The InternationalCovenant on Civil and Political Rights: A Study on Bangladesh Compliance languages are being wiped out. Massacre of indigenous people, burning of their houses, arbitrary arrests, torture, extra-judicial executions and ‘disappearances’ reportedly perpetrated by or with the connivance of the military and law enforcement agencies during the years of armed conflict, depict the human rights situation in the region. In 1990, information from one refugee camp in India indicated that one in every ten of the total population had been a victim of rape in the CHT, and over 94% of the alleged cases of rape of the hill women were by security forces.88 Arbitrary arrest and inhuman and degrading treatment of the hill people was a routine occurrence during the period of insurgency. These were planned actions as a part of a macro objective of nation building through forced assimilation and forced expulsion. Since 1980 there have been eleven major instances of massacre of the hill people by Bengali settlers and security personnel in which around 2000 hill men died.89 On the other hand, the PCJSS through its ideological and organizational framework undertook to organise the hill people on a nationalistic agenda. The persecution in the CHT led to the demand by the PCJSS for a separate nationhood for the hill people. This party, formed in the wake of Sheikh Mujib’s refusal in 1972 to recognise the hill people as a community distinct from Bengalis, had since the mid 1980s been referring to the hill people as the ‘Jumma nation’.90 The party’s nationalistic agenda has been explicitly spelt out in its 90 Schendal, “The Invention of Jumma,” 121. 69