ICC Note: 

The Church in Bangladesh is speaking up for the right of minorities, both ethnic and religious, claiming the government has done little to help these communities. A Muslim-majority nation, Bangladesh’s religious minorities often face widespread discrimination because of their religious identity. Often, their low social status allows the country’s Muslim-majority to take advantage of them and, at times, outright abuse them. Will the Church be able to reverse this situation? 

07/28/2017 Bangladesh (Herald Malaysia) – The Catholic Church in Bangladesh is speaking up for the rights of the country’s ethnic minorities, bemoaning the fact that ethnic and religious minorities are not explicitly mentioned in the nation’s constitution.

Archbishop Moses Costa of Chittagong told international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that “the government does not acknowledge their rightful existence and ignores them, so that they have hardly any possibility” of bettering their position in society.

He added that minorities are often discriminated against in the workplace, even in some schools, since they do not speak the national language—and “when the ethnic minorities suffer, the Church also suffers, for 60 percent of our Catholic faithful belong to this part of the population,” the bishop said. He noted that he Catholic Church is the only institution standing up for the rights and human dignity of the minorities.

Archbishop Costa described how, in the wake of severe flooding last year in the so-called Chittagong Hill Tracts, a mountainous province within his archdiocese, the government refused to aid the ethnic minorities living there and denied the existence of the crisis. He also criticized the exploitation of the tribal peoples in the ship-breaking yards of Chittagong Harbor, where unseaworthy ships are broken up into their component parts for reuse in other ways. For example, the steel components are dismantled and used as structural steel in buildings. “This work is carried out under very hazardous conditions and claims innumerable human lives. But I am not permitted to visit this place, because the authorities have refused me permission,” the archbishop charged.

Asked about the attacks on Christians and on Church properties which have been escalating in the overwhelmingly Muslim country, the archbishop said that a mixture of political and religious motives fuel the violence. On the one hand, there often attempts to unjustly gain possession of land and properties belonging to the tribal peoples, who are often Christians; however, the prelate said that some attacks have a religious aspect, a factor that is becoming more pronounced. There are a many different Islamic groups and organizations in Bangladesh.

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