People poured onto the streets of Bangladesh to mark their victory
In a huge victory for student protesters, Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina resigned on Monday and fled the country in an India-bound helicopter.
The news was a sweet moment for the tens of thousands of people who had defied curfews and were again preparing for bloody battle with Hasina’s army and police.
Cops and soldiers had already killed hundreds of students before the most recent massacre last Sunday, which added another 100 to the death toll.
No wonder the prime minister’s departure led to scenes of wild celebration.
“It is the victory of the students, the victory of the people. After a long time, we are happy to be out of a dictatorial regime,” said demonstrator Towfiqur Rahman.
“You can suppress anger for a while, but it erupts. Today is proof of that,” he added.
Jubilant demonstrators rushed to the former prime minister’s palatial house in the capital Dhaka, grabbing all they could and then trashing it.
While some took her luxury furniture into the streets and posed for photographs, others dressed in her saris. Protesters even made off with the dictator’s special chickens.
The homes and offices of Hasina’s allies, including leading members of her Awami League government, were similarly looted.
Video footage showed rioters entering the home of the former prime minister’s financial adviser. He had helped Hasina and her cronies loot the country and line their own pockets.
“Take whatever you can. Take everything,” a woman is heard saying in the video. “You are doing great work. Very good. Very good.”
By Monday evening, the army and the long-suppressed opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP), were meeting to decide on an interim government.
Fearing a continuing street movement and nationwide instability, they quickly offered concessions to the movement. The army announced free elections within three months and that it would release all captured protesters.
In return, the student leaders agreed to the army’s demand for authority to stop civil disobedience. The BNP signed up to the offer too, after the army agreed to release its chairperson, Khaleda Zia, from prison.
But by Tuesday afternoon the army had returned only a few protesters, leaving families and comrades anxious that authorities may have severely tortured activists while in jail.
The delay signals that now is the most dangerous moment in the uprising.
The army will hope that the movement will fade away and that students will leave the streets to return to reopened colleges and universities.
Such a move would ease the pressure on the military—and could make it believe that the promised elections should be serially delayed.
For decades, the Awami League pampered the generals, offering them lucrative government contracts and corrupt deals. For the troops, the government found overseas United Nations “peacekeeping” missions that paid as well as a job overseas.
With GDP economic growth in Bangladesh for years averaging above 6 percent, there was much in the government’s coffers that could buy friends and influence.
Little of that wealth found its way to the poor and the middle classes, who instead have been made to endure a years-long cost of living crisis.
The army will be anxious to hold on to its privileges. And that could mean it would demand seats at the table of a new government, or dispense with democracy altogether.
The only guard against this is for the student movement to remain mobilised, and to spread its demands to include those of workers in the factories, mills and ports.
Free elections are just the start. Workers and the poor in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, want a new society which benefits them rather than the looters at the top.
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