DHAKA: Bangladesh’s election campaign entered its final day Monday ahead of the February 12 vote, as rival parties invoked the 2024 uprising that ended the autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina.
Tens of thousands of flag?waving supporters have attended weeks of rival rallies across the sprawling capital Dhaka, as parties each seek to harness the legacy of the mass uprising — and pitch competing visions of change for the country of 170 million.
The South Asian nation will elect a new parliament, with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) — led by Tarique Rahman, who returned in December after 17 years in exile — widely tipped as a frontrunner.
The BNP’s Rahman led a rally on Sunday in Dhaka’s Mirpur neighborhood — constituency of Shafiqur Rahman, the leader of his main rival, Jamaat-e-Islami.
“I can talk about him forever, but that won’t benefit the people of Bangladesh,” the BNP leader said about the Islamist chief, to crowds waving flags with the party symbol, a sheaf of rice.
A heavy deployment of armed police monitored the rally, with drones hovering above, as he backed the local BNP candidate Shafiqul Islam Milton.
“Help him win the election, and he will take care of you once elected,” Rahman told the BNP crowds.
Rahman, 60, better known in Bangladesh as Tarique Zia, assumed leadership of the BNP following the death of his mother, former prime minister Khaleda Zia, who died in December at the age of 80.
Hasina’s Awami League was banned by the interim government from running in the elections, a move criticized by rights groups.
- ‘Long live the revolution’ -
Jamaat-e-Islami chief Shafiqur Rahman meanwhile addressed a packed rally in the Dhaka-11 constituency, a flashpoint during the August 5, 2024 uprising that toppled the Awami League government of Hasina after 15 years in power.
Shafiqur Rahman, leading a coalition of Islamist parties — under the symbol of weighing scales — accused the former ruling party of widespread repression, but warned that new forms of abuse had quickly followed its fall.
“A section of the oppressed turned into oppressors just a day after August 5,” he said, alleging extortion and corruption by returning political figures.
“Common people, business owners — even beggars — are now fed up. Justice has been sent into exile.”
Jamaat, ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and seeking a return to formal politics after years of bans and crackdowns, has allied with the National Citizen Party (NCP), formed by student leaders who spearheaded the uprising.
NCP leader Nahid Islam accused major parties of quietly sharing the “businesses of extortion and crime” for decades.
“If you elect me, I will dedicate myself to the betterment of the area,” Islam vowed, especially thanking women supporters and warning: “If we lose, August 5 will also lose.”
Supporters chanted popular slogans from the uprising.
“Long live the revolution!” supporters shouted.
“Slavery or freedom?,” they chanted, replying in unison, “Freedom, freedom!“
Among them was Mohammed Harun, 65, who said he had not voted in 17 years but would back the Jamaat-led alliance in hopes of a “just, corruption and violence-free country.”
Fatema Begum, a 40-year-old housewife, said she wanted a Bangladesh where people could “live independently and speak freely.”
First-time voter Abdullah-al-Rahat, 21, a Dhaka University student who took part in the 2024 uprising, said Jamaat leaders appeared “honest and humble,” but favored a unity government if no party won a majority.
Hasina, 78, sentenced to death in absentia in November for crimes against humanity for the deadly crackdown on protesters in her failed bid to cling to power, remains in hiding in India.
Bangladesh poll rivals rally on final day of campaign
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Bangladesh poll rivals rally on final day of campaign
- Bangladesh’s election campaign entered its final day Monday ahead of the February 12 vote, as rival parties invoked the 2024 uprising that ended the autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina
US labels Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood as ‘terrorists’
- Designation comes after the US in January declared several other Muslim Brotherhood branches to be terrorist organizations
WASHINGTON: The United States said Monday it will label the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a terrorist organization and accused the group of receiving support from Iran.
The designation, which will be effective in a week, comes after the United States in January declared several other Muslim Brotherhood branches to be terrorist organizations, including in its historic base of Egypt.
“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” the State Department said in a statement.
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood “has contributed upwards of 20,000 fighters to the war in Sudan, many receiving training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the elite ideological wing of Tehran’s military, the State Department said.
The State Department accused the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood of having “conducted mass executions of civilians in areas they captured.”
Iran, run by Shiite clerics, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization that historically had extensive social networks inside Egypt, both have supported Sudan’s army.
The army has been engaged for nearly three years in a brutal civil war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), with the fighting claiming tens of thousands of lives, displacing more than 11 million people and plunging areas into famine-like conditions.
The United States last year said that the RSF has carried out acts of genocide with systematic killings and sexual violence against black Sudanese. The United States also said the army carried out war crimes.
Targeting the Muslim Brotherhood has also been a rallying cry in Washington for some conservative Republicans, in part over unfounded conspiracy theories that the group is trying to impose Islamic sharia law in the United States.
