The Military Now Rules Bangladesh
nkdat...@bigmailbox.net
The Economist, London, UK
January 18, 2007
The coup that dare not speak its name - The army, not the
politicians, now runs Bangladesh
WHEN Iajuddin Ahmed, Bangladesh's president, declared an army-backed
state of emergency on January 11th and cancelled the election due on
January 22nd, neither he nor the foreign governments quietly cheering
him on used the word "coup". Yet that is what it looks like. The
army, in the tradition of "guardian coups" from Fiji to Thailand,
has stepped in with the usual list of apparently noble goals. The
interim government it is backing will enable credible elections, clean
up the country's extremely politicised civil service, fight corruption,
fix the country's power crisis and keep food prices in check-and then
return to the barracks.
The president stood down as head of the caretaker government that had
been supposed to oversee the elections. He was replaced by Fakhruddin
Ahmed, a former central-bank governor and World Bank official. The
technocratic administration he heads has so far sent the right signals.
A drive against corruption-in which Bangladesh regularly nears the
top of world league tables-is under way. The national-security chief,
the top civil servant in the power ministry and the attorney-general
have all been ousted. A start has been made in separating the judiciary
from the executive.
But restoring democracy remains a tall order. The political system has
collapsed. The army insisted the president step in before the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which headed a coalition government
for the past five years, could rig the election and secure itself
another term.
Delaying the vote averted a possible bloodbath. Allegations of
election-rigging levelled by an alliance led by the other big party,
the Awami League, had led to weeks of often violent protests and
strikes. Their charges were, in effect, backed by foreign observers.
Both the European Union and the UN withdrew their support for the
election. The UN also warned the army against partisan intervention in
politics, adding that this might jeopardise its lucrative role in UN
peacekeeping operations. This threat helped sever an alliance between
the army and the BNP.
The BNP's leader, the previous prime minister, Khaleda Zia, is reported
to have been taken aback by the state of emergency and disappointed in
the generals. But the BNP is unlikely to go quietly, raising fears that
the administration might be forced to make fuller use of its
wide-ranging emergency powers, which it has so far used with restraint.
Unless something extraordinary happens to make the parties behave,
there will be no return soon to two-party politics. It will take time
to fix a voter list bloated with millions of extra names, to issue
voter-identity cards, to set up a new independent election commission,
and to purge the bureaucracy. It seems unachievable before the July
monsoon, which pushes polls back to the final quarter of 2007. Indeed,
what would be the fourth electoral battle between Mrs Zia and the
League's Sheikh Hasina Wajed may never happen.
Arguing in favour of the state of emergency, Bangladesh's
largest-selling newspaper, Prothom Alo, has exposed the practice of
parties' auctioning off parliamentary seats for money. Matiur Rahman,
the editor, also alleges that both big parties entered a bidding war to
lure the Jatiya Party of the former dictator, Hossain Mohammad Ershad,
into their alliance. Jatiya has asked the army to shut the paper down.
Although the state of emergency has supporters even among some liberal
democrats, it is a high-stakes gamble. Authoritarian rule is unlikely
to appeal for long, however fed up voters are with the two big parties
and their mutually-loathing leaders. The main beneficiary from the
failure of mainstream politics is an extremist Islamist fringe.
Internationally, the stakes are highest for neighbouring India. It
accuses Bangladesh of harbouring insurgent groups from its north-east,
and is home, claim politicians, to some 20m Bangladeshi migrants. By
2050 Bangladesh, only twice as big as Ireland, will have about 250m
people. In the short term the only voting on offer to Bangladesh's
people, half of whom live in abject poverty, is with their feet.