San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fears of violence on eve of elections
DHAKA, Bangladesh — As Bangladeshis prepared to vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, there were fears that violence and intimidation could keep many away from the polls, including two opposition candidates who said police had barricaded them inside their homes.
Under the decade-long leadership of Sheikh Hasina, whose ruling party hopes to retain power in the elections, Bangladesh’s economy has grown by more than 6 percent annually, lifting millions out of extreme poverty.
Hasina, 71, has been internationally lauded for sheltering the more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who streamed across the border into Bangladesh to flee what many call a genocidal campaign by the military in their native Myanmar.
At home, she’s developed a strong persona as an iron lady after her fierce response to a 2016 attack by radical Islamists on a cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter in which 20 hostages, including 17 foreigners, were killed.
But her tenure also has included allegations of mass arrests and jailing of activists and critics on false charges — so commonplace that a term for them in Bengali, “gayebi maamla,” has been coined — as well as forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
Among Hasina’s imprisoned critics is her archrival, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the 74-year-old leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Zia is holed up in a colonial-era jail in the old part of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, serving a 17-year sentence for mishandling two charitable funds she established while in power.
In the early hours of Friday, Zahiruddin Swapan, a two-time member of Parliament from the BNP, kept the Associated Press on the phone as he attempted to negotiate with security officials whom he said had cordoned off his house.
In Chandpur, an area south of Dhaka, Sheikh Farid Ahmed, a BNP candidate contesting a seat held by a former foreign minister in Hasina’s Cabinet, said Saturday that he had been blockaded in his home for days after police and Awami League activists took positions around his 7-acre compound.
“They have threatened me not to go outside,” Ahmed said. “Police are there and the ruling activists are carrying homemade arms. They allow nobody from outside to meet me.”
Since Bangladesh’s election commission scheduled the polls in early November, about 15,000 BNP leaders and activists have been arrested, according to party vice chairman Shaukat Mahmood.
Opposition leaders have complained of violent attacks by ruling party supporters. “We hear from our supporters, ‘What’s the point? I’m going to lose my life.’ Voters are afraid — that’s a major challenge for us,” Mahmood said Saturday from Zia’s former office at BNP headquarters.
The violence hasn’t been one-sided, according to H.T. Imam, a Hasina adviser and co-chairman of the Awami League Election Steering Committee, who accused activists in Zia’s party and its ally Jamaat-e-Islami of attacking ruling party members. “Every moment we are getting information about attacks on our leaders, activists and supporters by the BNPJamaat men. Hundreds of our campaign offices have been attacked,” Imam told reporters last week. The BNP led the campaign for the deployment of more than 600,000 soldiers, border patrol, paramilitary and police officers who have fanned out across the country in advance of the vote.
Earlier in the week, the Awami League led massive rallies through Dhaka. The opposition says its requests for rallies were denied.
Both sides hope to avoid a repeat of the 2014 elections, in which 22 people were killed in post-election violence. Turnout for that vote — boycotted by the BNP — was just 22 percent.