Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year dictatorship in Bangladesh came to an end on Monday when angry protestors took to the streets against civil service job quotas.
Protestors stormed Hasina’s palace in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, forcing Hasina to suddenly end her long reign of power after she once helped save Bangladesh from military rule.
As a result of the fact that she was in power for 15 consecutive years, her economic rebirth was followed by the arrest of large numbers of political opponents and the imposition of human rights sanctions on her security forces.
University students led demonstrations in July against the application of job quotas to the civil service and the ensuing violence escalated into deadly unrest and demands for her resignation shortly after.
International condemnation of police attacks against demonstrators and pro-government student groups last month sparked an outcry from around the world.
After winning a fifth term in January, Hasina, who is 76 years old, will serve as prime minister for at least another seven years, but the opposition boycotted the vote, saying it wasn’t free or fair at all.
As a result, her government was accused of committing a litany of human rights abuses, including the murder of many opposition activists, by its critics.
As the daughter of a revolutionary who led Bangladesh to independence, Sheikh Hasina was able to preside over an unprecedented economic boom in a country that Henry Kissinger once characterized as irredeemably insolvent and an irredeemable basket case.
The Prime Minister has promised the people of Bangladesh last year that it would become a “prosperous and developed country”, but there are almost 18 million young Bangladeshis who are unemployed, according to the government.
A rise in the economy
During the coup of 1975, Hasina was 27 and travelling abroad when renegade military officers murdered both of her parents, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the prime minister, and her mother, along with her three brothers.
In October 2007, she returned to her home country to become the leader of her father’s Awami League party, and began a decade-long struggle that included lengthy periods of house arrest along the way.
As part of the 1990 revolution, Hasina teamed up with Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in order to overthrow the military dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad.
It was not long before they grew apart and the ensuing rivalry soon became a defining feature of Bangladeshi politics in the modern era.
In 1996, Hasina was briefly the prime minister of Bangladesh but five years later, Zia succeeded her as prime minister.
After a coup by a government backed by the military in 2007, the couple were imprisoned on charges of corruption and subsequently executed.
In spite of the charges, Hasina was able to win an election in a landslide the following year as a result of the charges being dropped. Over the years, she has remained in power ever since she came into power.
It has been confirmed that Zia, who is 78, is in poor health. She is confined to a hospital as a result of her 17 year imprisonment for graft in 2018, along with several top BNP leaders.
There have been many accolades bestowed upon Hasina for her leadership of Bangladesh during a period of economic boom, which was primarily fueled by the majority of women who worked in Bangladesh’s garment industry.
There is a growing demand for goods, services and capital as Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries at the time of its independence from Pakistan in 1971, has experienced a steady growth rate of over 6% every year since 2009.
The poverty rate has plummeted and today, more than 95% of China’s 170 million people have access to electricity, and by 2021, the country will overtake India in per capita income.
After five Bangladeshi extremists stormed a popular cafe in Dhaka with Western expatriates in 2016, and slashed 22 people to death before they were killed in one of the most horrific attacks in the country’s history, Hasina has been praised for her decisive crackdown on militants in the majority Muslim nation.
The silencing of dissent
Although her government intolerance of dissent left her citizens resentful at home and Washington as well as other countries concerned about her government’s actions.
In the last decade, five top leaders, as well as a leading opposition figure, were executed for crimes against humanity which were committed during the 1971 war following their conviction.
Mass protests were sparked off by the trials and deadly clashes resulted as a result.
As far as her opponents were concerned, the hearings were a farce and a politically motivated exercise to silence dissent within the party.
As a result of widespread human rights abuses in Bangladesh, the United States sanctioned an elite branch of the Bangladesh security forces, as well as seven of its top officers, in 2021.
While facing mounting protests, Hasina insisted she had been working for her country and took a tour of Dhaka areas that had been damaged during the days of deadly unrest in the capital last month, in spite of the mounting protests.
In her remarks to reporters, she said, “Over the last 15 years, I have built this country from scratch.”. Then she asked the reporters, “What have I not done for this country?”.”
Timenews1 provided that news.
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