Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord in Bangladesh: Reconciling the Issues of Human Rights, Indigenous Rights and Environmental Governance

The conflicts between the tribal people and the settlers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) area of Bangladesh has long been a cause of violation of human rights of the inhabitants, obstruction in the path of sustainable development, as well as ecosystem destruction, loss of biodiversity and natural resource degradation. To end this long term problem and violation in the CHT, an agreement generally known as the ‘peace accord’ was signed in 1997. However, several years after signing the accord, conflict resolution, thus sustainable development in CHT, is yet to be attained. Failure of effective implementation of the peace accord has resulted in a very critical situation at present. At the international level it has been recognized long ago that this kind of conflict should be addressed by reconciling human rights issues, indigenous rights, and environmental governance of the area. The purpose of this paper is to review the peace accord and its status of implementation to analyze it from the point of view of reconciliation of the above-mentioned issues.