Brief History of the Commission

In the backdrop of alarming reports of human rights violation that seeped out of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) which was completely closed off for foreigners in the 1980s, the CHT Commission was set up in 1990 jointly by the Organising Committee CHT Campaign (OCCHTC), an Amsterdam based organization and International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), based in Copenhagen. The Commission comprised of five members and included renowned indigenous peoples’ rights activists from Norway, Greenland and Australia, a lawyer and a member of the European Parliament.

 

The Commission carried out its first investigation in the field in 1990 with assistance of resource persons from OCCHTC and IWGIA. The report of the investigation – subsequently published as “Life is not Ours” – documented widespread human rights violations of the indigenous populations in the CHT by the various machinery of the Bangladeshi state with the Army as the lead perpetrator. The report remains till date the most thoroughly documented publication on the human rights violations of the indigenous peoples in CHT.

 

The Commission subsequently published four more ‘updates’ of the original report in 1992, 1994, 1997 and the last one in 2000. All these updates further brought out a more worrisome spectrum of the situation in CHT, namely that over the years there has been little change in the situation of human rights violation in the region.

 

Since the last update in 2000, no further reports have been produced and the Commission itself has been largely inactive. However, the limited implementation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord of 1997 especially with regards to resolving land disputes, as well as worrying reports of continued violations of human rights in the region, continuous influx of Bengali settlers and continued presence of the military made it compelling to re-establish the CHT Commission. 

The CHT situation is however different today and opportunities for positive steps towards peace exist.  As opposed to a few years ago, there is now an increased information flow as to what is happening on the ground in the hill tracts.  The issues at the core of the conflict are well known to the international community both within and outside Bangladesh. More importantly, the CHT issues are increasingly becoming a concern of many people within Bangladesh and many human rights organizations, media activists, and other concerned individuals within Bangladesh are working hard to find solutions to a peaceful future in the CHT.

 

With this backdrop in mind, concerned individuals met in Copenhagen on May 31 and June 1, 2008 to discuss the situation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and to discuss the re-establishment of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission. The international Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission (CHT Commission) was re-established.