285 - Popular Protests Ousts an Authoritarian: Can Others Elsewhere Copy?
Bangladesh and Beyond
It is striking and unusual, in these oppressively difficult times, that mostly youthful protesters sufficiently frightened a long-time, tough, dictatorial, prime minister so much that she upped traces and fled to India. As determined as numerous Bangladeshis were to oust Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power earlier this week after fifteen years of increasingly harsh domination of her 170 million mostly Muslim subjects, few observers expected that she would suddenly give it all up. She had presided over a systematic repression of her citizens, locked up Khaleda Zia, her main opponent, and kept harassing Muhammed Yunis, her country's only Nobel Prize laureate, and a critic.
Hasina relentlessly crushed anyone who tried to thwart her total control and also utilized an expansive patronage network to protect her tight grip on the full workings of her nation. Corruption was rampant, and lucrative for those favored by Hasina's administration.
Now, pushed decisively by the nation's military command, she slipped away in the night. Zia has been released from prison. And Yunis has been summoned back from Paris and London by Bangladesh's president to lead Bangladesh out of Hasina's nightmare toward a new daylight. Yunis promises to free his country from oppression, right the economy, and arrange early democratic elections.
Nothing of the same sort can be expected in Venezuela, where a despot refuses to accept his recent electoral loss, nor in Tunisia, where an election is to take place in October. And Russians are not yet threatening Putin's autocratic grip on the giant invader. But the ingredients of change unexpectedly came together dramatically last week and this week in Bangladesh.
Climate change and global warming have hit the country very hard. Immensely vulnerable because it bestrides the Ganges, a major river that spills in all directions when the monsoons are especially intense, as this year. Cyclones often wreak havoc. Bangladesh has also taken in more than 950,000 Rohingya refugees from neighboring Myanmar and smaller numbers of former residents of the hill states of northeastern India.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called Bangladesh a "basket case" in 1971.But it has since rebounded impressively. In 2023 it was still growing rapidly, thanks for a thriving garment and apparel industry that has long depended on poorly paid, largely exploited, women seamstresses and a tough regimentation enforced by Hasina's regime. Bangladesh also relies on remittances from citizens laboring abroad, many in the United Arab Emirates.
The origins of the largely spontaneous protest movement that ousted her was a Supreme Court decision to reimpose civil service appointment criteria that favored descendants of the Bangladeshis who had fought and sided with General Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's founding president and Hasina's father, when East Pakistan (as it then was) revolted against Pakistan in 1971 and achieved its independence as a separate nation. Rahman was later assassinated in 1975, and Hasina came to power first in 1996-2001 and then in 2009 partially to avenge his demise; partially to resume the battle against Zia, who had replaced her in 2001; and partially to further her own personal quest for hegemony.
Although Hasina governed in an absolutist manner, jailing thousands of political prisoners, locking up dissenters, and killing protesters (440 last week), she also helped to transform Bangladesh from a basket case to a developmental success story. Its GDP per capita rose from $1,119 in 2013 to $2,528 in 2023. Economic growth rates in recent years have averaged more than 6 percent annually. Literacy increased significantly over the last decade, with most children completing primary school. The female literacy rate is 72 percent, much higher than for India or Pakistan. Life expectancy improved from 47 percent to 73 percent from 1971 to 2024. Infant mortality rates fell over the same period to 26 per 1,000 live births, again much lower than India or Pakistan. In 1971, 158 children died in childbirth.
Hasina and Zia have feuded since their fathers both were gunned down and the daughters became political rivals, each ousting the other at the ballot box.
Yunus' star has shined more brightly than Hasina's, the basis for their personal feud. Now 84, he won his Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the spread of micro lending. He is the global father of microfinance based on an early recognition that lending to people too poor to qualify for regular bank loans, and monitoring and assisting their progress, produced outstanding results in otherwise impoverished rural and even urban areas.
Yunis is an economist, not a politician. But he was critical of some of Hasina's economic policies and of her antagonism to free speech and free assembly. In the public eye, his approach became an alternative, more democratic, method of hearing the voices of all Bangladeshis. Protesters believed Hasina was not as responsive, even after the Supreme Court and her government re-engineered the quota system and made it far less discriminatory.
But with jobs increasingly scarce, the protesters were unwilling to desist. Inflation of nearly 10 percent per year caused suffering, too, and large protests continued unavailingly. They even stormed Hasina's office and residence last week, looting as they intruded. In any event, she had lost her legitimacy well before the mobs that threatened to storm government facilities and taunted the police and military who wanted them to leave downtown Dhaka.
Yunis is a tried and true democrat with transformative instincts. But he has no experience governing and is not a traditional politician. Nor does he lead a political party like Hasina runs the Awami League and Zia leads the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Yunis' support base is as thin as his reputation as a reformer is vast. Can he return democracy to Bangladesh? is one major question. Another is how to feed and provide jobs for his citizens, how to educate them, how to help cure their diseases, and -- most of all-- how to set Bangladesh on a sure road to independence and freedom.
On the eve of his return to Bangladesh yesterday, Yunus urged Bangladeshis to stay calm and stop looting the mosques and bazaars of Dhaka “Let us make the best use of our new victory," he said. "Let us not let this slip away because of our mistakes. I fervently appeal to everybody to stay calm. Please refrain from all kinds of violence. I appeal to all students, members of all political parties and non-political people to stay calm. This is our beautiful country with lots of exciting possibilities...Violence is our enemy. Please don’t create more enemies. Be calm and get ready to build the country.”
If anyone has the stature to cure the political and economic ills of Bangladesh after decades of tyranny and oppression, it could be Yunus, backed by a responsive military establishment. But he will quickly have to gain the trust of rioters who achieved the impossible -- the ouster of a cruel, onetime all powerful repressor. Similar autocratic regimes should take note.
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