Bangladesh’s multi-party democracy is being methodically strangled in packed courts across the country. Almost every day, thousands of opposition party leaders, members and supporters appear before a judge. The charges are often vague and the evidence is poor quality at best. But just months before a crucial election that will pit them against the ruling Awami League, the chilling effect is clear.
About half of the 5 million members of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main Opposition party, are involved in politically motivated court cases, the group estimates. The most active leaders and organizers face dozens, even hundreds, of cases. Lives that should be defined by rallies or strategy meetings are dominated by law offices and courtrooms.
On a recent morning, Saiful Alam Nirob, a party leader, was led in handcuffs to the Dhaka magistrate’s court. He faces between 317 and 394 cases — he and his attorneys aren’t sure how many. Outside, a dozen supporters — facing 400 additional cases between them — waited in an alley that was frequently cleared by a police whistle, activated to make way for another political prisoner.
“I can’t have a job anymore,” said Abdul Satar, one of the supporters, who is dealing with 60 cases and spends three or four days a week in court.
In many cases, when often flimsy evidence is presented before a judge, defendants have spent months in prison, often at risk of harassment or torture in custody, human rights activists say. Bail has become more difficult to obtain in political cases. If the defendant is released, the government portrays it as a magnanimous gift, not an acknowledgment that the person should not have been detained in the first place.
In recent years, Bangladesh has been known as an economic success story and appeared to be overcoming decades of coups, countercoups and assassinations. But Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has embarked on a political consolidation campaign whose aim, Opposition leaders, analysts and activists say, is to turn the Republic into a one-party state. She has captured Bangladesh’s institutions, including the police, the military and, increasingly, the courts, filling them with party loyalists and making clear the consequences of not falling in line.
He has used these institutions both to stifle dissent—his targets also include artists, journalists, activists, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus—and to carry out a deeply personal campaign of revenge against his political enemies.
With elections scheduled for December or January, the country once again feels on the brink of eruption. The Opposition sees the vote as a last fight before what could be its total elimination. Hasina’s lieutenants say they cannot let the PNB win: “they will kill us” if they come to power, as one aide put it.
PNB leaders say around 800 of their members have been killed and more than 400 have gone missing since Hasina came to power in 2009. Hasina said that when PNB was in power she had done much the same thing with her party, imprisoning and killing thousands of his supporters.
“They started this,” he said.
By: MUJIB MASHAL
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6892139, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-13 19:50:08
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