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Internally Displaced Persons – 1998

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Peace Accord set up a Task Force on Rehabilitation of Returnee Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons for the purpose of monitoring and coordinating this process with the government. By and large, the international refugees (in Tripura) were treated as a priority and aid packages facilitated their return to Bangladesh; however, a large percentage, possibly over sixty percent, were unable to reclaim their property. Just as the majority of refugees were unable to reclaim their property, the rehabilitation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) met with very little practical success also. The lack of progress on rehabilitation stemmed from implementation problems in areas of citizenship reform and land reform. IDPs could not be rehabilitated because government members and tribal members on the Task Force were never able to agree on who qualifies for IDP status, mainly due to the lack of implementation of citizenship reform. The Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (English: United People’s Party of the Chittagong Hill Tracts), or PCJSS, maintained that the 1997 Accord excluded Bengalis from being re-settled to the CHT. The PCJSS demanded that only tribal people could be classified as IDPs and rehabilitated.¹

These PCJSS claims rested on the assumption that citizenship reform, as called for by the Accord, would be fully implemented, vesting sole authority to issue “permanent residency certificates” with the tribal Circle Chiefs. This did not happen. Instead, Bengalis were being issued permanent residency certificates by CHT Deputy Commissioners who happened to be ethnic Bengalis. Thus, as IDPs, Bengalis were qualified to be rehabilitated to the lands titled to them by the Government of Bangladesh in the settler programs of the 1980s, while most tribal refugees received nothing as they lacked government issued titles to the lands they occupied decades earlier before the insurgency.

In February and March, an estimated 10,000 tribal people from the Indian state of Mizoram crossed into southeastern Bangladesh. Many of these refugees “had found their abandoned homes taken over.”²

1. “Study on the status of implementation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord of 1997, submitted by the Special Rapporteur,” UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) (E/C.19/2011/6), February 18, 2011, accessed November 19, 2014, http://www.refworld.org/docid/4dbfb1262.html.
2. “10,000 Mizoram refugees cross into Bangladesh,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, March 26, 1998.