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BANGLADESH: Lurching From Crisis to Crisis Over Polls

Farid Ahmed

DHAKA, Nov 30 2006 (IPS) - Bangladesh is faced with yet another round of protests and transport blockades after the election commission set national polls for Jan. 21, 2007, ignoring demands by an opposition coalition for deferment until electoral rolls are revised and the commission itself reconstituted.

The 14-party coalition led by Sheikh Hasina Wajed, chief of the Awami League party, has accused the commission of rigging the electoral rolls to favour the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Begum Khaleda Zia who demitted office as prime minister on Oct. 28.

“We demand cancellation of the poll schedules, revision of voters’ roll and reorganisation of the election commission,” said Wajed, a former prime minister. ‘’All members of the commission, appointed during the tenure of the BNP government, are biased towards BNP.”

Awami League leader and coalition coordinator Abdul Jalil told reporters that unless the demands were acceded to by Saturday, transport blockade, the third since October, will begin on Sunday.

In contrast, the BNP and its Islamist ally the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh welcomed the announcement of election dates. “On behalf of my party and the alliance I thank the commission for declaring the election schedule at the right time,” BNP secretary general Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan said.

Thousands of political activists held a sit-in around the presidential palace on Monday and laid siege to the election commission secretariat on Tuesday, demanding cancellation of the poll schedule and the updating of the voters’ roll which, they claim, contained 14 million fake voters. The election commission has denied this.

Outside Dhaka, as the protests in the capital reinforced, angry people torched election offices in different districts indicating that once again the protests, planned for the coming week, would cripple normal functioning across the country.

Hopes that the election process would be back on track once the chief election commissioner M. A. Aziz stepped aside were dashed. ‘’We see light at the end of the tunnel,” Mahbubul Alam, a member of the interim government said, as Aziz stepped down. Aziz, who has refused to resign, as demanded by the agitating parties, went on a long vacation with a verbal promise not to return to work before the elections.

But on Monday, the election commission announced the poll and President Iajuddin Ahmed, who heads the interim caretaker government, created a new controversy by appointing two more election commissioners – one of them, Mudabbir Hossain Chowdhury, a hugely controversial figure.

“It’s unfortunate that the President has appointed as election commissioner someone who fought against Bangladesh during the war of liberation in 1971,” said Nasir Uddin Yousuff, a veteran of the violent movement which saw the secession of what was then East Pakistan.

Yousuff told IPS that Chowdhury had, as a junior officer in the Pakistan army, actively participated in the brutal repression carried out by it on Bangla-speaking people during the civil war.

Chowdhury was one of the 70 Bengali officers in the Pakistan army who surrendered to the Indian army and Bangladesh liberation forces when the war ended on Dec. 16, 1971. Chowdhury was later freed under a general amnesty.

“I believe the President has perpetrated a punishable offence by appointing such a person to a constitutional postà he has betrayed the nation by going against the spirit of the country’s liberation war,” Yousuff said.

In Yousuff’s view the President, though elected to office as a nominee of the BNP, should have worked neutrally to minimise the differences between the two main political parties.

“Instead of breaking the standoff, the move to hold the elections on Jan. 21 will certainly cause the crisis to linger on,” said Hajjaj-bin-Mahfuz, a senior official at the Mercantile Bank Limited.

“If the standoff continues, it will have a staggering as well as rippling effect on the national economy,” he said, adding that the country’s exports, largely apparels, were already badly affected by last month’s turmoil.

Almost all the major parties except the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami have rejected the poll schedules and announced support for a fresh round of street demonstrations and rail and road blockades all over the country.

The political standoff has continued ever since the BNP-led government of Khaleda Zia and its coalition partners stood down on Oct. 28 after completing its five-year tenure.

Amid violent protests in which at least 40 people were killed, Justice KM Hasan who was supposed to head the interim government under constitutional provision and the chief election commissioner Justice Aziz stepped aside earlier.

Ruhin Hossain, a secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party of Bangladesh, said the President and the election commission were taking the country into an uncertainty and putting democracy at risk. “The BNP, and its beneficiaries of the last five years, is desperate to return to power,” he said.

Many of the cabinet members of the interim government believed that the upcoming elections would not be credible at home and abroad, if boycotted by the major political parties.

“Nowhere in the world – be it the Philippines or Thailand – has an election, held without the participation of the main opposition parties, earned credibility,” said Akbar Ali Khan, a cabinet member in charge of the finance ministry.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appealed to major political parties to work together and find a common ground and hold the elections in the interest of democracy.

Craig Jenness, Annan’s envoy and director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, who arrived in Bangladesh, Wednesday, on a three-day tour, has held meetings with political leaders and offered support for the conduct of free and fair elections.