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Bangladesh

Zia indictment won’t help solve Bangladesh’s political standoff

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Former prime minister Khaleda Zia, her son Tarique Rahman, and other top officials in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) were indicted on charges of corruption yesterday, making it even more likely that Bangladesh will not soon end the political crisis that began with January’s elections — a vote boycotted by the BNP and other political parties not supporting Zia’s rival of three decades, Sheikh Hasina.bangladesh flag icon

While there’s plenty of evidence that just about every top figure in Bangladeshi politics is likely guilty of some form of corruption, the timing of the charges is suspicious.  There’s nothing inconsistent with the notion that Zia (pictured above) and her allies are culpable for graft and that Hasina’s governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) is using the countries judicial system to pressure Zia and the BNP.  Zia’s supporters are already calling the charges a government conspiracy against her.  True or not, the decision will only further divide Zia and Hasina, making it less likely that the two leaders can negotiate a truce, however warily, to end Bangladesh’s political and governance crisis.

Continue reading Zia indictment won’t help solve Bangladesh’s political standoff →

Bangladesh, Thailand

How Bangladesh could influence next month’s Thai election

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They’re both located in south/southeastern Asia, they share female prime ministers, and they share the dubious distinction of being the two troubled elections that kick off 2014’s global election season. thailandbangladesh flag icon

Though there’s little reason otherwise to link Bangladesh’s January 5 general election with Thailand’s February 2 vote, there are uncanny similarities.  In both countries, the main opposition parties are boycotting (or have boycotted) the election, the governing party is set to win the election, leaving each country in a political crisis with no easy apparent solution.  In both cases, the electoral crisis has its roots in a struggle that dates back over a decade, and in both cases, the military hasn’t been shy about intervening in the past.

In Bangladesh over the weekend, prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) won 232 of the 300 seats in the country’s Jatiyo Sangshad (national parliament).  The opposition, more Islamist Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) refused to participate in the vote, and it lost all of its seats.  Ostensibly, the BNP and its leader, former prime minister Khaleda Zia refused to take part in the vote due to Hasina’s refusal to appoint a caretaker government to oversee the elections.  But the reality is much more difficult — the BNP has carried out a campaign of attrition through general economic strikes, protests and sometimes violence to protest Hasina’s government.  Hasina (pictured above, top) has responded with an increasingly authoritarian tone, and Zia and other third party leaders have been detained or put under house arrest.  The political violence comes against the backdrop of the controversial execution of Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah for war crimes relating to the country’s 1971 war for independence, and unresolved matters from the 1971 war tribunal (including the previous life imprisonment sentence for Quader Mollah) led to massive protests in Dhaka’s Shabagh Square in early 2013.  Violence related to the election has already cost hundreds of lives and unknown damage to the Bangladeshi economy and the garment industry that dominates the country’s exports.

In Thailand, prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has called snap elections in response to protests against her government that initially sprang from opposition to a proposed amnesty bill that would have pardoned top political leaders from both major parties for political violence over the past decade.  Yingluck’s populist Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย), however, holds a nearly unbreakable lock on Thai politics, due to the popularity of Yingluck and her exiled brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in northern and northeastern Thailand.  The opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) refused to take part in the elections and is instead calling for an unelected council to govern.

In both cases, the opposition parties are actively banking on military intervention — an outcome that would undermine the fragile democratic institutions and rule of law in both countries, which have each made gains in reducing poverty over the past decade.  The Thai Democrats and its leaders, former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban, knew they had no chance to win the February election and believe that under a military government, they will have more influence.   Zia, who has been Hasina’s chief political rival since the 1980s, has never much trusted Hasina.  Game theory might teach you that three decades of ‘repeated games’ between the BNP and the Awami League would make a negotiated settlement easier.  But the BNP no longer has any faith in Hasina’s government to carry out fair elections, so the longtime animosity between Zia and Hasina may actually raise the costs of a deal.  So the BNP may actually prefer the military to the Awami League at this point.

What’s next?

The international community is already pressing Hasina hard to call new elections, and there’s even a precedent for how Bangladesh can walk out of the current impasse.  When Zia was prime minister in February 1996, she called snap elections that the Awami League boycotted — voter turnout barely exceeded 20% and the BNP on all 300 seats.  After a period of negotiation between the two parties, however, fresh elections were held in June 1996, the BNP lost power and the Awami League won a minority government.  The Bangladeshi tradition of appointing a caretaker government prior to elections, in fact, comes from the 1996 political settlement between the BNP and the Awami League.  Continue reading How Bangladesh could influence next month’s Thai election →

14 in 14, Bangladesh

14 in 2014: Bangladesh parliamentary elections

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hasina2014

1. Bangladesh parliamentary elections, January 5 (and perhaps again, later in 2014).bangladesh flag icon

Bangladesh is home to 155 million people, making it the eighth-most populous country in the world.  When voters go to the polls just after the New Year, however, it’s certain that the governing Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) and prime minister Sheikh Hasina (pictured above) will win reelection.  That’s because the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল) is boycotting the vote, largely over Hasina’s refusal to appoint a caretaker government to oversee the election’s administration.

The most relevant precedent is 1996, when the BNP’s leader, Khaleda Zia, was prime minister and Hasina and the Awami League were in the opposition.  The Awami League boycotted the February 1996 elections and the BNP won all 300 seats in the Bangladeshi parliament, but the parties eventually came to a deal on fresh elections, and both parties participated in the subsequent June 1996 elections.

Though the players are chiefly the same — the Zia/Hasina rivalry has influenced the country’s politics since the 1980s — the stakes have grown much higher.  Hasina established the International Crimes Tribunal in 2009 to prosecute the war crimes related to the brutal 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.  When the ICT sentenced Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah to life imprisonment, protesters came out in droves to Shabagh Square in Dhaka in early 2013 to contest the sentence as too lenient.  The government relented, executed Quader Mollah in December and banned the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), even though it’s never galvanized widespread support in Bangladesh.  That, too, caused protests and Quader Mollah’s execution brought international condemnation on Hasina’s government.  The protests on both sides have demonstrated that the wounds of 1971 are far from healed.  The opposition has conducted a general strike that’s threatening the economy, and Hasina has found herself increasingly isolated.

Photo credit to The Hindu.

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Bangladesh

Opposition continues boycott of Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections

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Bangladesh, the world’s eight-most populous country, was supposed to kick off the 2014 election season, where unpopular prime minister Sheikh Hasina seemed set to be kicked out of office by voters angry about the economy, the lack of jobs, and above all, her handling of the war crimes tribunal that began in 2009 and that resulted last week in the execution of Islamist leader Abdul Quader Mollah. bangladesh flag icon

Instead, Hasina and the Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ) look set to win virtually all of the 300 seats in the Jatiyo Sangshad (the National Parliament, জাতীয় সংসদ) when voters head to the polls on January 5.

That’s because the most prominent opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল), as well as the smaller Jatiya Party (National Party, জাতীয় পার্টি) and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী) are all boycotting the election over what they claim are the unfair conditions of the race.  Specifically, the BNP and the Jatiya party oppose Hasina’s refusal to adhere to the tradition of appointing a caretaker government to conduct national elections.

The boycott leaves at least 154 seats uncontested, which have essentially already been awarded to the Awami League.  That could further escalate the political tensions that reached a crescendo in October, when the BNP launched two general strikes against Hasina’s government and protests that have left hundreds of Bangladeshis dead — all in response to Hasina’s refusal to step down as prime minister.  Opposition forces are also currently enforcing a transport blockade that’s crippling the Bangladeshi economy — since November, the blockade is estimated to have cost the economy up to $4 billion.  Hasina’s government has increasingly responded with a heavy hand, and police forces are carefully tracking the BNP and its leader Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister, and they have detained the leader of the Jatiya Party, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, also a former Bangladeshi leader.

It’s a depressingly familiar story in Bangladeshi politics, which has been dominated by the same parties and the same leaders since the early 1980s.

In particular, the 1996 elections crisis feels like a virtual echo of the current political crisis.  But 17 years ago, the roles were reversed, with Zia leading a BNP government and Hasina leading the Awami League in opposition.  The Awami League began agitating for Zia’s resignation after it alleged that the BNP fraudulently stole a 1994 by-election.  The Awami League organized general strikes throughout the country that disrupted the government for the purpose of brining about a caretaker government and fresh elections, just like Zia and the BNP are doing today.  When Zia called a vote for February 1996, the Awami League and the Jatiya Party boycotted the elections and the BNP won all 300 seats in the national parliament.  The parties ultimately agreed to install a caretaker government in late March 1996 headed by Muhammad Habibur Rahman, the chief justice of Bangladesh’s supreme court, paving the way for a second set of elections in June 1996.  The Awami League won those elections with a minority government, and Hasina became Bangladesh’s prime minister for the next five years.

A similar outcome could be likely in 2014 — and Hasina has indicated that she is willing to dissolve the next parliament and call new elections if the BNP denounces political violence and severs its ties to the Jamaat-e-Islami.  Though the BNP is hardly as Islamist as the Jamaat-e-Islami, Islamism is an issue that has traditionally divided Bangladesh’s two main parties, with the BNP favoring a moderately Islamist nationalism and the Awami League favoring a secular Bengali nationalism.  But the BNP already controls large parts of the country already, and trust between the two longtime enemies is so low that a deal could be hard to broker.  Continue reading Opposition continues boycott of Bangladesh’s parliamentary elections →

Bangladesh

How the ‘West’ should understand — and why it should pay attention to — Shahbagh

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For the past 17 days, while most of the United States and Europe has ignored it, Bangladesh has undergone perhaps the most important political mobilization since its independence in 1971 — a series of protests that have become known as the Shahbagh protest, named after a central intersection and neighborhood in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital where protestors have gathered.  Even though Pakistan is preparing for elections later this spring and India is already moving toward campaign season for the 2014 elections, it’s becoming clear that Shahbagh is the most important political event in South Asia so far in 2013.bangladesh flag icon

A good friend, Rashad Ullah, wrote a thoughtful guest piece on the protests nearly two weeks ago when they were in their infancy — a piece that attracted some of Suffragio‘s highest readership over the past year, in fact, and which explained the background of the protest.  The protest followed immediately upon the life imprisonment sentence for Abdul Quader Mollah by a special war crimes panel, the International Crimes Tribunal, established by the current government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina (pictured below).

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Quader Mollah is the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), the country’s largest Islamist party, and the protestors are now generally calling for a ban on Jamaat-e-Islami in the furtherance of a fully secular political space in Bangladesh, and there’s some evidence that the Bangladeshi government may accede to the demands.

As it turns out, the life sentence was lighter than most Bangladeshis expected.

If you’re a relative moderate in the ‘West’ — meaning, the United States and Europe — you likely oppose the death penalty, so when you see the Shahbagh protest, you’ll see two different aspects, the first being a movement devoted to the execution of Quader Mollah and other war criminals, angry youths wielding placards bearing nooses and slogans of vengeance.

But that’s not the entire picture — and as the protests continue and grow (now in their 17th day), they seem to be taking on a more transcendental quality.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve re-learned anew the horror of the crimes that Pakistan’s army and its supporters perpetrated within East Pakistan/Bangladesh in the short but brutal war of independence in 1971 — murder, rape, torture, the targeting of women and the Hindu minority, and the systematic assassination of what would have been the Bangladeshi intellectual and political elite upon Bangladeshi independence, atrocities that some suggest may rise to the level of genocide.

On top of those crimes — the original sin of the creation of the Bangladeshi state — both the Pakistani and Bangladeshi governments swept the most horrific elements of 1971 under the rug.  That was perhaps understandable coming from Islamabad, but less so from Dhaka, where you would have expected the victors to prosecute what were clearly crimes against humanity by any international standard.

In the context of the time, however, newly independent Bangladesh and its leaders were interested more in geopolitical recognition than in settling scores, especially given the Cold War alliance between the United States and Pakistan.  Bangladesh in the 1970s needed diplomatic allies more than it needed war tribunals or even truth and reconciliation.

That creates an even more vital moral obligation for the United States and other allies to take note now.  If that weren’t reason enough, it’s important to remember that Bangladesh, with nearly 153 million citizens, is the eighth most-populous country in the world, and one of the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracies.

So it’s increasingly important to keep in mind the second aspect of the Shahbagh protest, what I believe will become the more enduring aspect of what’s happening at Shahbagh — the political coming-of-age of a new generation of Bangladeshis, the sons and daughters (many of whom weren’t yet born in 1971) of those who fought for independence, who are now pushing to finish the business of 1971 by coming to terms with the horrors of the 1971 atrocities, to settle the lack of accountability in either Pakistan or Bangladesh over the past 42 years for the crimes of 1971, and to create a space for Bangladesh to finally move forward as a nation. Continue reading How the ‘West’ should understand — and why it should pay attention to — Shahbagh →

Bangladesh

Are the Dhaka war tribunal protests morphing into a wider ‘Bengali Spring’?

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Shahbagh

Guest post by Rashad Ullah

News reports on the mass demonstrations in the heart of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, now in their fourth full day, dutifully report that Bangladeshis are protesting the verdict of a war crimes tribunal, but they may be missing the larger story — the genesis of a wider social protest movement in the world’s eighth-most populous country.bangladesh flag icon

At face value, the demonstrators are protesting the lighter-than-expected life sentence delivered earlier this week to Abdul Quader Mollah, an alleged war criminal — protestors who favor the death penalty held up signs of “ফাঁসি চাই (“Hanging Wanted”).

The verdict came as a result of a war crimes tribunal prosecuted by the Bangladesh government to bring to justice atrocities committed during the country’s independence war in 1971.  Quader Mollah, a leader of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (বাংলাদেশ জামায়াতে ইসলামী), the country’s largest Islamist party, which opposed the liberation of what was then East Pakistan in 1971 from Islamabad’s control, and Quader Mollah has been accused of masterminding killings against pro-independence intellectuals and perpetrating institutional violence against women.

In recent years, Jamaat-e-Islami has joined a government coalition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল), one of Bangladesh’s two major parties, from 2001 to 2006, and serves in opposition to the current government headed by the more progressive, secular, and historically pro-Indian Bangladesh Awami League (বাংলাদেশ আওয়ামী লীগ), which promised a war crimes tribunal during its victorious 2008 election campaign.

Although the demonstrations were initially organized on Tuesday by a group called the Bloggers and Online Activist Network, thousands of people have joined the protests at the Shahbagh intersection (the area separates “Old Dhaka” and “New Dhaka” and historically a site of major demonstrations). By now, it has become clear that the demonstrations are no longer simply about this particular verdict in this particular tribunal.

Moreover, the quickly congealing Shahbagh movement is as much a national soul-searching as anything else.

The vast majority of participants in the social media-fueled protests are young people who weren’t even alive in 1971, and the energy of the protests over the past four days has made for some odd contrasts — the demands for Quader Mollah’s execution (including mock nooses) are suffused into a carnival-like atmosphere complete with face paint,continuous singing,  and even a monument of paper flowers.  Although outside observers may find the death imagery a somewhat abhorrent reaction of a bloodthirsty mob, it’s important to keep in mind that the protests go directly to the heart of the events that brought the Bangladeshi state into being.

Continue reading Are the Dhaka war tribunal protests morphing into a wider ‘Bengali Spring’? →