Quietly Crushing a Democracy: Millions on Trial in Bangladesh
Atul Loke :
The most active rivals to the country’s ruling party face dozens, even hundreds, of court cases each, paralyzing the opposition as a crucial election approaches.
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.
“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.
“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 Survivors
The 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.
“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.
(To be continued)
