The Chittagong Hill Tracts: a case study in the political economy of 'creeping' genocide

The destruction of indigenous, tribal peoples in remote and/or frontier reg ions of the developing world is often assumed to be the outcome of inexorab le, even inevitable forces of progress. People are not so much killed, they become extinct. Terms such as ethnocide , cultural genocide or developmental genocide suggest a distinct form of 'o ff the map' elimination which implicitly discourages comparison with Other acknowledged examples of genocide. By concentrating on a little-known case study, that of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh, this article argues that this sort of categorisation is misplaced. Not only is the dest ruction or attempted destruction of fourth world peoples central to the pat tern of contemporary genocide but, by examining such specific examples, we can mol-e clearly delineate the phenomenon's more general wellsprings and p rocesses. The example of the CHT does have its own peculiar features; not l east what has been termed here its 'creeping' nature. In other respects, ho wever, the efforts of a new nation-state to overcome its structural weaknes ses by attempting a forced-pace consolidation and settlement of its one, al legedly, unoccupied resource-rich frontier region closely mirrors other sta te-building, developmental agendas which have been confronted with communal resistance. The ensuing crisis of state-communal relations, however, canno t be viewed in national isolation. Bangladesh's drive to develop the CHT ha s not only been funded by Western finance and aid but is closely linked to its efforts to integrate itself rapidly into a Western dominated and regula ted international system. It is in these efforts 'to realise what is actual ly unrealisable' that the relationship between a flawed state power and gen ocide can be located.