Bangladesh Church must speak out on long running anti-Christian campaign

The Catholic church in Bandarban, southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts is at the center of an anti-Christian campaign (Photo: Chittagong Catholic Diocese website)

Silence is often prudent but at other times it’s plain foolish, as is the case with the Catholic Church and Christians in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), where their deathly silence in response to a long-running anti-Christian campaign is working against them.

In March and April, local newspapers and online media ran a cooked-up story against priests and religious brothers from the Queen of Fatima Catholic Church in Bandarban, the largest and one of the oldest Catholic churches in the CHT.

The report alleged that the priests and religious were sexually abusing tribal girls residing in a Church-run hostel.

To escape the abuses, some 71 girls fled the hostel one night, prompting Church leaders to pay off local officials to cover everything up, it claimed.

The girls actually fled in protest against the woman in charge of the hostel, a tribal woman who the girls say treated them badly. They absconded after several pleas to have the woman replaced fell on deaf ears. The girls later returned after the woman was dismissed.

The concocted abuse story came from local journalists looking to extort money from Church officials and was encouraged by local Muslim leaders who have a history of anti-Christian sentiment.

This is not an isolated case, but part of a game that’s been played against the Church and Christians for nearly a decade. During this time, several Islamist and mainstream newspapers have run fabricated reports accusing Christian missioners of converting thousands of tribals with the lure of money and plotting to turn the CHT into an independent Christian country like Timor-Leste.

The reports also alleged that several Western countries were funding Christian NGO activities to change the religious demography of the CHT to fulfill this agenda.

Church leaders and development activists have told me privately that government intelligence agents have paid them visits asking them how many Christians were in the area and how Christian NGOs were being funded.

Last year, the Hefazat-e-Islam militant group staged two rallies in Dhaka to make 13 demands. Most Christians failed to notice that one of them was a crackdown on “unlawful activities by Christian missioners and NGOs in the CHT”.

Throughout this time, Church leaders have remained silent. They have neither spoken to the authorities nor refuted the baseless claims in the mainstream press. They also didn’t opt for official complaints and protests, not even with regard to the Hefazat-e-Islam rallies.

The CHT, which borders India and Myanmar, is the only mountainous region of Bangladesh. This strategically important area is home to more than 12 indigenous tribes, mostly Buddhist, who have lived there for centuries and been socially and economically neglected for decades.

These peace loving people have seen the systematic destruction of their culture and livelihood since the 1970s when the government started changing the local demography by resettling landless Bengali Muslims who started grabbing tribal lands. The result has been ongoing sectarian conflict in these hills.

Tribals resisted the influx and, with latent support from India, formed a militia group to fight the settlers.

In response, the government turned the area into a military zone. For more than two decades, a bloody bush war between the army and militants claimed hundreds of lives until it ended with the CHT Peace Accord in 1997, which is still to be implemented. To this day, the region is heavily militarized with some 500 army camps.

Christian missioners arrived in the 1950s, and today Christians account for less than three percent of the region’s 1.6 million people.

The Muslim population, however, has increased from less than three percent in 1947 to more than 48 percent today. Tribals are still larger in number, but they are marginal in city centers and most businesses are controlled by Bengalis.

With such a small Christian presence, claims that missioners and NGO’s are trying to create another Timor-Leste are nothing more than ill intentioned fairy tales and simply not possible .

Yet, the rumors are rife and are being fed by local Bengali Muslim groups, who are aggressively anti-tribal.

They are the force behind the occupation of tribal lands by Muslim settlers. They are also backed by civil and military officials, and Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hefazat. All are trying to discredit the Church to divert national and international attention away from the grim political and rights situation for tribals in the CHT.

The war is over, but sectarian clashes between tribals and Muslims and rival tribal groups are still common.

According to a local rights group, Muslims killed 11 tribal men, raped 15 tribal women and burned down more than 100 tribal homes last year. Rights activists also accuse the government and army of keeping unrest alive to legitimize the militarization of the area.

International rights groups including Amnesty International have reported gross human rights violations by Muslim settlers and soldiers on tribal people. These include murder, torture, arson and rape.

Environmental groups allege the region is facing an environmental disaster because of deforestation and tobacco cultivation by the settlers.

Foreigners are generally not allowed in the CHT; but if they are it is usually under close surveillance. It is not because armed tribal groups might kidnap them for ransom, but mostly to stop them seeing what really goes on there.

Like in other parts of the country, Catholics and Protestants have set up dozens of schools, vocational centers, health clinics, and conducted development activities in the CHT to help tribals, non-tribals, Christians and non-Christians alike.

In most other places, Christians are held in high esteem by Muslims for their contributions in the education, health and development sectors, but in the CHT they are being vilified.

One reason is the activities of Christian missioners who have made tribal people more aware of their rights and more vocal.

The Bandarban Church incident is the most recent example of this vilification and could have been a lot worse if local Muslims had believed the stories that were told.

A 1998 mob attack by Muslims on several churches and Christian institutions in the Luxmibazar district of Dhaka during a land dispute between a Catholic school and a local mosque should serve as a gentle reminder as to how vulnerable Christians are.

Church leaders should realize that Christian haters consider their silence as weakness. They should learn from the recent attempt to stoke anti-Christian feelings in the CHT and act strongly and accordingly.

If they don’t take this seriously, they can be assured that the worst is yet to come.

END 

Read original opinion piece here Bangladesh Church must speak out on long running anti-Christian campaign

For tea workers, there’s no place to call home

I’ve just come back from northwestern Sylhet, a hilly and densely forested region famous for its tea plantations.

The poor souls who work on them could well be the ultimate definition of “displaced people.”

They were brought there from various Indian states after the British colonists set up the first tea gardens in the 1850’s. Almost all of them were landless tribespeople. They were told they would be taken to a beautiful place where they could find a home and be richly rewarded for shaking a lovely plant; a story not far from the yarn that many modern day traffickers spin.

In reality, their homes were – as they are now - unsanitary mud-walled homes called ‘worker lines.’

The daily wage is 48 taka (about 50 cents) plus a meager daily ration of food and a minimal amount of medical care. And the house is theirs only as long as one of the family has a job there. If that person dies, they face a very uncertainty future.

Some of them are Catholics and the Church has been battling constantly for the last 60 years to set up schools for them. The plantation owners positively discourage education, for fear that it will make the workers discontented.

And all the time, the business is declining. Tea, the second most popular beverage in the world after water, was once a major export of Bangladesh. But those days are gone. Out of a total annual production of 50 million kgs, only 10 million are exported. If for any reason a tea garden or factory is closed, the family has no option but to go begging.

They have no other vocational skills. And they no longer have roots. Since the partition of India in 1946 and Bangladesh liberation in 1971 most of them have forgotten their language and lost touch with their original culture.

It’s ironic that you often see photos and videos of women plucking tea leaves. They’re used in calendars and advertisements and they look colorful and charming. Very few people know what their everyday reality is.

Peace a far cry, pressure a reality



Tribal people in Chittagong Hill Tracts once largely depended on Jhum (slash and burn) cultivation



During my recent travel to southeastern port city Chittagong I had a brief chat with one Church high official in and he told me they read ucanews.com reports in here regularly. I was glad to know that because few people (about 4%) use internet in Bangladesh and to be online for information is not yet an essential part of life for most people here.

The Church dignitary (who didn’t want to be named) lauded our efforts in covering the life of the Church. However, he warned me to be cautious while reporting on some issues from Chittagong, one of the diverse Catholic dioceses in the country.

In an earlier post I wrote about the significant nature of the diocese where Bengali and ethnic tribals make up over 39,000 Catholic population.

Half of the Catholics in the diocese are tribals, mostly Tripura people who live up on hills at three southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) districts along with about 25 fellow tribal groups.

The official several times cautioned me not to mention in reports anything about evangelization, conversion and Church statistics, especially from Church on hills. There are six Catholic parishes and some sub-centers in CHT.

From the very beginning we had been very vigilant to skip reporting any issues relating to evangelization and conversion, but we include Church statistics sometimes in our reports to show Church life and growth.

“Constitution and the law of the land allow us to freely practice our religion and administer missionary activities, (but) there is a continued political pressure,” he said.

He further added that intelligence and detective branches often ask Church authorities to provide them with Church statistics. They fear that if the number of Christians grow they will join neighboring Indian states where tribal Christians make-up significant portion and split from Bangladesh.

“This is an unrealistic and imaginative idea, but who will turn it around, as they don’t think otherwise because of political anxiety,” the official lamented.

The life of tribals on hills is unique, unparallel and most significantly challenging in forested and impassable region. They are very simple people and have their own way of living the life.

When Catholic Church reached to CHT in 1950s and eventually once Caritas started operating there things changed rapidly.

Now fewer people depend on Jhum cultivation which is destructive for the environment. Besides, the Church pioneered education, health and so on for tribals as necessary. It is regrettable that the Church is under surveillance now.

The recurring trouble has a real long root of origin.

The tribals are oldest settlers of CHT from an undocumented period of time. During 1970 and 1980s successive governments in the country attempted to resettle Bengali people on hills that were resisted by tribals. The influx of Bengali people was a premeditative counter insurgency measure.

Governments perhaps were worried that CHT might split out from the newly independent country and may join in to any other neighboring country that borders Bangladesh.

The tribals led by Parbatto Chattogram Jono Shanghati Samiti (PCJSS, United People’s Party of the CHT) formed a militia force called ‘Shanti Bahini’ (Peace Force) and it continued fighting against Bengali settlers and government forces.

The 23 years battle ended with much-desired Peace Accord in 1997. From the beginning of fighting the area was heavily militarized and even after over a decade it is still left that way. That means political worries didn’t wash away.

A fraction PCJSS and some disgruntled tribals opposed the treaty and later formed an armed force called United People’s democratic Front (UPDF) and continued sporadic fighting with pro-accord parties and also with Bengali settlers. Now-a-days clashes between Bengali and tribals are frequent on hills.

The war ends, but the fight ends never.

A recent UN report catalogued mass human rights violations in CHT and another blog post put forth the voice of one of the victims.

The undeserved pressure for Church in hills is not likely to go away soon, nor will the hills return to total peace. No one knows how long this wall of suspicion will haunt people on hills.

@UCAN Blogs on June 22, 2011

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