In 2011 I sent a memorandum to the Bangladesh prime minister on the constitutional amendment work that was going on. It was the 16th amendment to the constitution of Bangladesh. We requested or appealed that indigenous people, their identity as indigenous people, should be enshrined in Bangladesh's constitution. The Bangladesh government completely denied that appeal. Hasina's government could do that under the constitution, because they have more than two-thirds of the majority. They can do whatever they like right now because of the majority they have in the government.
I'll give you just one example. At the airport there were lots of billboards with pictures of smiling indigenous women. When the question later came up about the UN with regard to indigenous people, they removed the billboards. The indigenous women were erased. Subsequently there were government orders that all the foreign aid agencies and government agencies must not refer to indigenous peoples. Government officials were ordered to erase the term “indigenous” from all government documents, when previously....
So they said one thing one day and another thing the next day. They completely changed overnight because whatever army-loving group went to the prime minister and said, “If you recognize the indigenous people, we'll have to give up our land to them”, and this and that. As I said, there was the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Bangladesh was one of the signatories. Even the ILO, the International Labour Organization, in conventions 107 and 169 recognizes Bangladesh as a signatory.
If they say that indigenous people are just there, there will be a big problem because of the money and some other things they get from UNESCO, from the United Nations, from the World Bank. This is the reason they are very much denying why there should be indigenous.... They are saying that we are indigenous.
That is my understanding.