DHAKA, 19 January 2006 — The United States has called upon the ruling coalition and the opposition parties in Bangladesh to work together to hold a fair and credible general election at the year-end as political uncertainty deepened, officials said yesterday.
The US reaction to recent political developments in Bangladesh came as the main opposition party Awami League staged street protests in Dhaka against the unilateral appointment of two new commissioners to fill up vacant slots in the five-member national Election Commission.
The Awami League-led alliance has also called a nationwide dawn-to-dusk general strike for Sunday, a working day in the country.
Opposition lawmakers also view the upcoming protests as part of a campaign to pressure the governing Nationalist-Islamist coalition of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia to recast the Election Commission ahead of the polls due from next October.
“The US perception is that the government and the opposition should work together to find mutually acceptable procedures for holding elections in order to ensure that the polls are free and fair and that they are perceived to be so,” said a US Embassy spokesperson in Dhaka.
The European Union and Japan, funding Bangladesh’s many major development projects, have also expressed concern over the threat to the country’s stability posed by rising militancy.
The Election Commission is the constitutional body which stages the polls. The opposition groups claim the commission will not be allowed to function neutrally because the government has made it a partisan body.
Meanwhile, politically-inspired violence and an indefinite boycott of Parliament by the opposition led by former Premier Hasina Wajed have threatened the country’s fragile parliamentary democracy. “Without the presence of the real opposition the Parliament has become a rubber stamp body where laws are passed without debate,” said independent lawmaker Kader Siddiqui.
The standoff between Khaleda and Hasina reached a new height as the government overnight appointed a former High Court judge Mahfuzur Rahman and a retired civil servant S.M. Zakaria to the Election Commission.
The opposition parties blamed the new appointees for their alleged support to Khaleda’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the dominant group in the four-party coalition. The charges have been rejected by both men.
The opposition parties are demanding an overhauling of the Election Commission and appointment of acceptable figures for running the vital institution.
In a separate development, Human Rights Watch said yesterday in its annual report that Bangladeshi security forces committed serious abuses in 2005 including extra-judicial killings and torture of detainees.
“The country’s human rights record, already of pressing concern, worsened as Bangladesh security forces continue to commit abuses including extra-judicial killings, excessive use of force and custodial torture,” the US-based organization said.
The government does not dispute the deaths but rejects the term “extra-judicial killings.” It says the killings are not unlawful because they occur when suspects resist arrest or are caught in “crossfire” between security personnel and suspected criminals.
“Between January and October 2005, an estimated 300 persons were killed at the hands of the security forces...human rights groups and journalists have demanded an inquiry into each death, but the government has refused,” the report added.
