Indigenous Peoples The Indigenous community of the CHT experienced widespread discrimination and abuse despite nationwide government quotas for participation of Indigenous CHT residents in the civil service and higher education. These conditions also persisted despite provisions for local governance in the 1997 CHT Peace Accord, which has not been fully implemented, specifically the portions of the accord empowering a CHT-specific special administrative system consisting of the three Hill District Councils and the Regional Council. Indigenous persons from the CHT were unable to participate effectively in decisions affecting their lands due to disagreements regarding land dispute resolution procedures under the Land Commission Act. Local organizations claimed the army and intelligence forces carried out extrajudicial killings and arbitrary arrests; beat, harassed, threatened, and jailed Indigenous people on false charges; and labeled rights activists as terrorists and extortionists. In July the government ordered media not to use the word “indigenous” in shows organized for the August 9 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous activists claimed ethnic minorities were drastically undercounted by the census, impacting land rights and the development budget of the CHT. The official census reported 1.65 million minority persons, while the Bangladesh Indigenous Peoples’ Forum estimated there were around three million ethnic minority persons. While the country had a 20 percent poverty rate, poverty in the plains, where some Indigenous persons lived, was more than 80 percent and more than 65 percent in the CHT. Organizations corroborated health care available to Indigenous persons was well below the standard available to non-Indigenous persons in the country. Throughout the pandemic, multiple NGOs reported severe food insecurity due to the abrupt job loss by Indigenous persons outside the CHT. Since many Indigenous persons most in need of assistance lived in remote areas difficult to access by vehicles, many Indigenous communities reported receiving no government assistance. Human rights organizations continued to allege evictions and communal attacks Page 41