Even those countries that take little interest in the country’s internal politics such as Japan, but our major partners in development, look at what happen inside the country, such as corruption and police terrorism, are unacceptable in a democracy. They are working with the present unelected government but they are not unaware about how this government has come to power.
Just on Monday, the Japanese ambassador to Bangladesh, Ito Naoki, rather amusingly said, referring to the elections conducted under the present government, ‘never heard of stuffing ballot boxes on night before polls in any other country’. Like Ito Naoki, people in the outside world have also known that there is at least one country in the world where this kind of electoral preposterousness can happen.
Not long ago, the US imposed sanctions on the country’s elite force RAB for gross human rights violations including secret killings and enforced disappearances. Soon after the then UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet visited Dhaka in mid August to see for herself the human rights situation in Bangladesh, the United Nations published a list of 81 people who disappeared in the hands of the country’s law enforcing agencies including the RAB. The actual figure is, however, much higher.
But where the Japanese ambassador is wrong is in his expectation that the next election will be better. The dictators never give up power without being more brutal and inhuman. Nothing shames a government that steals people’s votes and tells everybody that the country is a democracy and the government is democratic!
Holding a free and fair election is also the most popular demand inside Bangladesh, and for pressing this demand, people are coming out in the streets in large numbers in spite of obstacles created by the government with the help of police. Thousands are sent to jail.
We are ashamed that we cannot choose our government. But all the democratic countries should also be ashamed for dealing with any undemocratic country and not telling them what it is. To treat an undemocratic government as a democratic one must be shunned in the greater interest of the free world. Let the communist countries have their authoritarianism. But fraudulent democracies around the world must be exposed as such.
