Bangladesh Protests Continue as Election Looms

Bangladesh is suffering from days of pre-election protests, with home-made bombs and stones being thrown at the police who seem to respond with more violence than thoughtfulness. The army has been called out to stiffen the forces of “order.” At the heart of the problem is an election scheduled for January 22, which the opposition Awami League believes has already been rigged because the voters’ list has not been updated. The president of the country, meanwhile, says the election must go ahead as per the constitution. This may be the end of a very rare bird, a parliamentary democracy in a Muslim nation.

The protests aren’t just a few hundred people marching on city hall, which in a nation of 145 million would hardly be noticed. The Awami League is leading a “mega” alliance of 18 other parties that has engineered a nationwide road, rail and waterway blockade of the capital Dhaka. There appears to be little travel between the country’s cities. At least 200 have been injured, but there are, as yet, no reports of fatalities. That piece of good news may just be the result of chaos that makes reporting difficult.

The mega alliance has determined to boycott the elections, which would mean a complete constitutional crisis. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-led four-party alliance will almost certainly go through the exercise of the election and claim total victory. The “mega” alliance would then have little choice but to continue its extra-parliamentary opposition (that means street violence).

India’s Zee News reports, “Newspapers, quoting home ministry notifications, said the army would be called out for election duties for 20 days starting today, with powers of arresting anyone without a warrant, Election Commission sources said. About 40,000 troops along with 20,000 other security personnel would be in action from to maintain order for the January 22 election, home ministry officials said.” This, in itself, is bad news.

The army in the streets with the power to arrest anyone without reason is no way to run an election, even a rigged one. While the parliamentary parties would suffer from a sham election, Islamist fringe groups such as the Jagrata Muslim Janata and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen would gain, and they are poisonously opposed to the national secular, liberal tradition. While the nonsense of Iraq continues, while the US drops bombs on Somalia to get three jihadis who may have been involved in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa, Bangladesh is losing its democratic, secular soul, and no one in the West seems to be paying much attention.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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