Lieutenant-general Hussain Muhammad Ershad
Former president of Bangladesh who seized power in a coup but was toppled by corruption charges
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL HUSSAIN MUHAMMAD ERSHAD, the former President of Bangladesh, who has died aged 89, had long seemed one of the world’s most scandal-proof despots when in 1990 he was deposed and arrested on charges of corruption and abuse of power.
Scarcely had the victorious protesters vacated Dhaka’s streets than Bangladesh’s new opposition parties produced a dazzling list of the toppled president’s misdemeanours.
The most serious of the allegations against him concerned millions of dollars of overseas disaster aid which Ershad was reported to have salted away in Swiss bank accounts during his eight-year sway.
As the mud flew, his detractors unfolded a blockbuster saga involving a nine-year-old blond American “miracle boy” whom Ershad claimed to be his son; a voluptuous Bengali exile, one Mariam Mumtaz, who claimed to be Ershad’s discarded second wife; and the wife of a leading politician, who was touted as his latest mistress.
Ershad had, it was thought, availed himself of no less than 18 of his colleagues’ more accommodating wives during his tenure, but it was an affair with a young American woman which apparently accounted for the story behind the “miracle boy”.
In 1983 Ershad stunned the nation when he claimed that his 50-year-old wife had suddenly become pregnant after 26 years of childless marriage. Uncharitable sources at the time noted his wife’s slender figure before the alleged birth and claimed that the president had, in fact, smuggled his American mistress’s baby into the delivery room at the palace.
A dashing, preening despot, with a shining moustache and feline eyes, Ershad liked to be seen by his people as a poetic, cultured man. He took to turning up late at international conferences with the excuse that he
had just been “penning a couple of stanzas”.
After his arrest, though, the president’s long list of crimes was extended to include a charge of plagiarism. It seemed that he had employed teams of bureaucrats, whose silence was bought with cash, to gather the work of unsung Bengali poets, and then published the verses under his own name.
Hussain Muhammad Ershad was born, one of nine children, on February 1 1930 in Dinhata, West Bengal; his father was a lawyer. At Partition the family moved to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He was educated at Carmichael College in Rangpur and at Dhaka University, from where he graduated in 1950.
He served in the Infantry Regimental Service before becoming an adjutant at the East Bengal Regimental Centre and attending a Staff College at Quetta, Pakistan.
Ershad served next in the East Pakistan Rifles, seeing action in the 1965 India-pakistan war, and worked his way up the ranks to end his army career as Chief of Army Staff.
In 1982, as head of the Jatiya party, he took charge of the beleaguered Asian nation in a bloodless coup. During the next eight years he ran the country as a relatively benign dictatorship, selecting ministers and bureaucrats himself and controlling their administrations on a system of patronage and military muscle.
But as Bangladesh was dogged by flood and famine, condemning its populace to ever more abject poverty, resentment grew. Ershad faced increasing pressure from opposition politicians to step down and hold free elections, and was finally forced to resign in December 1990 amid five days of fierce fighting between government troops and student-led protesters, in which scores were killed.
Ershad was soon arrested and thrown into jail. In elections early the next year he was re-elected to parliament after contesting his seat from his cell, but his trial a few months later effectively put paid to his career as a major political player.
In June 1991 Bangladesh’s longestserving president was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour for corruption and possessing illegal weapons. He threatened to commit suicide in an effort to get prison restrictions lifted. Still, he could hardly plead illtreatment: housed in his own set of chambers, he was tended by a personal cook and was entertained by three daily newspapers and a radio.
In 1997 he was released on bail but three years later was convicted again of corruption and given a seven-year sentence, reduced on appeal to five years. In all he faced court cases more than two dozen times, and when he died he was still facing one corruption charge, and another arising from the death of an associate in 1991.
Ershad’s other former appointments included Commander-in-chief of the Bangladesh Armed Forces, Chief Martial Law Administrator and Minister of Defence, Establishment, Health and Population Control. From prison in 1996 he told reporters that his greatest failure had been “running the country softly with the heart of a poet”.
Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who remained politically active in his final years, married Raushan, who became an MP, in 1956; he married, secondly, Bidisha Siddique. They divorced in 2005, and he is survived by a daughter and three sons.