Temporary migration Voluntary migration

RIGHTS AIPP AIPP Regional Capacity Building Program - Training Manual on the UNDRIP 147 • Rural to urban migration: people moving from the countryside to the cities. It is more common in developing countries where urban construction and industrialization cre- ate jobs, thus attracting people. • Urban to rural migration: people moving from the cities to the countryside. It is more common in developed countries where the higher cost of urban living forces poor people to move to the fringes of the city, to suburban areas. • Rural to rural migration: This takes place when people seek a better life in another part of the country. Often, this “other part of the country” are indigenous peoples’ territories, to which settlers are attracted. Many settlers migrating to indigenous peoples’ territories do it on their own. They are called spontaneous settlers. In other cases, it is indigenous people who move spontaneously into frontier areas, where they live with other settlers from other areas, to form mixed-ethnic communities. Often, however, it is the state which promotes migration to indigenous peoples’ territories. In such cases, the migrants can be called state-sponsored settlers. Large-scale state-sponsored migration often happens within the framework of explicit programs, which can be called trans- migration programs. Examples for transmigration programs involving indigenous peoples’ territories are those that have been implemented in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh; the Central Highlands of Vietnam; various parts of the Philippines, but especially on the islands of Mindoro, Palawan and Mindanao; and West Papua in Indonesia. Even where no explicit state program for settler colonization of indigenous peoples’ ter- ritories exists, government at least tolerates it. Settler colonization of indigenous peoples’ ter- ritories within the borders of a particular country is an aspect of internal colonialism. Other as- pects of internal colonialism are the massive exploitation of natural resources by logging, mining and power corporations, and large-scale land conversion for plantations, again either under the sponsorship or with the toleration of the state. EXAMPLE THE TRANSMIGRATION PROGRAM IN THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS Mainly as part of its anti-insurgency strategy, the government of Bangladesh launched a large-scale transmigration program in 1979. Over the ensuing years, between 200,000 and 450,000 Bengali-speaking migrants from various parts of Bangladesh were resettled in all the three districts of the Chittagong Hill Tracts CHT. The majority of the migrants were Muslims. One of the key objectives was to increase the proportion of Muslim Bengalis living in the CHT. The presence of Bengali settlers loyal to the state would allow the state security forces to exert more effective control over the CHT. Naturally, turning the indigenous people into a minority in their own land would weaken them and their support to the armed resistance movement. Thus, while in 1951 the indigenous peoples accounted for 90.01 of the population of 287,688, by 1991 they made up only 51.43 of a popula- tion of 974,445. Module-7