Foreign Press offers their views on the recent developments
The foreign press is offering their own analysis to the recent development. First one from CBS.
Zia was elected in 1991, Hasina in 1996, and Zia again in 2001. And after each election, a well-worn pattern emerged: the winner distributed plum jobs and lucrative contracts to supporters; the loser did their best to make the country ungovernable through strikes and protests.
….
Only the most die-hard Zia and Hasina supporters are sorry to see those days go.
But with the initial euphoria that accompanied the imposition of emergency rule wearing off, concerns are growing about what the generals plan to put in the place of the political elite that it’s working so hard to discredit.
A brief foray into politics by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, quickly foundered. And with the soldiers not saying much publicly, a number of theories, most based on nothing more than rumor, abound.
But there are two heard most often and given the most credence by experts.
The first, usually offered by optimists, is that the authorities are hoping reformists in Zia’s and Hasina’s parties will take over. “If the reformist are successful in taking over the parties, I think we could be on the road to elections in 2008,” as the government has promised, said Chowdhury, the former lawmaker.
The more pessimistic theory sees the generals trying to draw politicians from the two parties to form a third front closely tied to the military.
Read the full analysis with quotes from Sara Hossain and Nazim Kamran here
2nd one is the video report from BBC. See it here
Thoughts, comments? Please feel free to post other news coverage that you see fit to share.
September 5th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
i like the pessimistic theory. Better yet, a third theory might be that the CTG is leading bangladesh towards becoming the next pakistan (absent the nuclear weapons, because we all know that the migs that hasina bought don’t work, and the AL weapon of choice is a stick in the hand of a hungry student).
clam
September 6th, 2007 at 4:39 am
@ #1 CTG another step clser to become the next Pakistan by granting the voting right and national identity cards,to 1.5 lakh Pakistanis.
About 150,000 Urdu-speaking people, who are often called stranded Pakistanis, will get the voting right and national identity cards, a home ministry spokesman said Wednesday. It means once they would get the voting rights and ID cards they will automatically become the citizens of the country, according to the constitution
I am not sure if this is another ploy of the CTG in whose eyes the Jamatis are the “dhoa tulshi pata”, but it sure feels unsettling. While the new rule of “a year of jail time per lakh taka extortion” continues, I am sick of the war criminals roaming freely.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:26 am
#2 Tanim
When someone born and raised up in a country s/he is considered to be the citizen of that country regardless his/her speaking language. (They can speak and understand Bangla well but they don’t practise it within their community). I prefer to see this issue from the humanitarian aspect rather than political.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:38 am
This is good move by CTG.Please don’t bring 71 all the time.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Please move this discussion to the new thread.
http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2007/09/06/voting-rights-for-biharis/
September 6th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
New development:
CSB News-closed
September 6th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
From the Economist
The minus-two solution
Sep 6th 2007 | DHAKA
From The Economist print edition
Both the country’s leading civilian politicians are in detention. One way or another, the future looks green
EARLIER this year Bangladesh’s generals tried and failed to consign the countries’ two leading civilian politicians to exile. Now they have locked them both up. On September 3rd police arrested Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and prime minister until last October, and her younger son, on charges of corruption. Mrs Zia (pictured above after her arrest) will be the next-door prisoner in Dhaka’s idle parliament building to her nemesis, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, prime minister from 1996-2001 and leader of the Awami League, the other big party.
This will be uncomfortable for both women, who loathe each other. Judging from the sentences meted out in recent months by specially created courts to members of their kleptocratic coteries, they can expect long jail sentences. Until now, despite Bangladesh’s regular appearance at the top of global corruption league tables, the only politician ever convicted of graft was General Hossain Muhammad Ershad, Bangladesh’ s military ruler in the 1980s. In a rare moment of unity, the two women ousted him in 1990. Since then the parties that they managed to turn into patronage-based personality cults have won about 90% of votes in elections.
But so appalling was the begums’ record of governing the country that most of its 150m people were relieved when the generals took control in January. The mechanism intended to rescue democracy from viciously confrontational two-party politics—an unelected caretaker government to oversee elections—collapsed because the BNP picked a partisan president to rig the poll. Instead, the army forced him to resign as the head of the caretaker government, cancelled parliamentary elections, declared a state of emergency and installed an interim regime to pave the way for elections by December 2008.
Encouragingly, the army has so far resisted following the example of so many military regimes that form their own political parties to prolong their rule. But this, of course, might change. There is little to reassure Bangladeshis that the generals’ attempt to redesign society and stamp out corruption will not end up as the totalitarian disaster that follows so many coups.
It is not clear for how much longer the emergency government will be able to keep people quiet. Since January it has detained an extraordinary number: more than 250,000, according to Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group. The army chief, Moeen U Ahmed, has accused “evil forces” of instigating student riots last month. To Bangladeshis, such language is as painfully familiar as the repression that followed the students’ call for the early restoration of democracy—censorship, arrests without warrants, and the beating-up of intellectuals and journalists.
Last week a magistrate’s court heard two professors allege they were tortured while detained on suspicion of fuelling the campus violence. The court released them back into army custody. According to Odhikar, a Dhaka-based human-rights group, 126 people have been killed by law enforcement agencies since emergency rule began; at least 22 were tortured to death.
Despite the elections promised for next year, and efforts to mend a voters’ list bloated with millions of extra names, this is not a country preparing for a return to democratic politics. The government refuses to lift the state of emergency. Even if it did, that would not resuscitate the political process. The BNP is in a mess. Hours before her arrest, Khaleda Zia expelled Mannan Bhuiyan, the BNP’s secretary-general, for “a conspiracy to split the party”. The League, for its part, has found it impossible to part with Sheikh Hasina, who remains popular. No self-respecting politician will enter the fray while the army runs the show. Mohammad Yunus, a Nobel-prize-winning microcredit pioneer once seen as a potential candidate to fill the political vacuum, floated a party earlier in the year, but has scrapped plans to enter politics.
The generals and their civilian front are finding that their legitimacy, which rests on their competence, is eroding. In part, this stems from bad luck. Devastating floods and rising international prices for oil and food have worsened the plight of the poor. But the economic consequences of military rule have become apparent. Garment exports, the economy’s backbone, have plummeted. Investment has ground to a halt. To reverse the trend, business leaders, the army chief and the pliable head of the civilian administration, Fakhruddin Ahmed, this week held a “brainstorming” session. It is more likely to have made investors cringe than reach for their wallets. The state is desperately trying to hold down prices through administrative measures, though they will inevitably rise further during Ramadan later this month. Last month it decided, in effect, to use $300m of its foreign reserves to pay for fuel subsidies.
Meanwhile Western governments and donors, who backed the army’s seizure of power, are getting cold feet as human-rights abuses mount and public opinion turns. Even so, diplomats say that the present regime is “the only game in town”. The generals’ secular stance and tough opposition to Islamist extremism still make them attractive to Western governments. But with the two big parties decapitated, the fear is that the Islamists, both the mainstream and a more radical margin, will profit from the political vacuum and growing economic discontent.
This week India, alarmed by the alleged involvement of Bangladeshi terrorists in last month’s bombings in the southern city of Hyderabad, urged its neighbour to speed up the restoration of democracy. It would be messy, but as India knows from watching its other neighbour, Pakistan, so is the alternative.