Securing Land Rights of Oraon Indigenous community at Baluchor, Sylhet 2014
ECDO has been working for empowering the ethnic people so that they could recognize their rights and claim their entitlements from government and different service providers. Since long, ethnic people of Bangladesh have been deprived of their land rights. As most of these ethnic communities are not educated and they have minimal knowledge on land management, their land documents remain obsolete and most of these are not updated.
In 2014, ECDO has been successful in protecting the rights over the land of Oraon, a small ethnic community living close to Syhet city area. For generations, they were living in Baluchor area of Sylhet. On 18th February, 2014, the land grabbers started to construct a temporary shade on the land and created pressure on Oraon community to leave the land so that they can grab it permanently and the owner of the land is uprooted. The land grabber was local Union Parishad Chairman, claimed that he purchased the land years ago. In support to his argument, they presented a set of fake documents. Oraon community contacted with the authority of ECDO and the authority of ECDO responded immediately. First of all the matter was reported to local police and Assistant Commissioner of Land and Upazila Nirbahi Officer, Sylhet Sadar. ECDO successfully was able to stop the grabber by coordinating and involving three important pressure groups; civil society, media and law enforcement agency of government. Both local and national media covered the story with a special importance.
The active response from ECDO coupled with the strong support from other networks and media built confidence among Oraon community and they took initiatives for dismantling the structure that was illegally built on their land. However, this was the first case, where indigenous people got their land back even after illegal grabbing.
The above activities of ECDO were under the project “Strengthening the voice of Human Rights Defenders to protect rights and entitlement of ethnic minorities” supported by European Union and Oxfam. The European Union recognized this achievement as a success story under their EIDHR (European Instrument for Democracy and Human rights) tools. This success story was globally published from Brussels, Headquarter of European Union. In should be mentioned that the whole movements were coordinated by a group of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) of ECDO.
