From the WALL STREET JOURNAL – page one, June 13, 2007

MAN ON A MISSION
In a Bangladesh Forest,
Priest Fights for Tiny Tribe

Father Homrich Battles
Logging and Old Age;
Murder of an Activist
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
June 13, 2007; Page A1

PIRGACHA, Bangladesh -- A half-century ago, the Rev. Eugene Homrich set up a Catholic mission among a tiny pagan tribe clinging to a tropical forest.

He is still here. As a result, perhaps, so are the Garos, a predominantly farming people whose sari-clad women own the family land and pass on the family name.

A native of Muskegon, Mich., Father Homrich has founded schools and built clinics for the Garos, most of whom have converted to Christianity. Once, he personally delivered a baby on the back of his motorcycle. During Bangladesh's bloody civil war in 1971, he stockpiled explosives in his mission and narrowly avoided execution. Now, Father Homrich is confronting the country's forestry department to stem illegal logging of the Modhupur forest, the Garos' ancestral homeland.

Yaroslav Trofimov

Father Homrich says Mass at the mission. Most Garo are Christian, which makes them subject to discrimination in the largely Muslim nation.

To the chagrin of the local administration, the blunt, portly American has become the de facto leader of some 20,000 tribe members. "If it weren't for the father we'd be in a sea of trouble," says Simon Marak, a Garo community activist. "By his grace we're living here."
But there is only so much Father Homrich can still do for the Garos. He is turning 79 this year, and recently spent several months in the U.S. for medical treatment. He can be expelled from the country at any time. And despite his efforts, the Modhupur forest has shrunk through logging and development to some 23,000 square miles, one-tenth its size in the 1950s.
As the country's population keeps soaring, conflict between the Garos and land-hungry outsiders intensifies. The world's third-largest Muslim nation, Bangladesh packs 150 million people, about half the population of the U.S., into an Iowa-sized territory.
In recent years, more than a dozen tribe members have been killed by forestry officers and soldiers because of land disputes, say Garo leaders and human-rights groups in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. In March, the Garos say a prominent tribal activist, Cholesh Ritchil, was tortured to death while in army custody, an incident that sparked a wave of outrage in Bangladesh and prompted protests from Western embassies.
Shaken by the killing, Father Homrich says it's only a matter of time before the Garos' unique culture disappears from Modhupur. "The future for them is in the city, or in India. There is no future here in the jungle," he said last month at the Pirgacha mission, a neat compound shaded by jackfruit and mango trees. "Anyway, there is no jungle left."
But a few hours later, as he shuffles through photos of Mr. Ritchil's cadaver, the priest's fire ignites. "I'll keep going," he vowed. "We'll get their ass."
Father Homrich's path to rural Bangladesh began in a classroom in Muskegon during World War II. One of six siblings born to a factory worker, Father Homrich was fascinated by tales of Catholic missionaries who often visited his primary school. He prepared for missionary work at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and at the Holy Cross College in Washington, D.C. The Holy Cross, a Catholic congregation, had one mission abroad at the time, in what is now Bangladesh.

Tropical Agriculture

The young priest arrived here in 1956, equipped with knowledge of the Bengali language and tropical agriculture. The country was still part of Pakistan, its population less than one-third of today's level. Since ethnic Bengalis usually follow Islam or the Hindu religion, Christian missionaries sought new converts in outlying tribal areas populated by non-Bengali minorities. The Modhupur forest was one of the closest such areas, a half day's drive by car from Dhaka.
In the late 1950s, the forest still teemed with monkeys, deer and leopards. Some 25,000 Garo people made their home here, in an enclave separated from South Asia's larger community of Garos -- people ethnically and linguistically related to Tibetans and Burmese, and concentrated in India's Meghalaya state. Moving to the Modhupur forest alone, Father Homrich established a new mission deep in the jungle.
Most of the Garos whom Father Homrich encountered followed animist cults, sacrificing chickens and goats to shrines of multiple gods. Living in small huts in clearings, they followed slash-and-burn agriculture on a rotation that anthropologists say gave the forest time to recover.
He was immediately won over by the Garos' serene demeanor. "These are wonderful people," he says, as smiling tribal women in colorful saris sweep leaves from the mission's garden. "They have an inner peace that is amazing in this messy country. They live in the eye of God."
The jungle was a deadly place at the time. Malaria, scabies, intestinal parasites and a lethal black fever, known in the West as visceral leishmaniasis, claimed lives almost daily. Father Homrich taught villagers to dig wells and set up separate outhouses, and provided rudimentary medical services at a mission clinic.
The American priest was also accepted as a member of the tribe soon after arrival, and became intimately involved in running the tribal affairs.
The peace was shattered in March 1971, when the country sought independence from Pakistan. Pakistani troops assisted by Islamist militias responded with a bloody crackdown, and most ethnic Bengali soldiers deserted. On an April morning, Father Homrich woke up to find two Indian army officers sipping tea on his porch. India, as an enemy of Pakistan, supported Bangladesh's independence bid. The officers had come to help organize the local insurgency.
Father Homrich embraced the guerrillas, stockpiling India-supplied arms and explosives at the mission. The Pakistanis shelled his mission with mortars, and Father Homrich and 32 Garo leaders were taken to a military encampment. There, the group was told they would be executed for aiding the insurgents, say Father Homrich and Garo villagers.

Aware that the Pakistani army was trained and supported by the U.S., Father Homrich asked the local Pakistani commander where he had studied. "Camden, New Jersey," came the answer. "Would you really want this headline in tomorrow's U.S. newspapers: American priest executed by American-educated Pakistani officer?" Father Homrich recalls asking. The officer later ordered the detainees to be released.
When the war ended in December 1971, the new Bangladeshi state awarded Father Homrich a "Freedom Fighter" certificate that he displays above his door.
The new country was hard-pressed for land. Waves of ethnic Bengalis flocked to the Modhupur area, the only unfarmed patch in central Bangladesh. The democratically elected administrations and military regimes that governed Bangladesh after 1971 were consistent on one issue: They sought to evict the Garos from Modhupur to make room for the fast-growing Bengali majority.
At one point, a colonel in charge of Bangladesh's Tea Board, a government agency supervising the tea-growing industry, arrived at the mission with a proposal: All the Garos should be resettled on tea plantations elsewhere.
Father Homrich, who had been aware of the idea, says he invited some bearded Maoist rebels who prowled the region. He knew the rebels from treating their family members at the mission clinic, open to all comers. "Look behind you -- these men have come to cut your head off," he recalls telling the colonel. The colonel left. The tea plan was never raised again.
Having established himself as a voice for the Garo people, Father Homrich became their advocate in a larger struggle. In 1984, Bangladesh's government declared that most of the land inhabited by the Garos was state forest. The tribe members, it said, were illegal squatters.

Outside Poachers

The Garos aren't the only ones cutting down the forest's valuable sal trees. Forestry officials often allow outside poachers to log, and usually look the other way when Bengali villagers convert forest land into farms, Father Homrich and villagers say. "Wherever there is the forest department, there is no forest left," quips Father Homrich. Yet the government has filed thousands of illegal-logging suits against the Garos and razed many of their banana and pineapple plantations.
Rabindranath Adahkary, the chief local forestry official in Modhupur, said in a recent interview that there is no corruption in his department. A few days later his boss, the forest department's national chief, was arrested on corruption charges.
Mr. Ritchil, the Garo leader, was one of many tribe members wanted by the forestry department. On March 18, witnesses say he was picked up by the Bangladeshi army at an improvised roadblock on his way back from a wedding. He was taken to a military camp near Modhupur for interrogation about weapons he allegedly owned, according to a tribe member who was arrested with him. Bangladesh's army enjoys wide-ranging powers of arrest and detention after intervening in January to abort an election and to put the country under emergency rule.
Mr. Ritchil's body was returned to the family the following day. According to witnesses and photographs, most of it was covered in dark bruises. Mr. Ritchil's testicles were cut off and his eyes were mutilated. His finger bones were snapped, with pliers, says the tribe member who says he witnessed the torture. At the time, officials said Mr. Ritchil died of a heart attack.
Determined to ensure the killing didn't go unnoticed, Father Homrich used a patchy mobile-phone connection -- there are no land lines in the forest -- to send emails about Mr. Ritchil's death, as well as photos of his corpse, to Western embassies, journalists and human-rights groups.
The emails caused an uproar. Human-rights groups sent investigators to Modhupur. The U.S. ambassador in Dhaka, Patricia Butenis, raised the case directly with senior Bangladeshi military commanders, and Bangladesh's government established a commission of inquiry into the incident. The local army commander and forestry officials were transferred out of the region.
The outcry over Mr. Ritchil's death showed the formidable influence an American Christian missionary exerts in the middle of this predominantly Muslim nation -- an influence that some ethnic Bengalis resent. Human-rights activists and nongovernmental organizations in Dhaka, while appreciative of Father Homrich's work, point out that in the long run, the Garos' association with the Christian religion might hurt the tribe's interests.
Here in the forest, the most vocal critic is Zakir Hussein, the Modhupur-based chairman of the local administration, which governs a territory inhabited by most of the area's Garos and some 45,000 ethnic Bengalis. He says he is frustrated that the Garos view the missionary, and not his administration, as their authority. "I expect Father Homrich to be neutral," says Mr. Hussein, a pious Muslim who wears a red-hennaed beard and keeps a model of Mecca's Kaaba shrine on his desk. "But whenever there is a conflict, he always takes a position defending the Garos because they are Christian."
Father Homrich points out that Mr. Hussein's supporters organized a public celebration when Mr. Ritchil was killed in March.
The American missionary is more concerned with the attitude of Bangladesh's army-installed government, which displays less and less tolerance for critics like him. A U.S. citizen, Father Homrich must have his visa renewed every year. "They will probably kick me out of the country," he says.
In the meantime, the priest, who reports to the local bishop, wakes at 4:30 a.m. to prepare for mass in the mission, which has flush toilets and a satellite-TV hookup that lets him keep abreast of current events. Unlike the rest of the day, when he walks around dressed like a farmer in a nondescript T-shirt and khaki shorts, Father Homrich wears a prim white cassock as he delivers a sermon.

Native Nurses

The mission, supported by donations from Christian organizations in the West, now has 24 primary schools throughout the forest, employing 45 teachers and producing a literacy rate of some 85% among the Garos, according to Father Homrich. That's well above Bangladesh's national average of less than 50%. Improved education and health -- what Father Homrich describes as his lasting legacy -- have allowed many Garos to find relatively well-paid jobs in the capital as nurses, beauticians, and, because of their reputation for honesty, as household help for wealthy families. Dozens of local Garos have even gone to college in Dhaka, and the mission's clinic is staffed nowadays by five native nurses.
Recently, some of them have had to take care of Father Homrich. Two and a half years ago, the priest slipped off a ladder while entering a nearby pond for a swim, and broke his leg. With an open fracture, the leg became infected.
After unsuccessful treatment in a Dhaka hospital, Father Homrich was flown to the U.S., where he says advanced antibiotics saved his leg and his life. He spent seven months recovering, in part in a retirement community. With every day, he grew desperate to return to the Garos. "I couldn't stand to be with old people," Father Homrich says. "They live in the past."
Back at Pirgacha, Father Homrich made rounds at the mission clinic on a recent day, checking on fever-ridden children. Nurses teased him for the braces he wears on his leg, suggesting he needs a new limb. He complained that he still hasn't gotten used to the weather.
All three of Father Homrich's brothers passed away this year. He hopes to remain among the Garos for the rest of his life. "Here," he says, "is a garden of Eden."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com