PROGRAM

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT MECHANISM PROCESS IN BANGLADESH: A
CASE STUDY OF CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS
DELWAR HOSSAIN

The region of South Asia is profoundly featured by both internal and interstate conflicts. Indeed there is not a single country in the region today that is unaffected by national strife and violence. Bangladesh is no exception to it. Historically, the very emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state on December 16, 1971 was soaked in blood and tears. Since then Bangladesh has been witnessing both interstate and intrastate conflicts involving diverse issues and actors. The CHT conflict is cited as one of the successful cases for conflict management in the contemporary world where the state and a non-state force have signed a Peace Accord to end about 2-decade old armed struggle. It is a conflict where the successive political regimes in Bangladesh took different approaches from military to non-military at different times although the underlying focus remained on military solution. It was expected that the CHT conflict would be easily suppressed and that the Hill people would accept Bangladesh’s sovereignty in course of time. But contrary to expectations, the CHT conflict raged for decades, gradually miring the entire region in insurgency and conflicts of identity. Understanding the limitations of their counterinsurgency strategy in the CHT, the Bangladesh government effected a major policy-shift towards the CHT conflict in 1990s and made several attempts to negotiate peace with the Pahari (Hill People) groups. Finally, the government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and Parbatya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samity (PCJSS) signed the CHT Peace Accord on 2 December 1997 recognizing the special status of the Hill people. The peace accord ensures that the CHT enjoys the status of a tribal-inhabited region, which comes close to being a self-governing entity in the new institutional landscape holding the unprecedented management powers that accompany it. The accord however has many ambiguities and has left many of the crucial issues like, land, property rights, and the issue of Bengali settlers quite ambiguous. Despite these ambiguities, the Accord has unfolded a new phase in conflict management mechanism process in the CHT. 

• Map out the conflict scenarios in Bangladesh;
• Investigate how the CHT conflict was rooted and developed with implications for the CHT region and beyond;
• Review the role played by the external forces in the persistence and management of the CHT conflict;
• Investigate how the armed insurgency in the CHT ended through a peace process; and
• Study different challenges to the management of the CHT conflict in the post-Accord period.

The following hypotheses apply to the objectives mentioned above:

• Conflicts need to be effectively managed to enhance national and international security and development; and
• Bangladesh follows various types of conflict management mechanism processes

*Paper presented in an International Workshop on Conflict Management Mechanisms and the Challenge of Peace organized by the Program on Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, Department of International Relations, University of Karachi in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Islamabad at the Arts Auditorium on November 26-27-2007