Bangladesh, the world’s eighth most populous country, on Friday cut off telecommunications connections, including television news channels and the internet, which is operating with interruptions, after a week of violent student protests that have left at least 50 dead, according to hospital data cited by several news agencies. The demonstrations, which have blocked the streets of Dhaka, the capital of the Asian country, were triggered by student anger at the high rate of youth unemployment and the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate a quota system that reserves 30% of public jobs for families of combatants in Pakistan’s war of independence.
Violence is raging in 47 of the country’s 64 districts, with more than a thousand people injured. According to several regional media outlets citing anonymous sources, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government called in the army late on Thursday to help maintain order. The protests have also opened up old and delicate political fissures, between those who fought for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 and those accused of collaborating with Islamabad. Among the former is Hasina’s ruling party, the Awami League, which called the protesters “unjust”.racekar”, a term used to describe the collaborators of that time.
Authorities had already cut some mobile phone services on Thursday to try to quell the unrest, but the disruption has been extended to the whole country since Friday morning. Telephone calls abroad are interrupted, while the websites of several local newspapers have not been updated. Social media is also down. Television channels, including state-run BTV – whose offices were attacked on Thursday – have stopped broadcasting their regular programming, although entertainment channels were operating normally, according to a Reuters witness. The government said it was willing to hold talks with protesters, but they refused, saying, in its words, that police violence and debate “do not go hand in hand”. In addition, the official websites of the Central Bank, the Prime Minister’s Office and the police appeared to have been taken down. hacked, When accessing them, messages appeared such as: “It’s no longer a protest, it’s now a war” or “Get ready. The fight for justice has begun.”
The NGO Amnesty International has denounced, through several testimonies of protesters, that the protests were peaceful until July 15, when members of the Chatra League, a group affiliated with the Awami League, began to attack them. “We had nothing in our hands, only banners and flags. They started throwing bricks at us and then iron bars… They did not distinguish between men and women. They kicked women in the chest, in the stomach and in the head,” said a student attacked at Dhaka University. Another student quoted by the organization accused the State of “launching” the Chatra League against them. “Every time we demonstrate, whether in the protests of 2018 or this year, they use it as a force to crush us.”
The protests are the largest and most violent since Hasina was re-elected in January this year for a fourth consecutive term. Protesters say the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate the quota system, suspended in 2018 following other mass protests, benefits the prime minister’s supporters. Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, considered the founder of modern Bangladesh and a key figure in the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971.
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University campuses have been the main sites of protests. Nearly one in five Bangladeshis aged 15 to 24 is out of work or education, according to official statistics for 2023. University graduates face higher unemployment rates than other less-educated youth, and some 650,000 graduates are among the more than two million young people who enter the workforce each year. Graduates study for the civil service exam each year, to compete for scarce government jobs that promise job security, good income and prestige. In last year’s exam, some 346,000 candidates competed for just 3,300 positions, according to local media.
“The context of the quota reform protests is the persistent job and income insecurity faced by young people,” says Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, professor of development studies at the University of Dhaka and chairman of the Unnayan Onneshan economic research group. He notes that despite Bangladesh’s healthy demographic dividend – its young population, which makes up almost a fifth of the country’s 170 million people – “the jobs crisis is a huge loss.”
A large number of women have joined the demonstrations. Young women are in a particularly precarious situation when it comes to access to education and work, with government surveys showing that 27% of those aged 15 to 24 have no access to education or work, compared to 10% of young men.
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