Dilemmas in planning crisis prevention: NGOs in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

The signing of the Peace Accord between the Government of Bangladesh and the Parbattya Chattragam Jana Samhati Samiti (JSS) on 2nd December 1997 has been recognised worldwide. The peace accord has been rewarded with the general appreciation of donor agencies and other international players in the development business. The various multilateral and bilateral organisations have expressed their will to provide active support for the peace process and to increase their efforts to develop the Chittagong Hill Tracts Region (CHT), which had been badly neglected for about 20 years. Among the agencies engaged in energetic planning is the German Technical Cooperation organisation (GTZ). Since they enjoy well-established relationships with the Bangladeshi government resulting from long years of intensive development-cooperation, the Germans have been considering ways of launching an area of activity devoted to development and peace-building in the CHT. This article deals with the problems and difficulties of designing a project that will, so far as possible, avoid conflictive issues in a post-conflict region. It is based on extensive research done in the CHT 1999 and 20001; the second phase was conducted during an internship with GTZ's Appraisal Mission in the CHT. Following a short overview of the international discourse on crisis-prevention and peace-building, the author will show how donor agencies attempt to deal with the CHT case, with German policy and concrete ideas as the focus. The next step will be to define what the donor agencies call "local framework", by which is meant the context surrounding a possible project. In the case of the CHT as a post-conflict region, ethnicity might be the most important category that structures the social context. After considering how to analyse ethnic diversity in the CHT, the author will concentrate on the discourse of civil society, which has become, duplicating the Bangladeshi mainland model, an important stage from which various actors move into the development business, in Bangladesh predominantly in form of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The main thrust of the article will then be to analyse the ethnic relevance of NGOs operating in the CHT, in order to point out some important issues which might affect peace-building efforts. The central argument will focus on the question of choosing a counterpart without taking over the standpoint of one of the parties to the conflict, which is a basic policy concern on the donor side.