Dams, guns and refugees: irresponsible development and environmental conflicts displace rural people, especially when the tensions lead to violence.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Bengalis upon the banks and the waters of the Karnaphuli River in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) saw something without of the ordinary. A strange small watercraft was being paddled up the river. It contained three Europeans wearing tropical helmets; single man in the back seat and sum of two units boys sharing the front seat.

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These were not colonial Britishers who had "stayed on" after independence. Rather, they were partly Jewish Ostdeutsche who were displaced upon the German-Russian front of World War II. I was single of the boys in the brow seat. The craft was a German-produced