Blaming the victim? The state of forest governance in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

With 13,274 square kilometers of surface area, the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) comprises three hill districts of Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban and is geographically an isolated region of Bangladesh. It shares international borders with India in the north-east and Myanmar in the south. The area of CHT constitutes 10 percent of the total area of Bangladesh. There are at present 13 indigenous communities with distinct socio-cultural identities and people from Bengali ethnicity who are mostly government sponsored settlers living in CHT. During the end of British colonial rule in the Indian sub-continent, 98 percent of her inhabitants were indigenous communities. During the Pakistan period (1947-1971), there were migrations of Bengali traders and government employees into the region. However, after the independence of Bangladesh, there was a sudden flow of Bengali migrants under government patronage. Around 400,000 people from other parts of Bangladesh were given settlement in the CHT under a strategic population transfer plan during the period 1978-1984. As a result this planned population migration has resulted in land alienation, communal conflict and underlying causes of poverty in the region.