FOR all practical purposes, Bangladesh is now an elected dictatorship. A year ago, Prime Minister Hasina Wajid stole the general election and then went on to consolidate her rule by crushing all dissent, wreaking vendetta on her foes and hanging opposition leaders through a judicial process condemned as flawed by world rights bodies. And if you can't believe the world's rights bodies who can you trust?
On Sunday, the Bangladesh National Party’s head office was sealed and its leader, Khaleda Zia, confined to the party office for what the government called her own security. The real reason was to crush the countrywide strike called by Ms Zia to demand a fresh election, because Ms Wajid had abolished the constitutional clause providing for a caretaker, neutral government to hold the polls. This was a provocation to the opposition, because since 1991 general elections in Bangladesh had been held by caretaker governments. No wonder, the BNP and 17 other parties boycotted the polls in which Ms Wajid’s Awami League ‘won’ 153 of the National Assembly’s 300 seats because the opposition fielded no candidates. If you don't show up you don't win.
The fraudulent majority in parliament has since then enabled the ruling AL to persecute the opposition. They didn't show up at the polls but they ran daily riots, with the Jamaat's cadres leading the way.
The most blatant form of the government’s use of courts to destroy all dissent is to be seen in the flawed trials of many opposition leaders, especially those belonging to the Jamaat-i-Islami, which has for long been waging a campaign against the AL government. Like from before the time the country came into existence.
Several JI leaders have been hanged for their alleged war crimes during the 1971 insurgency, and many more leaders, including those belonging to the BNP, are on trial. Their "alleged" war crimes were proven in court despite all the attempts at witness intimidation and in some cases murder.
The BNP-led strike may not lead to a fresh election, They weren't able to derail the last one.
but the violence seen on Monday could snowball and throw Bangladesh into anarchy. Kind of like a replay of the days running up to last election.
Persecution of the opposition and judicial farce are not what Bangladesh needs. ... sez Pakistain...
The rivalry between the two leaders and periodic strikes have done enormous harm to Bangladesh’s fledgling democracy and have hurt its economy. What the country needs is national reconciliation and peace to consolidate democracy and speed up economic development. What it needs is less hereditary political leadership and a lot less involvement of religious parties in a secular state.
#1
Most dictatorships are elected these days. Even those that aren't feel the need to periodically stage elections for show. Saying that a particular leader or government has been 'democratically elected' answers nothing.
[Dawn] THE shadow of the Army Public School carnage hangs heavy, leaving students and parents, to say nothing of school and provincial administrations, unsettled. The reopening of government-run and private schools has overwhelmingly been delayed by varying numbers of days (depending on when the winter vacations were originally set to come to a close) in different cities, and provincial administrations have asked schools to beef up security. In Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Islamabad Capital Territory area, schools and other educational institutions have been categorised according to the threat assessment as perceived by the authorities, and the standard operating procedures issued to them include raising boundary walls, topping them with concertina razor wire, hiring security guards and installing closed-circuit camera systems. (Balochistan and Sindh have for different reasons not yet undertaken such measures.) Private-sector schools must arrange their own funding, and while public-sector schools have been promised some financial help, few — if any at all — have seen it materialise.
After the extended winter vacation, schools are now to open on the 12th, subject to their having met the new security protocols. But the situation does not look conducive to students being able to resume their academic activities. With few institutions — barring some schools, colleges and universities that have ample financial resources — having being able to improve security, most complain of a lack of funds, insufficient time and question even the viability of the measures proposed. Consider the fact that there are well over a 100,000 schools in Punjab alone, many without even the most basic of facilities and some that aren’t even registered with the government. Is it plausible to expect them to hire private security? Or for schools that don’t even have boundary walls — there are some 50 such institutions just in Islamabad — to now build them to required standards? The issue is far too complex for the one-size-fits-all approach taken by the administration. No doubt, there is urgent need for educational institutions to improve security; another APS-style horror can simply not be contemplated. But institutions are well within their rights to ask what provincial and federal authorities are doing to also protect them, and keep attacks at bay. Surely, the problem in its most basic iteration is this: until the state comes up with an effective and long-term strategy to contain the terrorism threat, and starts implementing it immediately, there is very little individuals and institutions can do to protect themselves.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
