Sheikh Hasina as soon as helped rescue Bangladesh from navy rule, however her time in energy has seen the mass arrest of her political opponents and human rights sanctions towards her safety forces.
The 76-year-old received a fifth time period as prime minister after polls on Sunday, with the opposition boycotting a vote they are saying was neither free nor honest.
Hasina branded the principle opposition social gathering a “terrorist organisation”.
The daughter of a revolutionary who led Bangladesh to independence, Hasina has presided over breakneck financial progress in a rustic as soon as written off by US statesman Henry Kissinger as an irredeemable “basket case”.
Final month, she vowed to “flip the complete of Bangladesh right into a affluent and developed nation”.
However critics accuse her authorities of unjustly jailing her chief rival, passing draconian anti-press freedom legal guidelines, and a litany of rights abuses together with the homicide of opposition activists.
Hasina was 27 and travelling overseas when renegade navy officers murdered her father, prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, alongside along with her mom and three brothers in a 1975 coup.
She returned after residing in exile for six years to take the reins of her father’s Awami League social gathering, starting a decade-long battle to revive democracy that noticed her subjected to prolonged stretches of home arrest.
Hasina joined forces with Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Social gathering (BNP) to assist oust navy dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad in 1990.
However they quickly fell out and their rivalry has dominated Bangladeshi politics since.
Hasina first served a time period as prime minister in 1996 however misplaced to Zia 5 years later. The pair have been then imprisoned on corruption costs in 2007 after a coup by a military-backed authorities.
The fees have been dropped and so they have been free to contest an election the next yr. Hasina received in a landslide and has been in energy ever since.
The 78-year-old Zia in the meantime is in ailing well being and confined to hospital after graft costs noticed her sentenced to a 17-year jail time period in 2018, with prime leaders from her social gathering additionally behind bars.
Hasina has been praised by supporters for main Bangladesh by a outstanding financial increase, largely on the again of the principally feminine manufacturing facility workforce powering its garment export business.
Bangladesh, one of many world’s poorest international locations when it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, has grown a median of greater than six p.c every year since 2009.
Poverty has plummeted and greater than 95 p.c of the nation’s 170 million folks now have entry to electrical energy, with per capita wealth overtaking India in 2021.
Hasina additionally obtained worldwide approval for opening Bangladesh’s doorways to a whole bunch of 1000’s of Rohingya refugees fleeing a 2017 navy crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar.
And she or he has been hailed for a decisive crackdown on Islamist militants within the Muslim-majority nation, after 5 homegrown extremists stormed a Dhaka cafe fashionable with Western expatriates and killed 22 folks in 2016.
However her authorities’s intolerance in direction of dissent has given rise to resentment at residence and expressions of concern from Washington and elsewhere overseas.
5 prime Islamist leaders and a senior opposition determine have been executed over the previous decade after convictions for crimes towards humanity dedicated throughout the nation’s brutal 1971 liberation battle.
As a substitute of therapeutic the injuries of that battle, the trials triggered mass protests and lethal clashes.
Her opponents branded them a farce, saying they have been a politically motivated train designed to silence dissent.
America imposed sanctions on an elite department of Bangladesh’s safety forces and 7 of its prime officers over costs of widespread human rights abuses.
Hasina’s newest marketing campaign was marred by the arrest of 1000’s of opposition activists.
Sometimes violent road protests over the previous yr demanded her resignation and the appointment of a caretaker authorities to supervise the election.
Even earlier than her opponents resolved to boycott the vote, analysts say the detention of so many senior BNP figures has left no viable democratic different to her rule.
She “created the phantasm of an election” stated Ataur Rahman, a former professor of politics on the Nationwide College of Singapore.
AFP
AFP
AFP
AFP
AFP