Mro communities’ land being grabbed by rubber company

We are shocked at the way the ancestral land of the indigenous communities in the hills and the plainlands are continuously being grabbed by powerful quarters for business purposes. Only three months ago, we came to know about a five-star hotel and amusement park being built in Bandarban's Chimbuk area evicting six Mro villages. Although the move was protested by the Mro community and various human rights organisations, the work of the project is still ongoing. And now we have learnt that a rubber company grabbed 200 acres of Mro people's jhum land in Bandarban's Lama upazila. As many as 65 families from three villages of the upazila became victims of this mindless grabbing and are now also worried about being evicted from their homes. According to the people of the community, they were not only threatened to be evicted but a false case was also filed against members of the community some years ago to grab their ancestral land.

Since the Mro communities' only source of livelihood is jhum cultivation, it has now become impossible for them to survive. They are so afraid of these grabbers that they have not dared to lodge any complaint to the police or file any case against them. And it is not that the land of the Mro communities have only been grabbed, other indigenous communities also lost their land to various private rubber plantation owners and horticulturists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts since 1997. The same thing also happened to the indigenous people of Madhupur and Dinajpur. How will these people survive if the state does not take any steps to address the issue? And who will protect these people when members of the law enforcing agencies also help the grabbers, as alleged by them?

What is even more frustrating is that indigenous people's land rights are not even protected by our constitution. So, one way of ensuring that they are not illegally evicted from their ancestral land is, by giving them the stewardship of their land, meaning that the people who have been living on this land for generations will remain the custodian of the land and collectively protect them, as experts working with indigenous people's rights have pointed out several times.

The state must ensure that the Mro people who have been living in the upazilas of Bandarban for generations are not driven off their land by powerful business entities. This rubber plantation project must be stopped at all costs and the Mro communities' land should be given back to them. Also, the construction of the five-star hotel in Bandarban's Chimbuk evicting six Mro villages must stop immediately. The UN human rights experts have recently expressed their concerns about constructing this tourist resort which "threatens to dispossess the indigenous Mro peoples of their traditional lands and cause serious environmental damage". We hope our government will pay heed to such concerns.