A delegation of the donor community led by the UNDP would visit the
Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) from June 1 to assess security in the area and
prepare a strategy for future development needs of the region.
Officials said yesterday that the team consisting of representatives of the
UNDP, Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other development partners of
Bangladesh would be in the CHT until June 9.
Besides, a security expert from the United States along with Major General
(retd.) Mainul Hossain Choudhury, a security consultant for the UNDP will
take part in the programme. The team would also include a number of
Bangladeshi officials, a director general of the foreign ministry, a joint
secretary of the CHT affairs ministry, and a brigadier general to represent
the army.
It would meet people and visit some areas which will be eventually chosen as
development sites where the government is preparing to run income-generating
programmes like pig and goat rearing, fisheries, and growing gingers,
turmerics, vegetables, bananas and pineapples.
A highly placed CHT official told The Daily Star yesterday that the
government aims to create job opportunities through development programmes
for raising the living standards of the people in the region torn by decades
of insurgency.
It also aims to provide the youth of the region with employment in an effort
to prevent them from engaging in criminal activities such as toll
collection, he added.
The development partners of Bangladesh decided to make an on-the-spot
assessment of the situation following the deterioration of law and order in
the CHT. All the foreign-aided projects halted following the abduction of
three European engineers working at a Danish-aided road project at Rangamati
on February 16 last year for ransom.
The road project is vital for the CHT since it would make communication
easy, facilitating marketing of agricultural produce. The engineers were
rescued a month later by the army, but the kidnappers are yet to be booked.
A case was filed in the Naniarchar Police Station but there has been no
progress. A team of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) from
Chittagong recently visited the area but they left without a proper
investigation, sources from Rangamati told this paper yesterday. However,
the case has not yet been closed officially, they added.
The abduction and the reported payment of ransom of about Tk 1 crore had led
to a series of kidnappings by a section of people patronised by the
political groups. This caused the law and order to deteriorate in the three
CHT districts, sources said. The authorities are preparing for a crackdown
on the miscreants to curb crimes, a highly placed official in Dhaka added.