1000’s of Bangladeshi protesters have crowded right into a central Dhaka sq. for mass protests, demanding Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resign following a lethal police crackdown.
Asif Mahmud, one of many key protest leaders in a nationwide civil disobedience marketing campaign, requested supporters to be able to battle. “Put together bamboo sticks and liberate Bangladesh,” he wrote on Fb on Sunday.
Whereas the military stepped in to assist restore order within the wake of earlier protests, some former army officers have since joined the coed motion, and ex-army chief Normal Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan turned his Fb profile image crimson in a present of help.
Military chief Waker-uz-Zaman spoke to officers on the army headquarters in Dhaka on Saturday, telling them the “Bangladesh Military is the image of belief of the folks”.
“It at all times stood by the folks and can achieve this for the sake of individuals and in any want of the state,” he mentioned, based on a military assertion issued late on Saturday. The assertion didn’t give additional particulars and didn’t explicitly say whether or not the military backed the protests.
The demonstrations started in early July over the reintroduction of the quota scheme, which reserved greater than half of all authorities jobs for sure teams. It has since been scaled again by Bangladesh’s high court docket.
Rallies in opposition to the quotas led to days of mayhem that noticed greater than 200 folks killed in a number of the worst durations of unrest throughout Hasina’s 15-year tenure.
Troops briefly restored order however crowds returned to the streets in big numbers this week in an all-out noncooperation motion geared toward paralysing the federal government.
On Saturday, when lots of of hundreds marched in Dhaka, the police had been largely bystanders watching the protest rallies, which have grown right into a wider antigovernment motion throughout the South Asian nation of some 170 million folks.
College students Towards Discrimination, the principle group behind the protests, has requested folks to cease paying taxes and utility payments from Sunday to pile stress on the federal government. They’ve additionally requested authorities employees and labourers within the nation’s economically very important garment factories to strike.
Hasina, 76, has dominated Bangladesh since 2009 and received her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote with out real opposition. Her authorities is accused by rights teams of misusing state establishments to entrench its maintain on energy and stamp out dissent, together with by the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.