There was a time when the hills belonged to their people. Indigenous families cultivated jhum without wondering whether their fields would still be theirs after the next harvest. Men, women and children caught fish together in the streams, gathered food from the forests and walked freely between villages. During Biju, Sangrai, Baisu and other festivals, the hills filled with music and dance.

Life was not easy. Jhum cultivation required exhausting labour, and many villages had no electricity, hospitals or modern roads. Poverty and disease brought their own suffering. But Indigenous people were not strangers or suspects in their own homeland. Children did not grow up beside military checkpoints, and families did not have to explain their destination to armed men. They possessed something that cannot be measured by roads, income or electricity: freedom from fear.

Then, in 1979, the soldiers began bringing strangers into the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

I come from this Indigenous homeland. For people like me, this is not merely a forgotten chapter of South Asian history. It is the story that shaped our families, our identity and our continuing struggle to survive.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts, or CHT, lies in southeastern Bangladesh along the borders with India and Myanmar. It covers Rangamati, Khagrachhari and Bandarban and is home to the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Mro, Tanchangya, Bawm and other Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous villagers watched unfamiliar military convoys arrive. Soldiers transported landless Bengali Muslim families from the plains and initially placed many of them in school playgrounds, marketplaces and newly established settlements. Villagers saw men wearing white prayer caps and women covered in burqas. They looked poor, homeless and unfamiliar with the land around them.

The Indigenous people did not immediately understand what was happening. These were not simply homeless families searching for somewhere to live. Their arrival marked the beginning of a state-sponsored transformation of an Indigenous homeland.

The newcomers reportedly received transportation, food, money and land. According to research cited by Forced Migration Review, more than 400,000 Bengali settlers were transferred to the CHT in the early 1980s. Many of those families were themselves victims of poverty, but their poverty was used by a powerful state. Poverty brought them to the military trucks; state policy turned their arrival into an instrument of demographic conquest.

Indigenous communities traditionally cultivated and protected land through customary ownership. A family might use the same field for generations without possessing a Bengali-style title deed. A village might collectively protect a forest or stream. Everyone living there knew whose land it was, but the state could describe it as empty or government-owned because its Indigenous custodians did not possess documents issued by that state.

Settlements appeared on Indigenous fields and around military camps and strategic roads. Markets and administrative centres gradually changed hands. Families sometimes returned to their jhum land and discovered strangers occupying it. When they protested, they did not face settlers alone. They faced soldiers, police and administrators who frequently protected the new settlements.

People defending ancestral fields were labelled........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)