DHAKA - Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has blamed her political opponents for the deadly unrest in the country, adding she was “forced” to impose a curfew for public safety.
“We will lift the curfew whenever the situation gets better,” she said on Monday in a meeting with business leaders in the capital Dhaka.
Security forces are accused of excessive force against student protesters, in which more than 150 people have been killed in the past week. Police have arrested over 1,000 people, including several senior opposition leaders.
Ms Hasina’s comments came a day after Bangladesh’s top court scrapped most of the quotas on government jobs, meeting a key demand of protesters. The rallies have sparked one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in the country for years and escalated into calls for Ms Hasina to quit. Ms Hasina has blamed the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami and their student wings for the violence, saying her government will work to “suppress these militants and create a better environment”.
Political analysts see the unrest as an unprecedented test for one of Asia’s most powerful women.
Ms Hasina, 76, secured her fourth straight term as prime minister in January, in a controversial election boycotted by the country’s main opposition parties.
“The over-politicisation of the spirit of the liberation war by Sheikh Hasina and her party, the denial of basic voting rights to citizens year after year, and the dictatorial nature of her regime have angered a large section of society,” said Mubashar Hasan, a research fellow at the University of Oslo who studies authoritarianism in Asia. “Unfortunately, she never became the prime minister for everyone in the country. Instead, she remained the leader of just one group,” he told BBC Bangla. Before Sunday’s court decision, Bangladesh reserved about 30% of its high-paying government jobs for relatives of those who fought in Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971.
The court ruled that 93% of roles would now be filled on merit. Ms Hasina is the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Her government abolished the reservation in 2018, following protests. But a court ordered the authorities to reinstate the quotas in June, triggered fresh unrest. The protests by mostly university students began about two weeks ago. They say the system unfairly benefits the children of pro-government groups and they have called for it to be replaced with merit-based recruitment.