DHAKA, 28 October 2006 — Thousands of opposition activists demonstrated in the Bangladesh capital yesterday threatening to disrupt an incoming caretaker administration, as Prime Minister Khaleda Zia prepared to hand over power ahead of elections.
Six people were killed and over 200 injured in clashes between rival political activists across the country yesterday.
Police said four men were killed in shootings or bomb attacks in the capital Dhaka and other towns. Two women were run over by a speeding bus in the capital’s eastern suburbs. The violence spread across the country after Khaleda finished her farewell address to the nation on state television in the evening.
Protesters blocked a highway, cutting road links between the capital and southeastern port city of Chittagong Several vehicles were set on fire by Awami League supporters who accuse the government of trying to install a partisan interim administration to supervise the election in January.
“No election without electoral reform,” the activists, armed with sticks and carrying replicas of the party symbol of boat, shouted.
Khaleda’s ruling Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) has said she will hand over power today at the end of her five-year term to an interim administration led by former Supreme Court Chief Justice K.M. Hasan.
But the 14-party opposition alliance led by the Awami League has refused to accept Hasan as the caretaker head, citing his past association with the ruling party.
“The opposition movement will grow stronger from tomorrow if Justice Hasan takes over,” Tofayel Ahmed, a senior leader of Awami League, told a rally of partymen yesterday.
The opposition urged President Iajuddin Ahmed not to swear in Hasan as caretaker chief “to save the country from a violent people’s outburst.” But the ruling party dismissed the opposition threat and said the people of Bangladesh would defeat their attempts to destabilize the country.
“BNP is ready to tackle the opposition with its massive public support,” Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan, secretary-general of BNP, told a separate rally of party supporters in the capital. Bhuiyan said those who had quit the party and joined the newly-formed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) would not survive politically for long. “Many of them will return to the BNP fold,” he said.
Street demonstrations and strikes, at times violent, often play a vital role in shaping Bangladesh’s politics.
At least 100 people were injured in clashes between rival political activists in Dhaka on Thursday, police and witnesses said.
Authorities deployed extra police and the elite Rapid Action Battalion to ensure a smooth transition as the two main political parties ordered their supporters to take to the streets in a show of strength.
Thirteen key politicians belonging to the BNP, which heads the four-party ruling coalition defected to the new political entity on Thursday. The new group, LDP, aims to break a nearly two-decade stranglehold on power by the BNP and the main opposition Awami League. “The present BNP is a corrupt party that has cheated the whole country and moved away from the goal its founders set by becoming an Islamic fundamentalist party,” the new party’s Joint Secretary-General Firoz M. Hasan told AFP.
