By Mehedi Hasan Marof and Mithil Aggarwal
Student-led protesters originally opposed to a job quota system had called for the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the South Asian country’s longest-serving leader.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and left the country on Monday, the army chief said, a day after nearly 100 people were killed in clashes with the police as protesters demanded she step down.
In an address to the nation, army chief Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman said an interim government would be formed.
The ouster of Hasina, 76, Bangladesh’s longest-serving leader, is a seismic change for the South Asian nation of 170 million people, where at least 300 people have been killed in recent weeks amid a mass movement against what critics said was her increasingly autocratic rule.
Video showed protesters carrying clothes and furniture out of the prime minister’s residence in Dhaka, the capital, which had been left unguarded.
Hasina’s resignation was met with jubilance by people gathered on the streets.
“I can’t express how it feels in words. This is perhaps the best day of my life,” said Saqlain Rafi, a high school student who was out with his father in the Bangla Motor area of Dhaka, where the procession of people reached as far as the eye could see.
“I could not fight on the street for the fall of this tyrant,” he added. “All hail the 300 martyrs who died for our future.”
At least 95 people, including 14 police officers, were killed on Sunday in the deadliest day of protests that began in June, according to the country’s leading Bengali-language daily newspaper, Prothom Alo.
Officials responded Sunday evening by imposing an indefinite nationwide curfew. But student-led protesters had called for a march toward the capital that drew people from around the country in an effort to press Hasina to to resign.
The country also spent most of Monday under an internet blackout ahead of Zaman’s address.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country demanding that Hasina step down, and were met with police officers who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Cars and buildings were set ablaze as protesters clashed with groups they said were associated with the government.
“When you’re on the streets and you look around and see thousands of people of your age, your father’s age, your sister’s age, you feel invincible,” Monorom Polok, 25, said in a telephone interview from Dhaka as he prepared to join the march on Monday.
Sunday’s death toll was the highest since the protests began over a controversial preferential quota system for public sector jobs. While they began peacefully, they evolved into fury against Hasina over the violent crackdown, which in addition to more than 300 deaths left thousands of people injured.
“The shocking violence in Bangladesh must stop,” Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement Sunday.
The scheme was eventually scaled back by the country’s top court, leaving the streets relatively calm for a few days. But protesters gathered again last week, demanding justice for those killed.
As protesters called for a march, authorities responded by first cutting the internet on Sunday, in the country’s second internet blackout since the protests turned deadly.
The military, which imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew last month, also imposed another curfew in Dhaka and other divisional and district headquarters later in the day.
Netblocks, an internet monitoring group, confirmed in a post on X Monday that Bangladesh was “in the midst of a near-total national internet shutdown after earlier social media and mobile cuts.”
For decades, Bangladesh’s streets have been roiled by political and often violent battles, between parties led by two powerful women. For Hasina, who first served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001, the recent protests were the biggest challenge to her rule since she returned to power in 2009.
In January, she won a fourth straight term in an election that was widely condemned by the opposition and that the United States said was not free or fair.
This was not the first time Hasina’s government had tried to change the hiring system for government jobs, which young job seekers consider a guaranteed path to a comfortable future.
The system, which reserved 30 percent of the jobs for families of those who fought in Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war against Pakistan, was in place until 2018 and scrapped after violent protests.
A Bangladeshi court revived the quotas in June. Following the violence, the country’s Supreme Court cut the quota down to 5 percent.
Polok was in his first year of university when he took to the streets in 2018. Now, a year after graduating, he said he was protesting the same system.
“The protesters today are the same graduates and college students that protested in their school uniform when they were in high school in 2018,” he said.
Throughout the protests last month, Bangladesh was plagued by telecom shutdowns that walled off the country from the rest of the world, and later violence that human rights organizations said was aided by government-affiliated groups.
“We have been alarmed by the large number of unlawful killings, possible enforced disappearances, torture and the detention of thousands of people,” Türk’s office said in a statement last month.
Hasina’s party blamed the opposition for the protests and said the students who participated in “sabotage” must be treated like criminals.
Mehedi Hasan Marof reported from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Mithil Aggarwal reported from Hong Kong.
Source: nbcnews.com