DHAKA, 11 March 2004 — Bangladesh’s main opposition party, the Awami League, turned down yesterday a request by Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia for it to return to Parliament, saying it wanted her government to go first.
“She is bluffing us and trying to mislead the public,” said Abdul Jalil, general secretary of the Awami League. “We want her to step down and set the stage for a new election.”
Bangladesh’s next elections are not due before October 2006 and Khaleda has rejected the opposition’s call for an early vote.
On Tuesday the prime minister repeated a call for the Awami League to end a boycott of Parliament since the middle of last year and come back to make its case, if any, in the assembly. The Awami League walked out, saying the speaker had denied its members enough time to speak in the 300-member assembly, in which Khaleda’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamic allies have a two-thirds majority. The speaker has denied this.
Awami League chief Hasina Wajed said on Tuesday there would be no negotiations with what she called Khaleda’s “corrupt and repressive” government, and threatened a series of new strikes later this month to force the government out.
“If the government fails to quit by the end of March, we will call for a three or four days’ non-stop strike to make it bend,” Hasina said.
Strikes, a popular means of protest, have not toppled any government in Bangladesh since 1990, when a popular uprising led by Khaleda and Hasina ousted military president, Gen. Hossain Mohammad Ershad. Since then the two women are rivals for power.
The opposition plan for more strikes has drawn flak from the business community and other sections of the people. “I am very concerned about the fate of my son,” said Hosne Ara Begum, the mother of a student whose schedule could be hit by a strike. “If the Awami League calls for strikes, his examinations may be disrupted.”
Business leaders said each strike day costs the impoverished country $60 million in lost production and export.
Meanwhile, two ruling-party lawmakers resigned from the party and Parliament simultaneously saying the Bangladesh Nationalist Party has failed to run the country properly. Retired Major M.A. Mannan and Mahi B. Chowdhury, son of former President Badruddoza Chowdhury, sent their resignations to the BNP chairperson and Prime Minister Khaleda Zia.
They announced their resignation at a press conference yesterday afternoon.
