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    Bangladesh Dragnet Sweeps Up Thousands in Protest Crackdown

    Charges include vandalism, arson, theft, trespassing and damage to state property. A rights group called it a witch hunt, following an initial sweep during which more than 200 people were killed.The authorities in Bangladesh have opened investigations against tens of thousands of people in recent weeks as security forces combed through neighborhoods as part of their deadly crackdown on a student protest that had spiraled into violence.The widening legal net, confirmed in interviews with police officials and a review of records, comes as arrests surpassed 10,000 since the crackdown on protesters began two weeks ago. Charges range from vandalism and arson to theft, trespassing and damage of state property. In many of the cases, sections of the law that allow long-term detention were invoked.“This is a witch hunt,” said Smriti Singh, the regional director for South Asia at Amnesty International.The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has blamed opposition parties, mainly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami, for the deadly turn in a previously peaceful protest against a quota-based system for distributing sought-after government jobs. Conservative estimates put the death toll at more than 200, mostly students and youths.Activists, analysts and diplomats say the movement escalated into chaos after the ruling party, having dismissed the students’ demands, unleashed its violent youth wing and a wide array of security forces.The new detentions and the sweep for more arrests are meant to prevent any regrouping. Many of the student leaders have been detained, some repeatedly. But the crackdown also follows a well-established tactic under Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule: using every opportunity to crush her political opponents by rounding up their leaders and dismantling their mobilization.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bangladesh Votes in Election Marred by Crackdown and Boycotts

    With the opposition in jail or off the ballots, the prime minister for the past 15 years is expected to maintain her grip on power in what appeared to be a low-turnout vote.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was nearly guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office as voting ended on Sunday in a low-turnout election that has been marred by a widespread crackdown on the opposition.Security remained tight across the country of 170 million people as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main opposition, which has boycotted the election as unfair, pushed for a nationwide strike. The situation had remained tense in the days leading up to the vote, with episodes of violence — including arson on a train in Dhaka that killed four people, and the torching of more than a dozen polling stations — reported from across the country.Ms. Hasina, 76, who cast her vote in Dhaka, the capital, soon after polls opened at 8 a.m. local time, urged people to come out in large numbers.On the campaign trail, she has called for political stability and continuity, often by mentioning the country’s violent history of coups and counter-coups, including one that killed her father, Bangladesh’s founding leader, in the 1970s. She has highlighted her efforts to champion economic development, and her secular party’s resistance to the rise of Islamist militancy, as reasons the voters should and will give her another term.“We have struggled a lot for this voting right: jail, oppression, grenades, bombs,” Ms. Hasina told reporters after casting her vote. “This election will be free and fair.”Police officers patrolling in Dhaka on Sunday, as security remained tight across the country.Monirul Alam/EPA, via ShutterstockBut with the results foretold, and the election largely a one-sided affair, there appeared to be little excitement on the streets about the vote.“I didn’t go to vote in my hometown because what difference would my vote make?” said Mominul Islam, a rickshaw puller in Dhaka.Visits to polling centers in Dhaka showed voting was slow. Members of the governing party, the Awami League, milled around outside the voting centers, but voters merely trickled in. Local news media reported instances of the governing party members lining up their supporters when cameras and foreign election observers reached a polling station, only for the people to disperse afterward.At 3 p.m. local time, voter turnout stood around 27 percent, Kazi Habibul Awal, Bangladesh’s chief election commissioner, told reporters. After the polls closed an hour later, Mr. Awal said at a news conference that “we can assure that at least 40 percent of the votes were cast” and that the exact turnout would be clearer after counting ended.With the main opposition boycotting, the competition — still tense, and in many constituencies marked by violence — is largely between members of Ms. Hasina’s own party.While Ms. Hasina’s officials tried to play down the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s boycott of the vote, pointing to smaller parties still participating, her moves in the final stretch of the campaign made clear that she was worried about the vote’s legitimacy. She instructed her party to prop up what became known as dummy candidates — members of the Awami League contesting as independent candidates against their own party’s official candidates.It was an effort to not only create a semblance of a contest, but to also shore up voter turnout that could give the election some legitimacy, analysts said.But with power so centralized, and so much economic and political fortune at stake in a ticket to Parliament, the result has been bitter interparty fights in many of the constituencies, including violent clashes. In at least two constituencies, Awami League candidates have pointed fingers at opponents from their own party for deaths of their supporters.Voters at a polling center on Sunday in Dhaka.Monirul Alam/EPA, via Shutterstock“The ruling party had been trying for a long time to break up the main opposition party, the B.N.P., and bring some of their people to their side. This would have shown that there was some kind of participation from different parties, especially the B.N.P., in the election,” said Ali Riaz, a political scientist and professor at Illinois State University, using an abbreviation for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “When they were not very successful in this, they had to choose this path.”Mr. Riaz said the way that the election had played out made clear that Bangladesh was no longer “an effective multiparty system.”“I am saying effective because there may be offices with signboards, but there will be no effective opposition,” Mr. Riaz said. “Not on paper, but in practice Bangladesh will become a one-party state.”After winning a competitive election held under a neutral caretaker government in 2009, Ms. Hasina has set out to turn Bangladesh into a one-party state, analysts and critics say. She changed the Constitution to make illegal the practice of holding elections under neutral administration, and won two additional terms — in 2014 and 2018 — in votes marked by opposition boycotts and irregularities.Ms. Hasina first moved to crush the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, effectively banning its political work and prosecuting several of its senior leaders for violence and treason during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971. More recently, her efforts have focused on the B.N.P., the main opposition party, which has by now been so gutted that it retains little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh on her way on Sunday to cast her vote in Dhaka. She is nearly guaranteed a fourth consecutive term in office.Altaf Qadri/Associated PressDuring much of the past 15 years, Ms. Hasina’s second time in power after a five-year term ending in 2001, an economic success story took attention away from her autocratic turn.On the back of investments in the garment industry, Bangladesh experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed India’s. The country also saw major improvements in education, health, female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters.She has also played a difficult balancing act in a tough neighborhood, where both China and India are vying for influence. Ms. Hasina has managed to keep India and China on her side.As Western pressures increased on her government over human rights abuses, including the crackdown on opposition and the enforced disappearances by Bangladesh’s elite security agencies, both Beijing and New Delhi have come to her defense. India, in particular, has been using its growing diplomatic weight to urge the United States and other Western nations to take it easy on Ms. Hasina, diplomats in New Delhi and Dhaka said.As Ms. Hasina prepared to seek a fourth consecutive term, the sheen was coming off the economic success story, with the population struggling with rising prices. While she might be able to control a decimated opposition through her control of security agencies and the judiciary, the task will become much more difficult if public anger continues over rising prices and she fails to check the economy’s downward spiral.Counting votes after the polls closed on Sunday in Munshiganj, outside Dhaka.Altaf Qadri/Associated PressThe successive blows of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have exposed Bangladesh’s overreliance on one industry. The country’s foreign reserves have been shrinking, forcing it to seek emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund.Opposition leaders tried to leverage public anger over the economy, holding their first major rallies in years, prompting Ms. Hasina to intensify the crackdown. The B.N.P. says more than 20,000 of its members have been arrested since its last major rally in October, which faced police batons and tear gas.“They are playing with the ambition of the country to be a democratic state,” Nazrul Islam Khan, a leader of the B.N.P., said on the eve of the vote. “We will continue the movement until the government falls.” More

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    Democracy in Bangladesh Is Quietly Being Crushed

    Bangladesh’s multiparty democracy is being methodically strangled in crowded courtrooms across this country of 170 million people.Nearly every day, thousands of leaders, members and supporters of opposition parties stand before a judge. Charges are usually vague, and evidence is shoddy, at best. But just months before a pivotal election pitting them against the ruling Awami League, the immobilizing effect is clear.About half of the five million members of the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, are embroiled in politically motivated court cases, the group estimates. The most active leaders and organizers face dozens, even hundreds, of cases. Lives that would be defined by raucous rallies or late-night strategizing are instead dominated by lawyers’ chambers, courtroom cages and, in Dhaka, the torturously snail-paced traffic between the two.One recent morning, a party leader, Saiful Alam Nirob, was ushered into Dhaka’s 10-story magistrate court in handcuffs. Mr. Nirob faces between 317 and 394 cases — he and his lawyers are unsure exactly how many. Outside the court, a dozen supporters — facing an additional 400 cases among them — waited in an alley whose bustle was cleared only by intermittent monsoon downpours and the frequent blowing of a police whistle to open the way for another political prisoner.The police ushering Saiful Alam Nirob, an opposition leader, to court in Dhaka in June. He faces hundreds of court cases.A rally by supporters of the ruling Awami League in July.“I can’t do a job anymore,” said one of the supporters, Abdul Satar, who is dealing with 60 cases and spends three or four days a week in court. “It’s court case to court case.”In recent years, Bangladesh has been known mostly as an economic success story, with a strong focus on a garment export industry that brought in a steady flow of dollars, increased women’s participation in the economy and lifted millions out of poverty. A country once described by American officials as a basket case of famine and disease appeared to be overcoming decades of coups, countercoups and assassinations.But under the surface, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has waged a campaign of political consolidation whose goal, opposition leaders, analysts and activists say, is to turn the South Asian republic into a one-party state.Over her 14 years in office, she has captured Bangladesh’s institutions, including the police, the military and, increasingly, the courts, by filling them with loyalists and making clear the consequences for not falling in line.She has wielded these institutions both to smother dissent — her targets have also included artists, journalists, activists and even the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus — and to carry out a deeply personal campaign of vengeance against her political enemies.With an election expected in December or January, the country again feels on the verge of eruption. The opposition sees the vote as a last fight before what could be its full vanquishing. Ms. Hasina’s lieutenants, for their part, say in no uncertain terms that they cannot let the B.N.P. win — “they will kill us” if they come to power, as one aide put it.When asked during an interview in her Dhaka office about using the judiciary to harass the opposition, Ms. Hasina sent an aide out of the room to retrieve a photo album. It was a catalog of horrors: graphic pictures of maimed bodies after arsons, bombings and other attacks.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at her office in Dhaka in June.Bangladesh’s economic success story in recent years has overshadowed its slide toward a one-party state. “It is not political, it is not political,” the prime minister said of the court cases, pointing to the visuals as examples of the “brutality” of the B.N.P. “It is because of their crime.”B.N.P. leaders say that about 800 of their members have been killed and more than 400 have disappeared since Ms. Hasina came to power in 2009. In the interview, Ms. Hasina said the B.N.P., when it was in power, had done much the same to her party, jailing and killing her supporters by the thousands.“They started this,” Ms. Hasina said.The SurvivorsThe story of Bangladesh over the past three decades has largely been one of bitter rivalry between two powerful women — Ms. Hasina, 75, and Khaleda Zia, 77, the leader of the B.N.P. and the country’s first female prime minister.Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was Bangladesh’s most prominent independence leader when the country broke away from Pakistan in 1971. He was killed four years later in a military coup, and much of his family was massacred.Ms. Zia was married to Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who came to power in the bloody chaos that followed Sheikh Mujib’s murder. Mr. Rahman himself was assassinated by soldiers in 1981.For much of the time since, the two surviving women have been locked in a fight over who defines Bangladesh’s democracy — and who is entitled to rule over it.“Actually it was my struggle to establish democracy,” Ms. Hasina said. Pointing to Ms. Zia’s husband, she added: “This opposition, you know, was created by a military dictator.”The B.N.P. says it was the one that restored multiparty democracy after Ms. Hasina’s father declared the country a one-party state — an unfinished project that the B.N.P. says Ms. Hasina is determined to complete.The story of Bangladesh in recent decades has largely been one of bitter rivalry between two powerful women: Ms. Hasina and Khaleda Zia, seen on a large poster inside the office of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in Dhaka. Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the B.N.P.’s secretary general and de facto leader.“They don’t believe in democracy,” said Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the B.N.P.’s secretary general.In 2018, Ms. Zia was jailed on graft charges. Today, she lives under house arrest, where, in deteriorating health, she is reduced to watching television and reading the newspaper, her aides say.Her son Tarique Rahman, who was implicated in a 2004 attack in which a dozen grenades were hurled at Ms. Hasina during a rally — a charge the B.N.P. denies — lives in exile in London. Mr. Alamgir, the party’s de facto leader in their absence, spends much of his time dealing with the 93 court cases he faces.Ms. Hasina has intensified her assault on the opposition as she has found herself in her most politically vulnerable position in years.Just as Bangladesh was working to get its garment industry back on track after the pandemic disrupted global demand, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a spike in the cost of imported energy and food, pushing the country’s supply of dollars perilously low.“It has put tremendous pressure on our economy,” Ms. Hasina said.Bangladesh was working to get its garment industry back on track after the pandemic when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a spike in the cost of imported energy and food.Anger has risen in Bangladesh over the rising food prices and power cuts.The battered opposition saw an opportunity in anger over rising food prices and power cuts, and, fearing an unfair election, was eager to take the showdown to the streets after Ms. Hasina refused to appoint a neutral caretaker administration to oversee the vote.During a rare large rally in June, B.N.P. speakers demanded free elections and the release of political prisoners. But as supporters marched across Dhaka, their chants offered an indication of the bubbling tensions: “Set fire to Hasina’s throne” and “A flood of blood will wash away the injustice.”As the police held back and allowed the rally and march to proceed, ruling-party leaders staged a rival rally where speakers acknowledged that the European Union and the United States were watching Bangladesh’s democracy. The U.S. government has imposed sanctions on Ms. Hasina’s senior security officers and threatened visa restrictions, and American and European officials have made several visits to Bangladesh in recent months.A few weeks after the B.N.P. rally, though, an unsettled Ms. Hasina responded with force. When the party’s supporters tried to hold another large rally, the police met them with clubs and tear gas — and 500 fresh court cases. The crackdown showed that, even as the West issues warnings, it ultimately has limited sway over a leader who has deftly balanced ties with Asia’s two giants, China and India.Opposition supporters during their rally against the governing party in June.Ms. Hasina has governed Bangladesh since 2009 and is seeking re-election in the coming months.Increasingly, the government’s powers are wielded en masse, said Ashraf Zaman, a Bangladeshi lawyer and activist in exile who works with the Asian Human Rights Commission. The police round up scores of people in one case — accusing them of “anti-state activities” or of blocking police work — and leave room for more to be added by listing dozens or even hundreds of “unnamed persons” in the same case. Each individual case can involve multiple charges.By the time the evidence, often flimsy, is put in front of a judge, the accused have spent months in jail, often at risk of harassment or torture in custody, human rights activists say. Bail, lawyers and legal experts said, has become harder to get in political cases. If the accused does get released, the government presents it as a magnanimous gift, not as acknowledgment that the person should not have been detained in the first place.Defense lawyers argue in court that their client “has a family, he has already spent this long time, if you kindly give him bail it would be appreciated, and the prosecution ‘allows’ it,” Mr. Zaman said.The CourtOne of the busiest places for political cases is Dhaka’s magistrate court, where Mr. Nirob, the B.N.P. leader facing more than 300 cases, was taken one morning in June. Syed Nazrul, Mr. Nirob’s lawyer, said his client had at least one case filed against him in every police station in the city.Before proceedings begin each morning, about a dozen lawyers cram into Room 205 at the bar association building, where Mr. Nazrul checks papers one last time. On June 12, the office’s large ledger showed that the team was defending clients in 33 cases that day, 32 of them involving the B.N.P.Lawyers crammed into a room at the bar association building in Dhaka in June. Many represent political prisoners. Syed Nazrul, a lawyer, inspecting documents for cases filed against a B.N.P. leader.Then the lawyers make their way through the narrow alley — buzzing with vendors selling anything from chicken to marigold to replacement teeth — that connects the bar association with the crowded courthouse.“The hearing takes, maximum, 20 minutes. All day is spent back and forth in this harassment,” Mr. Nazrul said.Even those fighting for causes beyond the bitter rivalry between the two political parties increasingly pay a heavy price.Didarul Bhuiyan, a computer engineer, returned to Dhaka after completing his studies in Australia. He set up a small software company, got married and raised three sons. But a question nagged at him: Had he made the right decision in returning?Mr. Bhuiyan became active in a civil society movement aimed at strengthening checks in the system, so his children would not be forced to pursue a life abroad. “Whenever someone gets to power, they go above the law,” he said.After Mr. Bhuiyan’s group criticized the management of relief funds during the pandemic, security forces in civilian clothes took him away in a van with tinted windows.Didarul Bhuiyan with his family in Dhaka in July. He spent five months in jail after criticizing the government’s management of Covid relief money. A woman and her relatives waving at people on a bus leaving court in Dhaka.“The incidents of disappearances were common; we worried about what could happen to him,” said his wife, Dilshad Ara Bhuiyan.As Ms. Bhuiyan went from court to court hoping to apply for bail for her husband, they refused to hear his case, even though the government had filed no charges against him. “The judge would see the name, the case, and say, ‘Sorry, I can’t,’” Mr. Bhuiyan said.After five months in jail, he got bail. The police did not file charges until about a year after his arrest, leveling vague accusations of treason and conspiracy against the state. As a central piece of evidence, the police submitted a Facebook post by Mr. Bhuiyan — which he had written months after his release. A time stamp marked a screenshot as having been taken three hours before.A fellow activist, Mushtaq Ahmed, who was detained around the same time as Mr. Bhuiyan, died in jail. A large portrait of Mr. Ahmed sits on a drawer in Mr. Bhuiyan’s home office.Mr. Bhuiyan called Mr. Ahmed’s death political murder.“Putting someone in jail for 10 months without any trial whatsoever is good enough to kill someone,” he said. More