Bangladesh in Numbers?
on From Banglatown to Bangladesh (Bangladesh), 16/Oct/2009 05:44, 34 days ago
I foundthis articlein my morning trawl of Guardian Online today, describing the reactions of Jamie Hewlett, the guy that designed the Gorillaz, to his visit to Bangladesh. It’s an emotive piece, highlighting the horrors of climate change here, the vulnerabilities to natural disaster faced as a country, and the precariousness inherent in the everyday lives of millions.For me, it’s also interesting as it paints a quite different picture to the Bangladesh I know. This article, like the vast majority I read in the international media, presents Bangladesh as chaotic, colourful, and monolithically flat and vulnerable to floods. The first paragraph states,There are only two numbers you need to know to grasp Bangladesh's problem. The country makes up less than 10% of the land mass of south Asia, yet more than 90% of south Asia's water passes through it on the way to the sea. Oh, and 80% of the country is floodplain.Living and working in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, I can identify with the chaos and colour the article describes, but other numbers are required to grasp some of the problems of this area, which falls into that unelaborated, and often overlooked, 20% of non-floodplain in Bangladesh. Here are just a few:•45: the approximate number of indigenous communities in Bangladesh, of which about11are found in the CHT, each with their own language, history and cultural practices, distinct from each other and distinct from the Bengali majority in the country.•1.6 million: the approximate number of indigenous peoples living in Bangladesh, of which about600,000live in the CHT.•40%: the percentage of cultivable land flooded in the CHT in the 1960s, an area in which land was already scarce due to the geographical landscape. In that pre-climate change decade, the floods came not from natural disaster, but rather in the name of‘development’: the building of Kaptai, Bangladesh’s only hydro-electric dam.•100,000: the approximate number of indigenous people displaced due to the building of the dam, few of whom received compensation, and thousands of whom fled to India.•25: the number of years of armed conflict in the CHT. Lasting from 1972 to 1997, it was between the Bangladesh state and Shanti Bahini, the armed wing of a political party fighting for political recognition of indigenous peoples and some form of autonomy for the CHT within the country.•400,000: the approximate number of Bengali settlers brought to the CHT by a secret government policy in the 1970s and 1980s, radically altering the area’s population, and having severe implications on access to land and natural resources for indigenous peoples.•1997: the year the CHT Accord was signed between the Bangladesh government and the Shanti Bahini, ending the official conflict in the CHT. The vast majority of the Accord has still not been fully implemented by the Bangladesh government.•Zero: the number of instances in Bangladesh’s constitution which recognises the existence of indigenous peoples or indigenous peoples’ rights in the country.And, of course, these numbers are themselves only a beginning. They don’t show the disturbing accounts of abuse and discrimination experienced by indigenous peoples throughout the conflict, including ‘killing, torture, rape, arson, forced relocation, cultural and religious oppression’*. They don’t describe the allegations of land-grabbing, rape of indigenous women, and destruction of indigenous villages that continue today. They don’t quantify the militarization of the CHT in the 1970s or count the number of Army camps still in existence here.They don’t measure how many indigenous peoples have lost their land, or the extent of the degradation of the CHT's natural resources, due to over-population and large-scale, environmentally-destructive ‘development’ projects. They don’t consider the implications of this for people’s economic survival, most of which is based in agriculture, or think about its impacts for indigenous cultures and cultural practices that are closely linked with land itself.This is not to question the severity of the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh. What is happening in this country is terrible and terrifying, and demands international action and attention. But when I see an article in the international media employing the same statistics to give, yet again, the same view of Bangladesh, its peoples, and its environment, I can’t help but search for something different. Because the reality is that alongside the chaos, colour and flooding of this country is a history of socio-political conflict and human rights abuses, and a diversity of geographies, cultures and problems. And in that Bangladesh, questions of change –climate or otherwise – cannot be summed up in numbers, no matter how many we choose.*This quote, and the majority of statistics in this blog, comes from‘Life is Not Ours’, a series of reports by theCHT Commissionon abuses of indigenous peoples’ human rights in the CHT at the hands of the Bangladeshi state and Army.