Bangla Jamaat calls for fair elections

DHAKA, 22 July — Bangladesh’s biggest Islamic political party yesterday asked the country’s caretaker government to take firm steps to ensure free and fair parliamentary elections in three months. “We want an end to terrorism and use of illegal arms as essential preconditions to make the election honest and credible,” Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami, chief of Jamaat-e-Islami (party), told reporters.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

He said the Jamaat would support actions by the caretaker authority, headed by Chief Justice Latifur Rahman, as long as they were “consistent with the country’s law and constitution.”

The caretaker government took over when former Prime Minister Hasina Wajed ended her five-year term in office on July 15. It is overseeing the elections due in early October as required by the country’s constitution.

Nizami said the Jamaat had formed an alliance with Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) headed by Khaleda Zia and two other parties as a “democratic means to jointly fight the election” against Hasina’s Awami League.

Nizami said the alliance was confident of winning the polls which must be held “in time, in an absolutely free and impartial manner.”

The BNP will be the League’s main challenger in the polls and clashes between activists from the two sides erupted even before the caretaker authority took charge, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 300 in the past nine days.

Police have launched a crackdown on illegal weapons and the authorities are planning to deploy the army to assist police in the drive, government sources said. Rahman has said he would strive to stage the elections in a free and peaceful atmosphere. He said up to 250,000 illegal firearms were in the hands of political cadres and criminals in the country, and that more weapons were flooding in ahead of the elections.

According to a conservative estimate, there are about a quarter million illegal fire arms in possession of criminals and political cadres. These arms came from neighboring countries or manufactured locally. There are allegations that police administration, largely politicized by the last Awami League government, was not effectively cooperating with the caretaker administration in the recovery of illegal arms.

During the last three days of nationwide combing operation, police could recover only 246 illegal fire arms but arrested 6,904 people in this connection.