Chittagong chanting

Amazon sells the flag of the CHT, which prompted me to some comments...

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is an area in the eastern part of Bangladesh. The native population is Buddhist and animist, yet CHT was awarded to Muslim East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) when India was partitioned. Ethnic tensions have characterized the area ever since. Many of the natives live on a “primitive” or “tribal” level. The conflict between CHT and Pakistan/Bangladesh may sound obscure in the extreme, but I actually heard about it already during the 1980's. For whatever reason, Swedish leftists wrote about the conflict in their magazines. Don't ask me why. There was a small Fourth World solidarity group in Stockholm which expressed its support for Native struggles around the world (including West Papua, American Indians and CHT) – its leader was a tall old hippie with a penchant for Buddhist chanting – but I never understood why they were interested in Chittagong in particular rather than, say, Nagaland or the Sami in Lapland! Bangladesh was pro-Western during the 1980's, which perhaps explains the situation. Chanting or not, the flag of the CHT shown here is unofficial and associated with the autonomy struggle of the Jumma, the collective name of the disparate tribes in the region. The political organization using the flag is called the PCJSS. I suppose the struggle continues…