Leaders of the Students Against Discrimination movement, which on Monday forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee Bangladesh following protests in which some 300 people died, warned on Tuesday that they would not tolerate a government backed or led by the military. The protesters had previously demanded the dissolution of parliament, a demand they have already obtained, according to a statement from the office of the country’s president, Mohammed Shahabuddin.
One of the leaders, Nahid Islam, had previously warned in a video on Facebook that if the demand was not met, the students would launch “strict” protest actions. According to Islam, who appears in the video with two of his fellow believers, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, philanthropist Muhammad Yunus, known as the “banker of the poor,” has accepted the offer to become the main advisor to the future interim government of Bangladesh. The spokesman for the student movement then specified that Yunus will immediately return to Bangladesh from Paris, where he had undergone “minor” medical treatment.
The protesters’ rejection of a possible military government and the confirmation of the dissolution of Parliament, which opens the door to the calling of elections, came after the Chief of Staff of the Army, Waker-Uz-Zaman, announced that he planned to meet with the leaders of the student movement to discuss the formation of an interim government, whose main task should be precisely to call these elections. With their warning, the leaders of the student movement are seen as trying to dispel fears that the country, the eighth most populous in the world with 170 million inhabitants, could once again fall into a military dictatorship like those that subjugated the Bangladeshis between 1975 and 1990.
For the time being, until an interim government is formed to call elections, the military is trying to calm the unrest, which has spiralled out of control. According to local media, at least 24 people were killed on Tuesday in an arson attack by a mob on the luxury hotel Zabeer International, owned by Shahin Chakladar, a lawmaker and secretary general of the former prime minister’s party, the Awami League, located in the city of Jashore, in western Bangladesh.
As the political situation in Bangladesh remains up in the air, the doors of the country’s prisons have begun to open for prominent politicians jailed during Hasina’s administration. The most prominent of these figures is the former prime minister’s ally and current opposition leader, Khaleda Zia, chairwoman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, who was jailed in 2018 for corruption, an accusation she denies, attributing it to alleged political persecution. Zia, 78, the country’s prime minister from 1991 to 1996, was released hours after Hasina fled, the country’s presidential office said.
Bangladeshi opposition activist and lawyer Ahmad Bin Quasem has also been released, his lawyer Michael Polak said on social media. Quasem was abducted by security forces in 2016, according to human rights organisations, which have reported that hundreds of Bangladeshi citizens were subjected to enforced disappearance under Hasina. The activist is part of a well-known Bangladeshi political family. His father, Mir Quasem Ali, was the leader of the banned Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s main religious party, and was executed after being found guilty of war crimes in 2016.
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The statement from the office of Bangladeshi President Mohamed Shahabuddin also confirmed the upcoming release of protesters from the Students Against Discrimination movement detained between July 1 and Monday for having participated in the protests that forced Hasina to resign.
Dues
Last Sunday was one of the most violent days in Bangladesh, with around a hundred people dead in clashes between protesters, Hasina supporters and the police since the protests began in July. Students took to the streets to denounce a controversial quota system for allocating public jobs, which reserved 30% of these positions for relatives of combatants in Pakistan’s war of independence (1971), and another 30% for women and minorities. The protesters considered this distribution discriminatory, since only 40% of contracts were made on merit. On July 21, the high court heeded their main claim and annulled this system: it raised the percentage of government jobs assigned on merit to 93%, reserved 5% for relatives of combatants and the remaining 2% for ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
Protests flared up again last week as demonstrators demanded a public apology from the government for the violence against them, the restoration of internet connections, the reopening of university campuses and the release of those detained.
At least 96 people died on Sunday and hundreds were injured, according to local media such as The Dhaka TribunePolice fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse tens of thousands of protesters, as they did in the previous bloody protest on 19 July, which also left more than 100 dead, many injured and several hundred arrested. In total, around 300 people have died since the start of the protests, at least 32 of them children, “and many more were injured and arrested,” UNICEF laments.
The arrival of a mass march in the capital, Dhaka, on Monday, many of whose participants entered the Prime Minister’s office, ended up forcing Hasina to resign and subsequently flee, initially traveling to the Indian city of Agartala, although media in that country reported that she will remain there “only a few days” before leaving for London, where she had already been in exile.
Sheikh Hasina has been in office for a total of 20 years (1996-2001 and 2009-2024), the last 15 of which have been uninterrupted. The 76-year-old prime minister won a fourth consecutive term in office last January in elections that were boycotted by the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
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