Last month a student-led upheaval in Bangladesh threw out the violent and abysmally corrupt autocracy of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. And last week some two dozen political parties engaged an interim government in Dhaka in exploring how to restore democracy. It reminded me of Ernest Gellner’s wisecrack about democratic experiments in Turkey.
The British anthropologist saw that Turkish army generals had staged four coups overthrowing elected governments and, after a while, replacing them with newly elected ones. “The Turkish military can say,” Gellner joked, “re-establishing democracy is easy, we have done it so many times.”
Given the continual disruptions of the democratic process in Bangladesh, I’m wondering if this latest democratization venture, led by the Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, is going to stick.
Bangladesh’s birth as an independent nation was the outcome of its people’s long and arduous struggle to realize their democratic rights. On April 17, 1953, Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin from East Pakistan was dismissed unceremoniously by a titular governor-general, Ghulam Mohammed, who didn’t have the right to fire the prime minister who enjoyed the support of a parliamentary majority.
Three days later Nazimuddin’s protégé and East Pakistan’s Chief Minister, Nurul Amin, flew in to Karachi and urged the deposed prime minister to launch a movement challenging Mohammed’s blatantly unconstitutional action. Nazimuddin replied that he had been “warned through Shahabuddin,” his brother, that “the army would take over if I create chaos” over his firing.
Nurul Amin shared the story with me in 1968 (I was working as his press aide), and I said: “Maybe you needed to start a movement against military intervention in politics right then.”
He said the deposed prime minister didn’t want that because he feared that a mass movement in East Pakistan against the government in Karachi would “give India the excuse to jump in and break up this newborn nation.” Pakistan was seven years old, and Nazimuddin had worked hard to help create it.
Then, in 1970, Pakistan had a parliamentary election. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led the East Pakistan Awami League party, but unfortunately he lacked the skills and patience to administer the new nation, as it was ravaged by a famine and had been reeling from unrest spawned by leftists and crypto-Communists. In February 1975, in an attempt to quell the turmoil, Mujib imposed a one-party rule, brutally suppressing political protests and dissent. Ironically, Bangladeshis were now robbed of their democratic rights, not by the Pakistan army, but by their leader who had won them those rights. Six months later, the army ended Mujib’s autocracy by staging a coup and assassinating him and 16 members of his family.
Mujib’s assassination was followed by 16 years of military and civilian dictatorships. By 1990, a populist resurgence, led by Hasina and Khaleda Zia, widow of a general-turned-president, led to the restoration of democracy. Zia and Hasina have since been prime ministers under parliamentary democracy.
Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has won three elections, and she has served two-and-a-half terms as prime minister. Her administrations were known for abuse of power and corruption. Her son Tarique Rahman and his cronies, who included an acquaintance of mine (since in self-imposed exile in India) became notorious for openly taking bribes for development projects. Journalists were harassed and intimidated for reporting corruption. In 2005, for the third consecutive year, Transparency International rated Zia’s Bangladesh the world’s “most corrupt country.”
US ambassador to Bangladesh, James F Moriarty, reported to the State Department that Tarique was “guilty of egregious political corruption that has had a serious adverse effect on US national interests.” The envoy sought to have him barred from entry into the US.
Hasina’s Awami League (AL) won four elections enabling her to serve 20 years as prime minister. The repression, violence, corruption, persecution of political opponents, and suppression of dissent under her regime paled those of any administration in Bangladesh’s history.
I have lived under the military dictatorships of brutal Pakistani Generals Yahya Khan and Ayub Khan. I criticized their regimes in my newspaper column, suffering practically no consequences. During the last phase of Hasina’s rule, I almost never got answers to my emails to friends in Bangladesh if they had critical remarks
Her AL and other parties had complained of irregularities in an election held under the Zia government, and they got the Constitution amended to have future elections be held under neutral “caretaker governments.” But having won the 2008 election, Hasina got her parliamentary majority to remove that constitutional provision, rigging all three subsequent elections and monopolizing political power during the next 15 years until, on August 5, the student-led upheaval chased her out of office and into India.
The horrible things that happened under Hasina included the incarnation and torture of her opponents and critics, disappearance of others, extra-judicial killings, widespread extortions, and near-total suppression of the press and speech.
I have lived and worked under the military dictatorships of brutal Pakistani Generals Yahya Khan and Ayub Khan. I criticized their regimes in my newspaper column and everyday conversations, suffering practically no consequences. During the last phase of Hasina’s rule, I almost never got answers to my emails to friends in Bangladesh if they had critical remarks about her misrule. Security folks monitored many citizens’ private communications.
A friend in Dhaka asked me not to “talk politics” with him over the phone: “I don’t want myself -- or you -- to get kicked and slapped in police custody, or disappear one day,” he warned.
Professor Yunus’s interim government is likely to revive the constitutional provision for a caretaker government to conduct elections. The question is what would keep future Bangladeshi governments from trashing that provision and, to quote Professor Gellner, “re-establishing democracy many times”?
I’m optimistic about it. Gellner died in 1995 and didn’t get to see what I believe is the final outcome of Turkish democratic experiments. On July 15, 2016, at about 5pm American East Coast time, I was about to get off my computer in my living room in the Washington suburbs. I clicked the New York Times app to check the latest news. “Breaking: Coup in Turkey?” flashed one particular blurb.
I became concerned about the fate of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then Turkish prime minister (now president). I had gotten to know him personally during several journalistic and research stints in Turkey and I recalled that the Turkish military, following its 1960 coup, had hanged Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Soon my worries about Erdogan began to evaporate.
I saw Turkish men and women, first in small groups and then in avalanches, roaring into the streets of Istanbul and Ankara and chasing and grabbing men in army fatigues, beating them up, and herding them into police stations. I have the lasting memory of two young men overpowering a soldier on the run while a girl in her late teens wrenched a belt out of her pants and began thrashing him. The attempted coup was over in a little more than three hours.
The next day I called a friend in Istanbul and asked how they “finally crushed a coup.”“We have a new generation, feeding on freedom and democracy,” replied Osman Oktai Eksi, the chief columnist of the Hurriyet newspaper. “The days of military dictatorship are over.”
The interim government, led by the renowned “banker to the poor,” is studded with some of the best talents that Bangladesh can boast of. It’s committed to holding free and fair elections. Meanwhile, it will be reforming law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, the Election Eommission, the banking sector, and other key institutions, most of which have been politicized and corrupted by the Hasina regime.
I’m confident that the democratic structure the interim government is going to put together will be safe in the hands of this blessed generation of Bangladeshis of whom I am so proud.
Mustafa Malik worked as a journalist for the Washington Times, Hartford Courant, Glasgow Herald, and other newspapers. He is a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and has worked as a research associate for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago