A Rationalist Explanation for Violence and Peace in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Despite a checkered history of conflict, Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) has failed to attract scholarly attention to the fundamental questions of the onset and duration of violence, timing of a settlement with a peace treaty, and longevity of such a settlement. This paper addresses these questions within game-theoretic models offering a unified analytic narrative of the conflict. It argues that while engaged in a protracted insurgency with the Bangladesh state, Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS)—the rebel party—had to solve two collective action problems: first, with the state, and second, with the ethnic groups that required assurances before joining the costly fight against the state.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank colleagues and friends who have helped us with information about potential authors and manuscripts in the review presented in this article. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have improved the quality of this paper in important ways.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Data used to generate Figure 2 are available at OSF: https://osf.io/6dq24.

Notes

1 The last century witnessed some of the most murderous ethnic conflicts in history including the Holocaust, Bangladesh genocide, Rwandan genocide, and Bosnian genocide (see, e.g., Mann, 2001). However, Fearon and Laitin (1996) argue that the incidents of peaceful coexistence of otherwise opposing ethnic groups were much higher in frequency than the violent ones. They maintained that observations about the ubiquity of ethnic violence could be due to selection bias and overestimation (p. 716).

2 See Chowdhury (2002) for the number, the names, and the spellings of the ethnic groups. It is important to note that due to the lack of a standard spelling rule, the popular literature on CHT affairs has used various spelling of these groups’ names leading to considerable confusion in counting the number of groups living in the region.

3 We have used the 2019 version of the corpus. The search result included mentioning the case sensitive three-term anywhere in a sentence, allowing across page boundaries and part of speech tagging while avoiding mentions of the words in the phrase cross sentence boundaries (Carmody, 2020).

4 The population dynamic further changed significantly in the decade following Bangladesh’ last census in 2011 because of Rohingya refuges (Choudhury, 2017, pp. 13–29).

5 One may find reference to conflict in such areas as natural resources (16%), identity (16%), development (8%), history (4%), human rights (4%), and gender (4%).

6 In contrast to Ali’s internal war thesis (Ali, 1993), both Ibrahim (2001) and Bhaumik (1996) considered it as an ‘external’ war among South Asian and Southeast Asian neighbours, providing details of the war reflecting Bangladesh and Indian governments’ perspectives, respectively.

7 Between February 1972 and January 1973, M.N. Larma, then a member of the constitutional assembly, tried to lobby the State authorities and assembly members for special constitutional provisions for the CHT. Soon after the formation of the Constituent Assembly and the Constitution Drafting Committee, he submitted an elaborate four-point charter of demands on April 24, 1972, to the drafting committee. He also met in multiple sessions with the then Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Reportedly, in one of these meetings, the Prime Minister threatened M. N. Larma to influx CHT with Bengalis and military (Ahmed, 1993, pp. 42–44; Bhaumik, 1996, p. 261).

8 In 1980, the government estimated the number of the Shanti Bahini to more or less than 2000 full-time guerrillas and several thousands of trained militias (Kamaluddin, 1980b). As of 1984, the Shanti Bahini claimed to have 15,000 fighters. However, the 1988 Asia Yearbook of the Far Eastern Economic Review citing the Institute for Strategic Studies London put the number of the Shanti Bahini as high as 8,000 (Bertocci, 1989, p. 162).

9 The size of the land grant was as follows: 5 acres of hilly land or 2.5 acres of plough land or 4 acres mixed lands (plain and bumpy land) (Chakma, 2010, p. 21; Roy, 2000, pp. 107–121).

10 Numerous armed encounters occurred between the security forces and the insurgents. There were at least 582 events of ‘atrocities’ (raid, ambush, looting, burning, killing, kidnapping) the insurgents alone carried out between 1979 and 1992 (Bangladesh Army, n. d.). The number of similar acts the security forces carried out against the insurgents and/or the hill people are unknown. Based on media reports, there are at least 16 large-scale incidents that we could mark as war-like violent campaigns (compare Levene, 1999).

11 There are at least 343 members of the country’s security forced were killed by the insurgents in the CHT between 1972 and 1998. In the same period the security forces killed 271, injured 95, and captured 1892 insurgents. The encounters between the security forces and the insurgents killed an estimated 1293, injured 868, and made 738 civilians missing (Bangladesh Army, n. d.).

12 The Bohmong chief Mong Shoi Pure Chowdhury, a minister of the then East Pakistan provincial government in 1965, remained non-committal to either side of the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 (Chakma, 1986, pp. 45–46).

13 Two additional political movements vied for control over CHT: Mukti Parishad (Liberation Council), which had a support-based in the Tanchangya communities, and a broad-based left movement under Sarbohara Party (Proletarian Party), an underground Marxist revolutionary movement. While Mukti Parishad branded Shanti Bahini as an Indian government’s agent, Shanti Bahini viewed these movements as detrimental to the hill people’s interest (Kamaluddin, 1980a, pp. 30–31; and Mey and Bangladesh Group Netherlands 1984, pp. 138–139). Shanti Bahini managed to lead most of the attacks against the government forces, while keeping the Mukti Parishad and the Sarbohara Party out of the CHT (Chakma, 1986, pp. 108–109).