Political Strife Besieges Bangladesh

From an “international basket case” with meager economic resources and a hungry and growing populace, Bangladesh has become a political basket case with an overabundance of jealous and feuding politicians.

Elections this month hardly helped matters: The balloting, marred by an opposition boycott, abysmal turnout, acts of violence and official poll-rigging, accentuated the gulf between the government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and her Bangladesh Nationalist Party and a three-party opposition coalition.

“By keeping major parties outside the process, you can’t assure political stability,” Motiurahman Nizami, secretary general of the opposition Jamaat-i-Islami, said in an interview. “There will be permanent chaos.”

True to his prediction, Nizami’s Islamic fundamentalist party and its partners have scheduled nationwide protest strikes in a bid to topple Zia’s “illegitimate” government, which returned to power in Parliament with a Stalinesque majority of at least 205-2.

Violence before and after the controversial election left at least 45 people dead and 1,000 injured and further polarized rival camps. On Saturday, at least one person was killed and 100 others were injured as violence disrupted 60 towns and cities across the nation. The opposition strike continued today, bringing the nation to a virtual standstill, police and news reports said.

But it is also true that this South Asian nation, where 70% of the population lives in the countryside, is so poor and underdeveloped that the political infighting in Dhaka, the capital, has little if any effect on the average person.

Whoever is in office, the rice grows and must be harvested. And although the opposition-government deadlock has gone on in varying degrees of intensity for almost two years, the overall growth rate of the economy appears to be holding steady at about 5.8%, Western diplomats say.

Mohammed Sultan, a boatman who ferries diesel oil drums in Dhaka’s bustling river port, sees a different side of the picture. The frequent nationwide work stoppages or transport shutdowns called by the opposition slash the number of passenger launches sailing to other towns in Bangladesh by half.

The result is that the wiry river man, sole source of support for his wife and two children, earns only 50 taka, or about $1.25, on some days. “I could earn extra if things were normal,” Sultan complained as he stood on the deck of an overnight ferry about to set sail with hundreds of passengers for Patuakhali, south of Dhaka.

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Sultan’s outlook, more or less, is that of foreign investors. Assiduously courted by Zia on trips to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Britain and other foreign lands, they have been frightened away in the main by Bangladesh’s 22 months of political turmoil. And the country’s economic ambitions have withered.

“Any hopes they had for investment are obviously dead in the water,” one Western diplomat said.

The political unrest has been especially destabilizing in Chittagong, the country’s commercial center and most important port on the Bay of Bengal. The turmoil has reportedly shut a quarter of Bangladesh’s garment factories, the main source of foreign currency.

Increasingly fed up at the inability of politicians to deal with each other, some members of the country’s fast-growing middle class are even voicing the hope that the 115,000-strong armed forces, which basically ran the country’s politics for 15 years of its quarter-century of existence, will retake control.

“I’m dissatisfied with all these parties,” said Beethi Rushdi, who runs a small shirt factory that counts Wal-Mart among its U.S. customers. “The soldiers should sort them out.”

There doesn’t seem to be any danger of that happening, because most Bangladeshis seem squarely in favor of maintaining civilian and parliamentary rule. But just in case, U.S. diplomats have discreetly told the generals that overthrowing a legitimately elected government would cost Bangladesh its $70 million in annual U.S. aid, plus shipments of food.

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The BNP’s mantra for ending the crisis is that, sooner or later, it will hold a new election under constitutionally amended rules to deal with a key opposition demand that a neutral caretaker government administer the polls. But some allies are urging the prime minister to get tough with her foes, and that possibility cannot be ruled out either.

“I cannot allow this sort of anarchy,” Zia said in a recent interview. “We’ll try to convince the opposition to come and sit; we’ll sit and discuss, and we’ll come to an understanding. If they don’t come, if they don’t discuss, then obviously they don’t want any solution.”

When then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dubbed nascent Bangladesh an “international basket case” in 1971, he meant that the former eastern half of Pakistan would not be viable as an independent entity. Zia takes umbrage at that prognosis.

“No more international basket case, no more democratic basket case,” she said with an exasperated laugh. “Bangladesh is now emerging. The economy is picking up, everything is going well. If you go to the countryside, you can see how, for the last 4 1/2, almost five years, I have built so many roads, bridges, culverts, schools, electricity [lines], hospitals.”

Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Daily Star and one of Bangladesh’s most influential journalists, agreed that his country has made progress in areas such as the construction of shelters to minimize deaths from the cyclones that roar in from the Bay of Bengal. But in general, Anam said, such achievements have been “in spite of the politicians.”

Jamaat-i-Islami’s Nizami, although a former member of Parliament, appears to agree. “Twenty-five years have gone by, and still no government, no party has been able to solve the main problem--that of poverty, illiteracy and unemployment,” he said. “No party has a practical program to deal with that.”

And as politicians maneuver for power, life for many Bangladeshis continues to be precarious--in a country where people are getting smaller because of poor diet. According to one study cited by Western diplomats, the average Bangladeshi is about 2 1/2 inches shorter today than in 1941-42.