Update from Dhaka: As Bangladesh Overturns Authoritarian Rule, Protesters Demand Democratic Gov’t

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We’re going to turn right now to Bangladesh. History is being made there. Student-led protests forced the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee to India Monday. Earlier today, the Bangladeshi president dissolved the Parliament. The president also ordered the opposition leader Khaleda Zia to be released from prison, where she’s been held since 2018. The military said an interim government will be formed, but its makeup remains unclear. Student protest leaders are calling for the Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus to head the interim government.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s decision to resign came after weeks of protests and an intense crackdown. More than 400 people have been killed since the protests began, including over a hundred on Monday alone. In southwestern Bangladesh, 24 people died on Monday when a hotel was set on fire. The hotel was owned by a political associate of Sheikh Hasina. After she fled the country, protesters stormed her official residence.

For more, we’re joined in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, by Irene Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. She served as secretary general of Amnesty International from 2001 to 2009.

Irene Khan, welcome to Democracy Now!. Explain what has happened in your country.

IRENE KHAN: Well, thank you for inviting me to your program.

What is happening here is quite extraordinary. As you said, a student uprising, that actually began about quotas for government jobs, has turned into a mass popular movement for democracy. The prime minister fled the country yesterday, in a remarkable short time, and now we have an army chief and the president here in the country who are trying to put together an interim government. On the other hand, we have hundreds of thousands of people who turned up on the streets to celebrate yesterday in Dhaka itself, and millions around the country, who want to have a smooth transition to democracy, but not more of the same.

And that is where the students come in with their request for the Nobel laureate Yunus, because for the students, the struggle is about equality. They call themselves now the nondiscrimination movement. So they want equality. They want justice. They want accountability for the 400 people who have been killed, 10,000 people put in jail, thousands injured and so on.

But we are at a very risky — in a very risky situation. We want change, but who is going to bring the change? There is an army chief who effectively took over from Hasina, and his job is to set up an interim government. But, you know, the Armed Forces, the law enforcement, they were only last week actually shooting the people. And, of course, the risks are there — as you mentioned, the hotel. There has been a lot of retaliatory attacks, unfortunately, on the Hindu minority, who are seen to have been close to Hasina’s government. A number of reports are coming in about temples having been attacked, property being burned. Last night, I myself heard, in a slum down the road from where I live, people screaming and shouting as some of these goons came in and broke their property. So, there’s a lot of this revenge killing going on. There is an army chief. It’s not clear exactly which direction he will go.

And then there are these students who are demanding something that hasn’t happened before. They’re not asking for political parties. They’re actually asking to have an interim government led by a civil society leader who is very highly regarded in this country. And they are looking for justice. They’re looking for human rights, actually, a human rights approach. So, whether that will happen, of course, remains to be seen, but we are very — all of us are behind that. At least I am behind that move of putting human rights front and center in the struggle.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Tanjeem Arnob, one of the student protesters who has been fighting for democracy in Bangladesh. Tanjeem, talk to us about the protests, your expectations now that the government has fallen.

TANJEEM ARNOB: What I’m really expecting is an interim government that will listen to us, that will listen to our students, because when the militaryship held the military — the militaryship had relationships with all of the political parties, but they stood at us. So, now the protesters, we, the protesters, the common students, has taken on the social media again, and we demanded that the previous Parliament had to be broken down before 3 p.m. Bangladesh time. They have broken down the government, but we don’t know who’s going to be in charge of the interim government.

We are expecting, and we are hoping — we, the general students, want Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, to be the chief adviser of the interim government. And we also expect to have a thorough investigation of all the killings, which includes the police officers, which includes the students, which includes the general people. And we want everyone who killed anyone or vandalized any property to face the court and face justice. We don’t want anyone to die anymore on the streets. And we want the military or the interim government to take proper steps to ensure safety on the roads.

AMY GOODMAN: Tanjeem Ashhab Arnob, if you can explain why this started with the students, tens of thousands of people in the streets? Four hundred people have been killed. How many arrested? And what’s your message to the international community?

TANJEEM ARNOB: So, OK, my message to the — first of all, we took the streets. The streets started with the students because the job quota movement. There was a 56% quota on the national services of Bangladeshi job sectors. And we wanted to abolish that, which, in that 56, if you break down that 56%, you would have 30% that belong to the grandchildren of freedom fighters. And we didn’t want that. We thought that it was unfair to give 30% of quota to such a small population, which doesn’t — who weren’t suppressed. There are other people who needs help.

And another part of it was, when we took on the streets over with our fair demands, the government, especially Obaidul Quader and the prime minister, they ridiculed us. They ridiculed us. They wanted to attack us. They attacked us with the students body. The student body was armed, and they took on my unarmed brothers and sisters in Dhaka University.

And another part of it was that the people of this country, we are actually fed up of the autocratic government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. We are fed up. If you speak up in this country, you will be arrested, [inaudible] people. We don’t know. There has been people who were arrested five or six years ago. We don’t know where they are, what happened to them. There are many unnamed killings. We wanted proper response from the government. There were students who were unarmed killed by police officers, as well. We saw those. We couldn’t stay at our homes, because [inaudible] the person. I was in the same class with the person who went to the same college with me, were getting killed or were getting attacked in other parts of the country. And we, the students, had to take on the streets and protest.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask Irene Khan if you could talk about the — Sheikh Hasina was seen herself as a pro-democracy advocate when she first came to power. What happened to her and to her regime? And what will be her legacy?

IRENE KHAN: Well, she is the daughter of the founding father of this country, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. She was also the prime minister who signed all the international human rights instruments on behalf of Bangladesh when she came to power in 2001. But over the last 15 years or so, she became a dictator, authoritarian. She rigged three elections, one after the other, depriving people of their right to vote. And very dangerously, her party captured all the state institutions — the police, the army, the judiciary, even the media. Independent media journalists were either killed, threatened. Editors had cases brought against them.

So, basically, she destroyed all the pillars of democracy and lost touch with the needs of the people, at a time when the country was going through economic growth, but that economic growth did not benefit ordinary people, so there was inequality. And there is a lot of inequality in the country, where the prime — former prime minister and her cronies got richer and richer, and a lot of other people got poorer and poorer. And as the student leader just explained, young people felt deprived of opportunity, felt ignored. And there was this sort of big bomb waiting to explode. And that’s precisely what happened. The tinder was the issue of the job quotas. But there was a lot more anger, frustration, disappointment behind that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the significance of her fleeing to India?

IRENE KHAN: Well, I think it is interesting, because India, as a neighboring country, has been supportive of Bangladesh’s independence, for example. But over the last decade and more, it has been very close, worked very closely with the Awami government. And many people in this country would say that India’s support allowed her to retain her power for so long.

Now, of course, India has a choice. India has given her a temporary — I understand it’s temporary; I don’t know — stay there. But the more important question is how India will view the uprising, the people’s demand in Bangladesh for change. I hope that the Indian government has watched how hundreds and thousands, millions of people came out in the streets yesterday, and that they will respect the wishes of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you a final question, Irene Khan. You are the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. Earlier today, you issued a statement condemning the Israeli military killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and the cameraman Rami al-Rifi in Gaza. Can you talk more about their deaths and, overall, the number of journalists — well over a hundred — who have been killed in Gaza?

IRENE KHAN: Yes. I have been very disturbed by the high number of killings of journalists in this war. As you know, the Committee on the Protection of Journalists and other organizations that collect this data say that this is the most dangerous conflict for journalists in the last 30 years, since statistics have been kept. And part of it is because of the intensity of the war, but what I’m seeing also is a pattern in which journalists are being targeted.

Now, most of the journalists on the ground in Gaza — almost all, not most — they are all Gazans, because Israel has refused to allow foreign media into the country, into Gaza. So, you have these local journalists, who are working on behalf sometimes of international outlets, sometimes other outlets, who are being targeted.

And in this particular case, they were wearing — they were traveling in a car marked “press,” they were wearing jackets marked “press,” and they were attacked. And this is not the first incident like that. We have seen several incidents like that, one that was investigated earlier this year by The Washington Post, and where the Post had the opportunity to examine the video material from the Israeli Defense Force, and it was clear that these people were journalists doing journalistic activities, and they were killed with drones.

So, what I see is a very dangerous act here. Journalists are civilians. The deliberate targeting of journalists is a war crime. Israel has to be held accountable for that. These journalists are our lifeline for communication on what is happening there. So, if they get killed, they can’t do their job. It also covers up the terrible atrocities that are happening there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us, Irene Khan, U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, former head of Amnesty International, speaking to us from Dhaka, from her country of Bangladesh, where the prime minister has just fled. And I want to thank Tanjeem Ashhab Arnob, a student at Brac University. He is participating in the student-led protests that have resulted in the prime minister’s resignation.

Next up, it’s Primary Day in Missouri here in the United States. Stay with us.