Bangladesh’s prime minister has been ousted and her palace stormed, with the army chief announcing Monday that he was forming an interim government, a month after anti-government protests began.
“The country has suffered a lot, the economy has been hit, many people have been killed. It is time to end the violence,” General Waker-Uz-Zaman said, announcing the resignation of 76-year-old leader Sheikh Hasina in an address to the nation broadcast on Bangladesh state television.
“If the situation improves, there is no need to resort to a state of emergency,” he added, promising that those responsible for the killings during the protests would be prosecuted.
At least 300 people have been killed since the protests began in July, according to an AFP tally based on data from police, officials and hospital sources.
Sheikh Hasina fled the capital Dhaka by helicopter on Monday before thousands of protesters stormed her palace, a source close to the leader told AFP.
The eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh which gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, Sheikh Hasina came to power in 2009, after a first term between 1996 and 2001.
Footage broadcast by Bangladeshi channel Channel 24 showed a crowd of protesters running into the grounds of M’s palaceme Hasina.
Shortly before his residence was stormed, his son, Sajeeb Wazed, had urged security forces to prevent any takeover. “Your duty is to ensure the safety of our people and our country and uphold the Constitution,” he wrote on Facebook.
The announcement of Mr.me Hasina’s speech comes as hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters take to the streets of the capital on Monday, a day after a bloody day in which clashes left at least 94 people dead across the country.
Witnesses said large crowds were marching in the streets of Dhaka and had torn down roadblocks. The Business Standard newspaper estimated that some 400,000 protesters were demonstrating on Monday, a number AFP could not verify.
” Battlefield “
On Sunday, new clashes between opponents of Mme Hasina, security forces and supporters of the ruling party had left at least 94 dead across the country.
It is the heaviest toll in a single day since the start of anti-government protests a month ago in this Muslim country of 170 million inhabitants, where students are protesting, against a backdrop of acute unemployment among graduates, the favours enjoyed by those close to the government to become civil servants.
All of Dhaka was transformed into “a battlefield” and a crowd of several thousand demonstrators set fire to cars and motorcycles near a hospital, according to another police source.
In response, the government closed schools and universities and deployed the army.
The country has many unemployed graduates, and students are demanding the abolition of a system of positive discrimination that reserves a quota of public jobs for the families of independence veterans.
Partially abolished in 2018, this system was restored in June by the courts, setting the fuse alight, before a new reversal at the end of July by the Supreme Court.
The social crisis turned into a political crisis from July 16, when the repression caused its first deaths, with demonstrators demanding the resignation of Mr.me Hasina.
“It’s not just about job quotas anymore,” Sakhawat, a young protester we met in Dhaka, told AFP. “We want future generations to be able to live freely,” she said.
The government of Mme Hasina has been accused by human rights groups of using state institutions to consolidate her grip on power and stamp out dissent, including by carrying out extrajudicial executions of opposition activists.