The crisis in Bangladesh continues to worsen, with tens of thousands of arrests, accusations of torture and summary executions, attempts to censure the means of communication.

Thirty thousand arrests.  On January 11th, President Iajuddin Ahmed postponed parliamentary elections scheduled for January 22 and declared a state of emergency in an attempt to defuse the political crisis that erupted in Bangladesh last October. With the proclamation of a state of emergency, every power has in fact passed into the hands of the president and the armed forces, which have immediately launched a “campaign against criminality and corruption.” From then, in the space of fifteen days, the police announced that they have made more than 33,000 arrests: common criminals, but also corrupt functionaries and political exponents of the two major Bengalese parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League. The new head of the transition government, nominated by President Ahmed to ferry Bangladesh toward the next elections, praised the role of the armed forces in this delicate phase and underlined the importance of the anti-corruption campaign because “the nation cannot be hostage to a bunch of criminals.” Organizations for human rights, however, tell another story.

Extrajudicial Executions. Among the various accusations pick that of the Bengalese association Odhikar. In the ten successive days to the proclamation of the state of emergency, reports Odhikar, nineteen people were supposedly killed by the security forces, tortured to death while they were in custody or killed in “clashes of gunfire” during the arrest process. Odhikar attributed four homicides to the army, five to the police, and eight to the notorious RAB, the special antiterrorism forces of the rapid response battalion. The death in mysterious circumstances of detainees in custody is an old problem in Bangladesh: last December Human Rights Watch published a detailed report on the crimes of RAB, which is supposedly implicated in more than 350 homicides from 2004 to today. And the same Human Rights Watch has assembled the charges of the Bengalese associations: “The state of emergency cannot justify killings on the part of the security forces,” has stated Brad Adams, director of the Asiatic section of HRW: “The government must put an immediate end to these abuses.”

The Press in the Gunsight. Another thorny problem regards the exercise of freedom of speech: the state of emergency forecasts great limitations on the means of communication, that cannot “disturb public order” by criticizing the government. The minister of information has denied that censorship would be imposed: “We are only appealing to the sense of responsibility of the journalists,” Barrister Mainul said on Saturday during a meeting with editors and writers of the principal means of Bengalese communication. The same day, however, the minister of the interior has published a note that threatens economic sanctions and, above all, the punishment of detention from two to five years for journalists who violate the “new norms” of the publishing trade. It is in this climate of tension that, Saturday evening, in the capital of Dhaka, a bomb exploded intended, it seems, for a patrol of the rapid response battalion. In the explosion seven people were wounded, among them two members of the special forces. The police are still investigating, and at the moment have not formulated hypotheses on the matrix of the attack. What is certain is that Bengalese democracy, which in the last fifteen years has earned the applause of the international community, is living through a terrible crisis, from which it will be able to exit with difficulty, counting only on the army and on censorship.  

Cecilia Strada