The Chittagong Hill Tracts are three districts in Bangladesh's south-east — Bandarban, Rangamati, and Khagrachhari — covering about 10% of the country's territory and a fraction of its population. They are mountainous, ethnically distinct from the Bengali-majority plains, and historically administered under special rules. From the late 1970s through the 1990s they were the site of a long, low-intensity armed conflict between the Bangladesh Army and the Shanti Bahini, the armed wing of the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti.
The CHT Accord, signed in December 1997, was supposed to end that. Land commissions, demilitarisation, decentralised governance — all on the table. The BPO record covers the post- Accord decades. Since 1991 the desk has coded 755 incidents under the cross-cutting CHT theme. That's a small share of the national total — but the texture of those incidents is what makes them worth reading carefully.
Three eras in the record
Pre-Accord (≤1997). Sparse coverage in the BPO record — the desk's source net was narrower in the 1990s and the conflict was actively suppressed in the press. Treat anything before 1998 as a lower bound on what was happening, not a count of what occurred.
Accord-decade (1998–2007). Demilitarisation promised in the Accord did not happen on the schedule expected, and the BPO record from this period captures repeated confrontations: land-grab disputes, military checkpoints, intra- community fights between settler and indigenous communities, and a smaller number of armed encounters with residual factions. The Awami League came into government for one term in 1996–2001; the BNP returned 2001–2006; the political commitment to implementing the Accord ebbed and flowed with government changes.
Post-2009. The Awami League returned to power in 2009 and held it through 2024. CHT incident counts in the record do not drop. The composition shifts: more incidents involving the police and RAB (not just the army), more land- commission disputes flowing to district courts, more incidents coded as "communal" between Bengali settlers and indigenous communities. The recent record (2018-onward) also contains incidents that wouldn't have surfaced earlier — social-media flare-ups, online communal incitement, COVID-19 enforcement in remote upazillas.
What the Accord did and didn't do
Read the BPO record from any vantage and the same observation holds: armed military-vs-militant clashes essentially ended in the early 2000s. That part of the Accord worked. What didn't end was the security presence: regular army units remained deployed in the three districts; checkpoints stayed up; clearance requirements for non-indigenous visitors persisted. Whether this counts as "peace" depends on what you measure.
The land-commission disputes are the bigger story the record tells. The BPO desk has coded a steady stream of incidents across all three districts involving disputed plots, settler- indigenous confrontations, and administrative actions contested by community groups. These are not headline events. They are the texture of an unresolved land settlement playing out over decades.
What to do with this
If you are writing about the CHT, default to the three-district filter, not just the theme tag. The cross-cutting code is applied conservatively — incidents that obviously belong (an attack on a Buddhist temple in Rangamati, for instance) get the tag; incidents that are CHT-located but generic (a road- traffic dispute in Bandarban town) often don't. The geographic filter captures both.
Treat the post-Accord low in armed-confrontation incidents as partial good news. Read the persistent baseline of land-and- community disputes as the unfinished agenda.