Homemade bombs exploded in Bangladesh’s capital and police fired tear gas at demonstrators as opposition parties enforced a general strike yesterday, demanding that the government to restore an election-time caretaker administration.
Schools and businesses were closed in Dhaka and other major cities and towns during the eight-hour shutdown. Nationwide transportation was largely disrupted during the second opposition strike this week.
Witnesses and television stations reported that police fought pitched battles with opposition activists in parts of Dhaka, but it was not immediately clear if anyone was injured in the violence.
Several vehicles whose drivers tried to defy the strike were either torched or smashed in Dhaka yesterday, police said.
Bangla Vision and Massranga television stations said dozens were detained in major cities.
A coalition of 18 opposition parties was enforcing the strike to demand that the caretaker government be restored before the next national elections, due in 2014. A key coalition partner is also pressing for the release of its leaders, who are facing charges of crimes against humanity related to the 1971 independence war against Pakistan.
The protest is led by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is headed by former Bangladeshi prime minister Khaleda Zia.
Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic party and the main partner of Zia’s party, has been demanding the release of nine of its leaders charged with crimes against humanity. Two other leaders from Zia’s party face similar charges and are in jail.
Zia has criticized the triasl, calling it politically motivated.
Jamaat-e-Islami leaders are accused of abetting the Pakistani Army in killing and raping during the war. The party says the charges are aimed at weakening it.
In 1971, Bangladesh — at the time the eastern wing of Pakistan — became independent, aided by India, after a nine-month war against Pakistan.
Zia’s party was also demanding the release of a senior leader who was arrested on charges of instigating violence earlier this week.
The government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last year scrapped the 15-year-old caretaker government system during elections following a Bangladeshi Supreme Court ruling that the constitution allows only popularly elected governments. Opposition parties fear the election will be rigged if the current party remains in power.
Hasina’s government said the main opposition must return to parliament and place any alternative to the system for next elections. Lawmakers from Zia’s party have been boycotting parliamentary proceedings for months amid street protests.
Hasina’s Awami League Party and Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party are the main contenders for power.
The opposition enforced a nationwide road blockade on Sunday and a nationwide general strike on Tuesday. The protests turned violent.
The US has urged the government and the opposition to sit across the table to remove differences over the election row.
The country’s top business leaders on Wednesday urged the both sides to shun the politics of confrontation and resolve disputes through discussion.
Dhaka has blamed the opposition for the recent violence, saying the protests are aimed at protecting the 1971 suspects. The administration has vowed not to go back to the caretaker government system.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the