Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS, GENOCIDE IN
appeals process, and then hearings regarding his extradition to Spain to stand trial,
Pinochet was not extradited from Britain. On March 2, 2000, he returned to Chile.
Within the country, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to try to heal
the rifts caused by the Pinochet years, and upon his return Pinochet himself was placed
under house arrest pursuant to various charges.
China, Genocide in. China experienced significant episodes of genocidal destruction
during the course of the twentieth century. It would be a mistake to think that its people
have suffered only under communism, even though killing has predominated over the
course of communist rule since 1949. Under the rule of warlords and the pre-1949 Nationalist
government, millions were killed, both deliberately, for political reasons, and, as innocent
victims, who were swept up in the course of the many wars and rebellions that beset
China during the first half of the twentieth century. The precommunist atrocities visited
upon the Chinese people were not only caused by internal upheaval, however; China’s
experience at the hands of its Japanese occupiers throughout the 1930s led to a low estimate
of 4 million deaths, and possibly even up to 6 million. In 1937 the Japanese treatment
of China’s then capital city, Nanking (now Nanjing), became a paradigm for genocidal
massacre, as the Japanese, in an orgy of murder, rape, torture, and looting, killed more than
three hundred thousand of the city’s residents. After the communist victory in October
1949, millions of Chinese citizens were killed as the party sought to develop its revolutionary
platform and shape society according to the teachings of the party chairman, Mao
Zedong (1893–1976). The Chinese communists employed brutal repression in order to
terrorize the population into following the new ways. They executed all those who had represented
the former Nationalist government or its ideals, those of whom the communists
deemed to be counterrevolutionaries opposed to the revolution, and anyone else considered
to be an “enemy” of the people. In the communist drive to institutionalize the revolution
through schemes of social engineering such as the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)
and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) perhaps up to 30 million lost their lives owing
to starvation and more political killing. Under communism, China has had a record of
unrelenting state-imposed death on a genocidal scale, and to this should be added a clearcut
case of genocide against the people of Tibet, invaded by China in 1949, in which about
one-quarter of the preinvasion population has been wiped out in order to make way for
Han Chinese transmigrants. In addition there has been an ongoing and intensive campaign
of ethnocide carried out by successive Chinese governments against the culture and
religion of the Tibetans. More recently, Chinese communist attempts at suppressing the
quasi-religious movement known as Falun Gong have also been considered by some to fit
the 1948 UN Genocide Convention’s criteria of what constitutes genocide.
Chittagong Hill Tracts, Genocide in. The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) occupies a
land area of 5,093 square miles (13,295 square kilometers), constituting some 10 percent of
the total area of the country of Bangladesh. The land is hilly and covered with dense vegetation,
in marked contrast to the rest of the low-lying country. The majority of the population
of CHT, a people known as the Jummas, had been the target of massive human rights
abuses since before the inception of the state in 1971, but increasingly so since Bangladesh’s
independence. In March 1972, M. N. Larma (d. 1983) formed a Jumma political party, Jana
Samhati Samiti (JSS), to seek better living conditions for the Jummas; a military wing of
the JSS, the Shanti Bahini, emerged soon thereafter. This intensified the persecution of the
Jummas by the Bangladeshi authorities. In the name of “counterinsurgency,” Jummas have
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