For the first time in over a decade, human rights defenders can meet freely in Dhaka without fear of arrest, surveillance, harassment, or worse. After the student-led mass uprising that ousted the repressive Sheikh Hasina government in August, many Bangladeshis can hope for a democratic and rights-respecting future.

However, there is still one place where human rights monitors cannot travel or work freely in Bangladesh: the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The region, which borders India and Myanmar in southeastern Bangladesh, is home to just under a million Indigenous people. Over the last five decades, the policies of the Bangladesh government aimed at controlling the region have displaced many members of the Indigenous population, not giving them their due rights to their land and identity.

The policies in the region under the interim government have remained nearly identical to those under Sheikh Hasina. The interim government continues to restrict access by requiring foreigners to inform the home ministry prior to any visit. Any international human rights monitors must be accompanied by a guide, vetted by the ministry, making it essentially impossible for activists and human rights victims to speak freely about the human rights abuses they face.

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Where is inclusivity for the Indigenous people?

With the population cut off from international monitors and with local activists under heavy government surveillance, abuses in the region are rarely investigated or prosecuted. It is disappointing that even as Bangladesh plans to usher in a wave of reforms to restore rights and ensure accountability for the indiscriminate use of force, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, and unaccounted-for killings, an Indigenous activist told me that those "winds of change have yet to come to the CHT."

Michael Chakma, an Indigenous rights activist, was among those forcibly disappeared by the Sheikh Hasina government. He was unlawfully detained in April 2019, and even as security forces and government officials denied his arrest, he was tortured and interrogated in custody.

He was among the handful of detainees who emerged alive from a secret detention centre in August after the Hasina government folded. But the military remains heavily deployed in the CHT region with credible reports of abuse of civilians.

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CHT Accord implementation a pressing need

In the late 1970s, the government instituted a "population transfer programme," offering cash and in-kind incentives to members of the country's majority Bangalee community to move to the CHT area. In 1977, the military moved into the region in response to the rise of local armed groups opposed to the "settlers."

In 1997, the government signed a peace accord to end the violence and officially recognise the distinct ethnicity and relative autonomy of the tribes and Indigenous people of the CHT region. Yet, nearly 30 years later, the accord is yet to be fully implemented. And violence continues to this day.

Civil society activists have called for the full implementation of the 1997 accord, with only 25 of its 72 provisions addressed. One of them was to set up a commission to ensure "a discrimination-free society establishing rights of the national minorities."

Yet, that discrimination seems entrenched. Throughout Dhaka, the streets are covered in protest art, illustrating the student activists' dedication and their visions for Bangladesh's future. In the CHT region, too, activists painted in solidarity, but theirs was removed. "The revolution is for everyone in Bangladesh, except for those in the CHT," one activist told me.

Activists have called for a Bangladesh 2.0, where rights are respected, security forces serve the public, and authorities—including the military—are held to account. Freedom and justice in the CHT region should serve as a test for whether these aspirations are a reality.

Julia Bleckner is senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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