaints and help them in crafting the petitions. This effort led to the submission of more than 22,000 complaints to the office of the Land Commission. Challenges remain in this process as there has been no progress in processing the draft rules of business from the side of the Ministry of Land. In addition to the slow administrative process, the bigger challenge for the functioning of the Land Commission is the political climate of surveillance, intimidation, and violence within which the process will have to go ahead along with the reality of decades of capitalist exploitation through unrestrained land-grabbing, deforestation, and tourism at the expense of the environment and its Indigenous inhabitants.

We all know that the 1997 CHT “Peace” Accord is a big watershed moment in the politics of the region, but the political policy to demolish the Jumma Indigenous People’s current movement which began roughly around 2010, is what will ultimately decide the fate of the Jumma Indigenous Peoples of the CHT. Following the two large arson attacks in Sajek in 2008 and 2010 (now the area of a military-run tourist resort) the state began to map out its long-term plan for capitalist expansion in the area. It was also around this time that a secret document, titled Strategic Management Forum (SMF), was shared among Indigenous Jumma activities about a state-sanctioned plan to increase surveillance upon the Jumma activists, the functioning of NGOs, the work of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission (CHT Commission) and the regional political parties.

In 2011, I was coordinating the work of the CHT Commission, and I was present at the 10th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) where the Government of Bangladesh first declared that there were no Indigenous Peoples in the country. This declaration came following the report by a Special Rapporteur which recommended that military officers who had violated human rights in the CHT should not be allowed to participate in the UN Peacekeeping missions. The 2011 declaration by the Bangladesh Government that there are no Indigenous People in Bangladesh was also a decision that closely aligns with the ideas in the SMF. This declaration from a government is nothing new as this declaration also happened in other countries around the world where postcolonial nations have found the existence of Indigenous peoples on their land “threatening” particularly in terms of land, and particularly in this neoliberal era when land is so precious for capitalist expansion.

While the 2016 amendment to the Land Commission was the culmination of years of political struggle by activists, the amendment also irked the Bengali Settler groups and they brought out a protest and called a hartal in all three districts of the CHT.[5] The Bengali settler groups are known to be made up of party-affiliates or Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as well as the powerful Bengali elite who have various business interests in the Hills and are well-connected with the civil and military administration. The protests and hartal by the settler groups was the beginning but only part of the series of obstructions that would be placed on the actual functioning of the Land Commission.

Many Indigenous Jumma activists and academics have pointed out that land is the most crucial aspect of the CHT.[6] While the judicial process to amend the Act went ahead in 2016 and made the necessary amendments to the law, the military-industrial complex was already planning a multi-pronged political approach to develop several obstructions to hamper the work of the Land Commission. Some of these include, but are not limited to: the formation of the UPDF (Gonotantrik) group in 2017 which mainly targeted UPDF and JSS activists and the level of targeted killing led to many high-profile Indigenous Jumma activists living in exile outside Bangladesh; the continued expansion of military-based tourism in the CHT including the plan for the five-star resort over 100 acres of land in Thanchi, the subsequent silence around the resort following international condemnation of it; the attack on the Queen of the Chakma Circle Chief Yan Yan in 2018 who was trying to seek justice for two Marma survivors of violence; the intimidation of headmen and karbaris through conferences organised by the military throughout the year; the construction of roads by the military on the borders leading to India that was abandoned by the World Bank in 2016 following protests by activists; and most recently, the legal challenge against the 1900 CHT Regulation.[7]

In the last decade since the 15th amendment to the Constitution and the strict stand by the Government of Bangladesh that there were no Indigenous Peoples in the country, the state has slowly been leading to the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples from their land. If we come back to the issue of the functioning of the Land Commission, while a lack of political will has been holding back this process since 2001 when the Commission was first formed, the 2016 amendment gave some hope to the Indigenous peoples. Since 2016 the Commission held 11 meetings and with the 22,000 complaints submitted to the Commission a momentum was created in the work of the body before Covid came and shut everything down. Although, since then the lack of momentum in the work demonstrates a continuation of that lack of political will, and the broader political situation of continued economic exploitation and culture of fear in the CHT makes the work of the Land Commission even more difficult with every passing day.

Hana Shams Ahmed is a PhD Candidate at York University in Canada.

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