Thank you, sir.
According to my understanding, there is of course a lot of money channelled through CIDA to Bangladesh. I don't have any figures for how much, or for how much is invested, or for how much aid money goes to the Chittagong Hills. I don't have any figures because I was unable to get anything of that kind.
Of course, as a donor-dependent country, Bangladesh most fears publicity. That's number one. Number two is if the aid donor has some kind of influence.
This is our responsibility as Canadians. I am also very proud as a Canadian citizen right now that our moral and ethical responsibility is to promote respect for human rights in an area: if you are receiving my aid, democracy and human rights go side by side as a package. We must promote human rights. Indigenous peoples and religious minorities should be respected, just like we do any others here.
That's what I really want the Canadian government to say to the people. I'm not saying that we stop the aid. It's a very poor country, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of 150 million right now in an area of 55,000 square miles. Within our capacity and our aid money, of course, we can have influence there.
Another thing you have asked me about is how we can promote.... It is basically a kind of media coverage that we are unable to do there, where there is a lot of menace for the media. Here, they are unable or don't want to do that, because we have such insignificant numbers. The attitude I find here is, “Why should we care?” We are here all the time, but in fact, all of our movements are hijacked by things like ISIS and Islamic terrorism. We have been waiting for this moment. It has been postponed many times. I am very indebted to Dr. Bose. She was trying to help organize this meeting for us.
You will remember that I gave you one example. I went to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2011. I had a press conference there. The media were there. We gave testimony. There was huge coverage. We also took part in speeches and rallies in front of the United Nations building, so we had some coverage.
One day, a Bengali woman came to me. In New York she was a local member of the Awami League. She asked why I was doing all those things and asked to talk about it, saying that they didn't want publicity. She invited me to meet with Bangladesh's ambassador to the United Nations. She said that she was going to arrange a dinner or something like that for me, and then I understood that they are really very afraid of publicity. This is probably one of the two things that makes the Bangladesh government listen in regard to what has to be done.
The problem I can see, as I said before, is that the army is so powerful, and they are not going to do anything. They know very well that if they go on rampaging or killing on a larger scale it will be in the newspaper and other places. So they are doing slowly something called creeping genocide. I have here the IWGIA's “Militarization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh—The Slow Demise of the Region’s Indigenous Peoples”. If anybody is interested, I can send you an electronic copy. I have the document, if anybody's interested. I have 15 copies here. You can pick them up. Most of the documents are here.
Surprisingly—I'm so happy—on February 18 we got documents from Amnesty International about the silencing of the indigenous people of Bangladesh. They are not allowed to talk to foreigners, not even to Bangladeshi organizations and individuals. This is very....
I am saying that enough is enough. This is what I have to say.
Thank you, sir.