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April 11, 2004

Tribal people are losing their ancestral lands

Rezwana Nur

Pai Thui Aung, an ethnic Khashia tribe leader, is an angry man. He is married to one of the two tribal sisters who have inherited a small plot of land from their father. He is fighting on behalf of the sisters who have lost their ancestral land to the forest department that has vigorously pursued its programmes to expanding the country's forestry. The Khashia sisters have lost all their two acres of land.

They have recently learned that the forest department has taken over a large portion of the land in their Rangamati district and their two-acre land has gone as part of that programme. The requisition has hit the two sisters hard. They are now day-labourers and collect dry wood and leaves for their livelihoods.

Aung believes that if this process of taking over tribal lands continues, more tribal people will become poorer and will be forced to the streets. 'The forest officials have taken our lands. This is inhuman. This is rendering poor tribal people homeless and poorer', complains Aung.

The government has been implementing for several years a massive plan to expand the country's forest areas. Bangladesh has only about 10 percent of its land under forest, far below what is needed. Ideally, at least 20 percent of a country should be forested for environmental balance. Aware of that need, the government has embarked on a nationwide foresting programme. The plan has drawn flak from critics, especially the ethnic tribal people who have been living at the edge of forests for many years.

'The poor tribal people are losing their lands and becoming homeless as the government is evicting them in the name of expanding forests,' cries one tribal man, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The tribal people are also critical of the state-run Karnaphuli Paper Mills. The factory needs pulpwood as its main raw material to produce paper. Authorities are raising reserved forests for pulpwood under its pulpwood plantation division. Again the problem is that the plant has affected tribal people living close to the forests or in lands Forest Department claims to be government lands.

Consider the plight of Khang inhabitants after the requisition of land by the Forest Department or the paper mills authorities. Plantations have been made right in the areas that tribal people have used for long as their homesteads.

Tribal people are losing their ancestral lands to other projects such as eco-park in Sylhet and the walling of tribal villages in Tangail in the name of protecting the Madhupur forests. Thus the ethnic tribal people are being harassed and deprived of their rights to lands and to the living.

The tribal people have also complaints against the Bengali settlers who have gone to their areas from the plains and they allegedly either purchased their lands or simply grabbed those. The tribal people are now facing great difficulties to keep control over their lands allegedly because of the settlers from outside.

Bangladesh Human Rights Coordination Council and the Minority Rights Group have identified several factors that have forced the tribal people to loose their lands to the settlers who started arriving in the hilly region in the early 1960s. The practice of borrowing money against the lands is one of those factors. This has been a common process with poor tribal people losing to the wealth of the settlers. In many cases, the deal was done in plain white papers.

Besides, there are allegations of intimidation to force poor tribal people to sell their lands to the settlers. Cheating is also widespread. The rights of the tribal people to their ancestral land are protected by international laws. But those laws seem to have little effect in Bangladesh, where tribal people complain of persecution in many ways.

'The ILO has recognised the tribal people's traditional rights to their lands. The harassment of tribal people must have inspired the ILO to make such a convention', says Sanjiv Drong, General Secretary of Bangladesh Adibashi Forum.

Many tribal people allege that they have not got right to their lands even living there for more than a century. Raja Debashish Roy thinks that the problems caused by the reserved forestry project can be solved if the authorities are sincere. The bottom line is that no one can evict the tribal people from their ancestral land in the name of development or environment.

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