Election Chief in Bangladesh Asks Military to Maintain Order

A quarter-century after Bangladesh’s birth in agony and blood, and five years since its freest and fairest election, soldiers have come back onto the streets of this capital.

Chief Election Commissioner A. K. M. Sadeque said he called upon the army not in order to bury democracy but to safeguard today’s controversial nationwide election, which began early this morning with only a few voters waiting in lines as polling stations opened.

But in a land that gained freedom in a gory war with Pakistan in 1971 and that overthrew military-backed rule just six years ago, it was a sad commentary that the generals had to be called upon, albeit temporarily, to help shore up the parliamentary system.

“In this country, previously democracy has been jeopardized by military charlatans. Now it’s jeopardized by the rivalries of political parties,” said Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Daily Star newspaper. “We are in the grip of a government without credibility and an opposition without responsibility.”

One of Asia’s poorest countries, Bangladesh has been locked for nearly two years in a political mean season pitting the government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia against a trio of angry opposition parties.

This month alone, 14 people have been killed and 400 wounded in political violence. Bombs have been thrown at cars, candidates and officials have been assaulted and homes have been torched.

It’s a wearying, economically damaging conflict that Bangladesh doesn’t need. Its 120 million people, crowded into an area one-third the size of California, on fertile land periodically swept by cyclones and floods, earn $230 a year on average.

Political turmoil and repeated strikes have hamstrung government efforts to woo more foreign investment. And in the past two months, the clothing industry, Bangladesh’s No. 1 source of export earnings, has reportedly been hammered: 400 to 500 of the 2,000 garment factories have closed down due to the strikes, said Abu Takir, deputy head of the Bangladesh Garment Exporters Assn.

In the election, which the prime minister maintains is mandated by the constitution, only Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, fringe candidates and independents are participating. The opposition parties, which claim the government is dictatorial and corrupt and will stuff ballot boxes to win, have called a boycott.

A 48-hour strike that began Wednesday shut shops and public transport in the capital, the port of Chittagong and other major cities. In the hours before polls were scheduled to open, crude homemade bombs exploded by the score in Dhaka and other cities. Four people were reportedly killed.

Sadeque said concerns that the violence might escalate led him to ask for the temporary deployment of hundreds of uniformed soldiers, who rolled through Dhaka’s streets in trucks or were posted to guard gasoline stations and intersections.

“They [election opponents] have thrown bombs and burned our offices,” the election commissioner told a news conference. “We fear they have much more sophisticated weapons to disrupt the voting.”

The opposition, whose 147 members of Parliament resigned en masse in December 1994, earlier announced formation of “action squads” but washed its hands of any consequences.

“When the mob becomes unruly, who can control them?” Hasina Wajed, outspoken leader of the opposition Awami League, told a news conference Tuesday.

Western diplomats expect the turnout to be as low as 10% of the 56 million eligible voters. Zia has said she would accept approbation from that fraction as a mandate to remain in office. Wajed, her most vehement critic, says the resulting government would be illegal.

“I will mobilize the people,” the opposition leader vowed. “No autocratic government can stay in power for long. Their time will come.”

Many Bangladeshis blame the parlous state of the country’s politics on bad relations between these two women. Zia is a 50-year-old former housewife whose assassinated husband, Gen. Ziaur Rahman, was military ruler of Bangladesh from 1975 to 1981. Wajed, 48, is the daughter of the country’s charismatic founder, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, who was slain in 1975.

Wajed had demanded that Zia cancel the election and resign to make way for a neutral caretaker government capable of administering the polls impartially.

The prime minister refused but said in an interview Wednesday that she hopes to hold talks after the election that could lead to another round of elections under revised rules. She has said that constitutionally, she has no choice but to hold today’s balloting, since her government’s five-year mandate expires in April.

Sixteen years of military or executive presidential rule in Bangladesh came to an end in 1991, and some worry that the current deadlock is harming democracy’s shallow roots.

“They have never transferred power democratically from one party to another,” said Peter Manikas of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, an affiliate of the U.S. Democratic Party. “There’s never been two good elections in a row.”

The opposition has lampooned an election with so few contests that 48 candidates for Parliament’s 300 elected seats, Zia included, will win for want of opposition. In turn, the prime minister accused her foes Wednesday of trying to destabilize the country to the point where the army will be tempted to intervene again in politics.