On Sunday alone, more than 100 people were killed when the protests targeting Prime Minister Hasina re-erupted. They included more than a dozen policemen and at least half a dozen Awami league activists, underlining how the movement had turned against those responsible for the deaths of protestors
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has resigned and fled Dhaka. The Bangladeshi Army has announced that a new interim government will be formed today. Hasina has been ousted by a students’ movement which demanded the cancellation of quotas in government jobs but quickly transformed into a public uprising.
The uprising was fueled by more than 300 people who were killed in the protests which began on 1 July. The death toll, the highest in Bangladesh since its Liberation War in 1971, resulted in the issue of quotas in government jobs being sidelined after the Bangladesh Supreme Court scrapped most of the quotas on 22 July. There were several indications that a mere retreat on job quotas by the Hasina government was not going to satisfy the student protestors. The students wanted the culprits responsible for the torture, arrest, and killings of their comrades to be identified, brought to trial, and punished.
On Sunday, after the students gave a call for marching onto Ganobhaban, the prime minister’s office, on Monday morning, curfew was re-imposed in Dhaka. On Monday morning, the internet was cut in the forenoon for more than three hours. The time gained seems to have been used by the Army to persuade Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and to facilitate her flight out of the country. The details of what transpired between her and the Army before her resignation remain unclear.
What is known is that the Army Chief General Waker-uz-Zaman was under pressure from his subordinate officers not to give orders to fire on the protestors. They did not want the Army to be seen as part of the government’s crackdown on the student protestors….
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State terror in Bangladesh / Informal reports on the ground situation
Bangladesh: Students Have Often Led Protests That Have Transformed the Country
105 people killed; national curfew imposed in Bangladesh after student protesters storm prison
After the truth-shower 