WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #28: Bangladesh: violence and police repression does not pass - Ignazio Leone (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In a country that was nursing a deep malaise, the Bangladeshi people

joined the student protests ---- In recent weeks, Bangladesh has
returned to the headlines, something that hasn't happened since the
collapse of the Rana Plaza in 2013, in which more than a thousand people
lost their lives, who worked there in terrible conditions and with
starvation wages, mainly for the global fashion industry. ---- A large
popular uprising forced Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina, daughter of the
first president of Bangladesh, who had governed the country since 2009
with her party, the Awami League, to flee by helicopter.

It all started with peaceful student protests against the quota
mechanism within the Bangladeshi public administration, which reserved
30% of available positions for the family members of those who fought in
the 1971 war of independence against Pakistan. The students' protest was
due to the fact that, so many decades after the war, this rule was
nothing more than the way in which the ruling party ensured its
influence within the public administration, shielding the command posts
and at the same time having a solid base for clientelist policies.

The government's response to the peaceful student protests can be summed
up in two words: violence and repression. A curfew was imposed, internet
access was blocked and those who protested were brutally attacked by the
police and groups linked to the ruling party: the result was hundreds of
deaths and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of people.

This did not quell the protests, in a country that was harboring a deep
malaise and that saw a large part of the Bangladeshi people support the
students and join their protests.

In these long years of rule by the deposed prime minister, Bangladesh
has achieved some economic goals that are certainly not insignificant.
The World Bank, in the section of its website dedicated to Bangladesh,
states that the country has gone from being one of the poorest in the
world to acquiring the status of a lower-middle-income country in 2015,
with the possibility, according to the World Bank, of becoming an
upper-middle-income country by 2031(1).

If on the one hand, reading the World Bank data, this has led to a
reduction in poverty from 11.8% in 2010 to 5% in 2022, on the other hand
we must ask ourselves what has supported the economic growth of
Bangladesh and at what price.

In fact, the greatest price seems to have been paid by workers: this is
what emerges from the report of the International Trade Union
Confederation (ITUC) entitled "Global Rights Index 2024", according to
which Bangladesh boasts the very sad record of being one of the 10 worst
countries in the world for workers (2).

State repression, violence and anti-union policies: this seems to be the
recipe for success of Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina's economic policies.
In order to make the cocktail of repression and violence even more
effective, the government has pulled another gem out of the hat: the
Industrial Police. From a page on the website of the Bangladesh Garment
Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) (3), we learn that the
Industrial Police is "a specialized law enforcement unit[...]with the
aim of maintaining order in the four industrial zones of the country".
Also on the same page of the website, we read that the then Minister of
Internal Affairs Sahara Khatun declared that the creation of this police
force was functional "to ensure that no outsider can incite violence or
create anarchy in the industrial sector".

To better understand the situation of Bangladeshi workers, it is worth
quoting a passage from the aforementioned ITUC report: "In 2023, several
workers in the dominant garment sector were killed by police during
protests and a union leader was murdered. Strikes were brutally
repressed by police and attempts to form unions for the sector's 4.5
million workers were hampered by a draconian registration process that
saw 50% of applications rejected."

It should be added that the repression carried out by the Awami League
government was not only aimed at workers, but against all political
opponents and non-aligned journalists; according to the report "The
State of Human Rights in the World - April 2024", published by Amnesty
International (4), the Bangladeshi government "has used the powers of
the Digital Security Act and other laws to target journalists and human
rights defenders, subjecting them to arbitrary detention and torture.
There has been a worrying increase in enforced disappearances and a lack
of accountability for deaths in custody".

Yet all this repressive apparatus was not enough for Sheikha Hasina: in
a few weeks she was ousted by a mass action that imposed Mohammed Yunus
as prime minister of the interim government that will lead Bangladesh
until the next elections.

The name Yunus is not new to those interested in another economy:
considered one of the creators of microcredit, he is in fact the founder
of the Grameen Bank, the so-called "bank of the poor" that for more than
40 years has offered loans to segments of the population excluded from
traditional banking circuits, which is why he won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2006.

However, we must not forget that Sheikha Hasina herself was not born an
autocrat: she entered politics as a student leader, becoming in the
early 1990s one of the protagonists of the pro-democracy demonstrations
that put an end to military rule. This is to say that often, too often,
history demonstrates the correctness of anarchism in recognizing that
there are no heroes or saviors of the homeland: only mass mobilization
and constant popular participation in decision-making mechanisms is
capable of bringing about real and concrete changes. Just as only the
presence of a structured and cohesive anarchist organization can
guarantee that these changes have equality and freedom as their guiding
stars.

Because the more time passes, the more value the slogans of the First
International acquire: the emancipation of workers will be the work of
the workers themselves.

Notes: 1) The World Bank in Bangladesh, www.worldbank.org,
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/bangladesh/overview 2) ITUC, Global
rights index 2024,
https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/2024_ituc_global_rights_index_en.pdf 3)
Industrial police launched, www.bgmea.com.bd,
https://www.bgmea.com.bd/page /Industrial_police_launched 4) Amnesty
International, The state of the world's human rights, April 2024, ISBN:
978-0-86210-509-9,
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WEBPOL1072002024ENGLISH.pdf

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