Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on Monday after hundreds of people were killed in a crackdown on demonstrations that began as protests against job quotas and swelled into a movement demanding her ouster.
There’s another thread on this with a constantly-updating Al Jazeera article that included a timeline of events which I pasted over there before It got too far down the page. I’ll paste it here too:
Timeline: How the unrest began
• Students began protesting last month when a controversial government job quota system that favoured children of war veterans was reinstated by the High Court.
• The government responded by shutting down universities and using the police and military to crack down on protesters.
• Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina imposed a nationwide curfew and cut off access to phones and the internet.
• Some 200 people, mostly students, were killed. Thousands were arrested.
• On July 21, Bangladesh’s top court stepped in, ruling that the quotas should be scaled back from 30 percent to 5 percent, with 3 percent for relatives of veterans.
• Last week, demonstrations resumed with protesters issuing new demands, including bringing justice and accountability for those killed and for Hasina to step down.
• The prime minister had pledged a strong response, calling the demonstrators criminals and saboteurs.
I’ve been following it for a few weeks, it was a snowball effect.
The original protest was met with mockery and ignorance where Hasina called the protestors “rajakars”, which refers to the people who aided Pakistan during the genocide in the 70s. That caused even bigger protests.
The government’s youth wing/league, likened to a gang or terrorist group, violently beat protestors and killed some. In the chaos, police fired on protestors, drove cars through rickshaws, and started showing up to homes in plainclothes at night arresting students. More happened but this is what I saw videos of. Many more were killed during this time. To slow the spread of news about this, the government shut down the internet. At this point the people wanted her out of power.
Further growing protests were met with more violence, a curfew, and a shoot on sight order. The youth wing attacked people on the street and police fired at people outside. People were shot at even when standing by the windows or on the rooftops.
All of thus culminated in people flooding to the capital, filling the city centres and Hasina fleeing the country.
While its very likely that opposition party members supported the protests, too much happened for it to be entirely manufactured.
There’s another thread on this with a constantly-updating Al Jazeera article that included a timeline of events which I pasted over there before It got too far down the page. I’ll paste it here too:
Riots caused by court rulings don’t usually topple prime ministers. This feels really weird and off.
I think it was a snowball effect.
I’ve been following it for a few weeks, it was a snowball effect.
The original protest was met with mockery and ignorance where Hasina called the protestors “rajakars”, which refers to the people who aided Pakistan during the genocide in the 70s. That caused even bigger protests.
The government’s youth wing/league, likened to a gang or terrorist group, violently beat protestors and killed some. In the chaos, police fired on protestors, drove cars through rickshaws, and started showing up to homes in plainclothes at night arresting students. More happened but this is what I saw videos of. Many more were killed during this time. To slow the spread of news about this, the government shut down the internet. At this point the people wanted her out of power.
Further growing protests were met with more violence, a curfew, and a shoot on sight order. The youth wing attacked people on the street and police fired at people outside. People were shot at even when standing by the windows or on the rooftops.
All of thus culminated in people flooding to the capital, filling the city centres and Hasina fleeing the country.
While its very likely that opposition party members supported the protests, too much happened for it to be entirely manufactured.