DHAKA, May 15, Reuter: Bangladesh appears headed for a diplomatic standoff with its large neighbour India over one of South Asia’s lesser known guerrilla conflicts.

The two countries are blaming each other for violence that has killed more than 1,500 people in the dense jungles of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts over the past 15 years.

While the disturbances are dwarfed by others in South Asia, such as the conflicts involving Tamils in Sri Lanka or Sikhs in the North Indian State of Punjab, Western diplomats fear the situation in the hill tracts is becoming explosive.

Dhaka says New Delhi is helping to arm separatist guerrillas known as “Shanti Bahini” (Peace Force) and giving them sanctuary.

New Delhi denies the charge. It accuses Dhaka of carrying out atrocities in the area and causing. Thousands of Bangladesh tribesmen to take refuge in camps across the border in India.

“It is as clear as daylight that some groups of misguided people operate from across the border”, President Hossain Mohammad Ershad said recently.

Western diplomats said they feared the row could snowball into a diplomatic confrontation as there was no solution in sight, although officials of the two governments have met four times to discuss the issue.

“We know where the rebels operate from, where they get arms and training”, Bangladesh Foreign Minister Humayun Rasheed Choudhury told Parliament last week.

Referring to stepped up Shanti attacks in which 52 settlers were killed in the past three weeks, he said; “It is an evil design based on a foreign blueprint”.

The Shanties are the armed wing of a tribal welfare group that seeks autonomy for 5,500 square miles of hills bordering Burma and India.

It also wants expulsion of some 300,000 Bengali settlers who had been rehabilitated in the area over the last 15 years under a government scheme to ease overcrowding of the plains. They accuse the settlers of stealing their land and destroying tribal culture.

About 400,000 of the hill tracts’ 750,000 population are tribe’s people. The largest group is Chakma, which makes up SI per cent of the tribes people.

Article extracted from this publication >> May 20, 1988