Of sovereignty and an inclusive society
TWO former generals, both linked to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, are afraid that the withdrawal of some army camps from the Chittagong Hill Tracts might lead to bloodshed in the region. Their fears happen also to be those of a lot of their fellow travellers in the BNP and around it.
If you have lately been tuning in to television news or going through the rightwing newspapers, you may have noted the panic that is being attempted by a class of people whose prominence or the lack of it in politics today stems from the U-turn Bangladesh took in the mid 1970s following the assassination of the country's independence leaders.
Today, when the matter is one of a simple withdrawal of just one brigade from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the disinformation is being given out that the region is about to fall back into the kind of chaos which laid it low through the 1980s and much of the 1990s.
Let there be no mistake about what we as a people achieved in the late 1990s through the accord between the government and the CHT insurgents. It was plain realism at work, the very cogent thought that what had gone on before could not be allowed to go on any longer, unless of course there were elements within the Bangladesh establishment and among the Shanti Bahini insurgents ready and willing to put the country to the torch.
It is, of course, another matter that the accord remains in need of some fine tuning, that men like Santu Larma have kept on complaining about the things that have not been done as a follow up to the treaty. But where the principle behind the deal is concerned, there will be few who will disagree with the notion that the accord was a breather for the country after years of what had at times increasingly looked like a gathering mess.
And now that an army brigade is being withdrawn, there is in us the feeling that peace, in that overall sense of the meaning, will eventually descend on the hills. But for that feeling to be translated into tangible form, it is absolutely necessary that the government as well as the leading lights of the erstwhile insurgency plug all the holes that might yet be there or might yet open up, enough to cause new worries among both Bengalis and the original inhabitants of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
That said, there is now the matter of how feeble Bangladesh's sovereignty happens to be at present. We raise that point because one of the two generals who have been giving expression to the fears about the withdrawal of the army brigade from the hill tracts feels that once those soldiers leave the place, this country's freedom will be at risk. That begs the question: before the soldiers went into the Chittagong Hill Tracts, was there any hint that Bangladesh's independent status as a nation was in a tenuous state? Of course, there was, but not because it had anything to do with the hill tracts.
Let us face facts. The foundations of this country were rudely disturbed in August and November 1975. And it came about in grating, grotesque manner. The secular principles upon which the country was founded in 1971 were dispensed with; the socialistic platform on which economic policy was based was cast aside; Bengali nationalism was exiled from the land it had inspired into freedom and replaced by thoughts sinister and spurious; and democracy became hostage to military dictatorship reminiscent of the Pakistan era. That was when national sovereignty took a bad mauling.
But look again at the Chittagong Hill Tracts question. Of critical importance today is the creation of an inclusive society that can in turn ensure the greatest good for the greatest number. And to do that it is absolutely necessary that those who have in the past been alienated by the policies of successive governments now have their confidence in the state renewed. What has happened in the Chittagong Hill Tracts -- and it all began in the 1960s through the Kaptai dam project of the Ayub Khan regime in Pakistan -- is a tragic episode we simply cannot airbrush out of our history.
There are too the various travails that other ethnic communities in Bangladesh have been put through. Their land has been commandeered because someone had the bright idea of building an eco park there. Indigenous men who have protested injustice have been shot. A tribal girl is abducted and no trace of her is there, despite years having elapsed since the incident.
There is today, ladies and gentlemen, a very real need for all Bengalis to acknowledge the mistakes that have been made, the insensitivities that have been demonstrated where dealing with the original inhabitants of the land is concerned. Their right to life and liberty is as much a potent factor in national politics as is our claim to power and privilege.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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