| |  | | with Anika Arora Seth |
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| A mural of Prime Minister Sheik Hasina is seen vandalized by protesters as people celebrate her resignation in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Monday. (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters) |
For the entirety of Bangladesh’s independent existence, the family of now-deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina has been central to its story. Hasina’s father was the esteemed Mujibur Rahman, the pioneering icon of the Bangladeshi nation, who led the country’s freedom struggle that withstood the genocidal rampages of the Pakistani army in 1971 and, with Indian aid, ultimately severed the unnatural union between what was then-West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Four years later, Hasina was studying abroad in Germany when an army putsch saw soldiers burst into her family’s residence in the capital, Dhaka, and assassinate her father, mother, three siblings and members of the household staff. That trauma was profound for both young Hasina and the fledgling nation: It prefigured cycles of violence and instability, military coups and vengeful, zero-sum political battles. And it lurked below Hasina’s multiple stints in power, especially the last 15 years, during which the democratically elected leader turned into an increasingly aloof and heavy-handed autocrat.  |  | |
Hasina and her secularist Awami League party won elections in 2009 that were held after a military intervention placed the country under an interim technocratic government. She took office bent on extracting justice for the past, and ushered in trials and tribunals seeking to punish a generation of pro-Pakistani collaborators implicated in wanton massacres, rapes and atrocities that accompanied Bangladesh’s bloody independence five decades ago. The proceedings were cheered by many as a necessary step to healing the country’s wounds. But they were carried out in a manner that engendered criticism by rights groups and foreign governments, who questioned the fairness and transparency by which Hasina’s government was carrying out its prosecutions. Some critics wondered whether Hasina was actually pursuing justice or executing a vendetta. A few influential politicians with documented links to 1971 death squads were executed. But, as Hasina assumed more autocratic behaviors and powers, the dragnet of lawfare expanded, sidelining rivals and silencing journalists and civil society activists. She won reelection three successive times in conditions that were increasingly less free and less fair. The scenes Monday in Dhaka mark a dramatic denouement for Hasina’s career. A month of protests that had been met by deadly repression culminated in Hasina’s resignation and hasty departure to India alongside the familiar intervention of Bangladesh’s top brass. It also saw the ransacking of Hasina’s official residence by jubilant demonstrators and once-unthinkable scenes of vandalism, with some protesters hammering away at a large statue of Mujib, Hasina’s father and the spiritual figurehead of the nation. The spur of the uprising had been a government quota policy that reserved a major proportion of civil service jobs for the relatives and descendants of those who fought in the 1971 war for liberation. But they represent only a sliver of the country’s overall population — Bangladesh is the eighth-most-populous country in the world — and a generation of students and other young people shorn of opportunities and frustrated by the endemic corruption of the political elites rebelled. “This quota reform movement became a spark for other political and economic grievances. Three elections have taken place in Bangladesh which were completely fraudulent,” Ali Riaz, a political scientist at Illinois State University, told Scroll.in, an Indian publication. “So people have no way to vent their anger. So when the quota reform movement spilled over to the streets that is when this convergence took place.” Their dissent was met with brute force and stubbornness from Hasina, who appears to have unleashed armed cadres of party loyalists onto the protesters once it became clear that elements of the security forces weren’t willing to follow her orders. At least 300 people were killed in clashes between the two sides over the past month — the majority shot dead by police, paramilitaries and members of the ruling Awami League, my colleagues reported. Hasina was defiant till the end, even branding the protesters as “razakars,” a reference to the pro-Pakistani death squads that murdered myriad university students clamoring for independence in 1971. The audacity of the claim only further incensed those protesting her. “It seems that we have been liberated again. I am over the moon,” Rakibul Islam, a student of Abudharr Ghifari College, told my colleagues after news of Hasina’s departure broke. “I am going to celebrate this victory for a long, long time.” What comes next is far from certain. The specter of further political violence is real, with reprisal attacks on Awami League officials proliferating throughout the country. In neighboring India, concerns grew over the perceived advantage gained by political Islamists in Bangladesh, whom Hasina had suppressed while in office. After student leaders, security chiefs, and the country’s president sat down for meetings Tuesday, it emerged that Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and civil society activist, would serve as a transitional leader. The prime minister’s defenders, including her own son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, extolled her economic track record and feared the turmoil that may hit the developing country in the coming months. “She has turned Bangladesh around,” Wazed told the BBC. “When she took over power it was considered a failing state. It was a poor country. Until today it was considered one of the rising tigers of Asia.” But a surge in Bangladesh’s GDP was not felt by the average citizen. “Over the years they have seen that Bangladesh reportedly achieved high economic growth, yet the unemployment rate was very high. On the other hand, they saw widespread corruption,” noted Riaz. |
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People gather around the Bangladeshi prime minister's residence in Dhaka on Monday. (Str/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) |
Attention shifts to Bangladesh’s influential military, which yet again says it’s stepping in to clean up the misdeeds of civilian rulers. “Please trust the armed forces. I am taking full responsibility to protect all lives and property,” Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman, the army chief, said to the nation Monday. He called for an end to the violence and promised a full investigation into the deaths of the protesters. “I assure you that you will not be disappointed,” he said, adding, “Every single death will be investigated, every atrocity will be discussed.” As stunning as the developments of recent days have been, one can’t help but feel a degree of déjà vu. I was in Dhaka in 2008, not long after the country’s generals had interrupted Bangladesh’s democracy amid a bout of dysfunctional bickering between Hasina and her main rival, former prime minister Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (who on Monday was ordered released from the jail where Hasina had had her consigned in recent years). I interviewed the army chief at the time, the unassuming, diminutive Gen. Moeen Uddin Ahmed. “The situation was deteriorating very rapidly,” he said, justifying the military intervention in 2007. “The world saw people dying in Dhaka’s streets. Was this the way forward?” The piece I ended up writing cast Moeen as a potential wolf in sheep’s clothing, perhaps a would-be strongman who could snuff out the democratic aspirations of ordinary Bangladeshis. In hindsight, that was an unfair assessment. He ended up fulfilling his promise to allow fresh elections that paved the way for Hasina to come to power, and retired from the armed forces. It was the Bangladeshi prime minister who then set up a regime that further polarized her country. “No systems of government are bad in their own right,” Moeen told me philosophically 16 years ago. “It’s the human beings who make it so.” |
| (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post). |
A growing list of airlines is canceling flights in the Middle East, with Tel Aviv’s airport seeing cancellation after cancellation. As Israel braces for the retaliation that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran have sworn is coming, some families have been desperate to flee. “We are going to Portugal, and we do not plan to go back,” said Enav Graff, biting back tears while she and her family waited at Ben Gurion Airport. “I do not feel safe here anymore." Other Israeli families, like the Asulins, are determined to stand their ground. Shimon Asulin stood with balloons at the Tel Aviv airport’s arrival hall to welcome home his wife, daughter and sister-in-law as they returned from a vacation in New York. |
| • Five U.S. service members and two contractors were injured Monday in a rocket attack at an Iraqi air base, defense officials said. The Pentagon said Tuesday that Iran-backed militants were responsible for the attack at Al Asad air base, an incident that risks further escalation in a region on the brink of wider conflict. All seven of those wounded are in stable condition. • American support for sending troops to defend Israel is at its lowest level in over a decade, according to a nationwide poll released Tuesday. The survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 55 percent of Americans opposed such a move if Israel’s neighbors were to attack, while 41 percent expressed support. • Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is experiencing stock market whiplash. Japanese markets took their biggest dive since 1987 on Monday, but on Tuesday, they rebounded in the largest daily gain since 2008. The turbulence can be partially attributed to rising unemployment in the United States as well as to rapid changes in the value of the Japanese yen, among other factors, experts say. • Nine staff members of the main United Nations relief agency in Gaza were fired after an internal investigation concluded that they “may have been involved” in Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel. Israel initially alleged in January that 19 staff members had participated in the attacks, which prompted more than a dozen countries to suspend donations to the agency. The U.N. investigation determined there was “insufficient” evidence to support Israel’s charges against another nine of the accused, and “no evidence” against one. |
| By Devlin Barrett, Shayna Jacobs and Josh Dawsey | | |
By Missy Ryan, John Hudson, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Karen DeYoung | | |
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| By Bilel Nasiri | New Lines Magazine | | |
By Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin and Jake Sullivan | The Washington Post | | |
By Ali Riaz | Foreign Affairs | | |
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| Air Base 201 is seen from a plane outside Agadez, Niger, on Friday. (Carmen Yasmine Abd Ali for The Washington Post) |
AGADEZ, Niger — The last U.S. troops flew out of their sprawling base in Niger’s northern desert on Monday, marking a closing chapter in the American military relationship with this West African country and a substantial strategic setback for Washington. The withdrawal of the U.S. forces, which had numbered 1,100 in Niger at their peak, follows more than a decade of investment in Niger — and months of fruitless efforts to put the country back on a democratic path after its military seized power in a coup a year ago. The pullout comes at a moment when extremist violence in West Africa is reaching record highs and Russia’s influence in the region is growing. Seen from the air, the cluster of white buildings that make up Air Base 201 emerges from the brown sand just outside Agadez, a small city on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The base took on increasing importance for the U.S. counterterrorism strategy, which began in the early 2000s under President George W. Bush and ramped up further about a decade ago, after extremists and separatists took over much of neighboring Mali. That base “gave us a window into everything that was going on in the region,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior associate at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now literally and figuratively, what we are doing is that we are moving to the margins.” After the coup in Niger, U.S. officials pressed the military junta to begin restoring democracy and warned that American assistance hung in the balance. In March, the spokesman for Niger’s military government declared that the presence of American troops was “illegal.” The next month, Niger welcomed Russian military instructors to the same airfield in the capital where American troops were at the time based. Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State-Sahel Province have also in recent years made Niger and its neighbors a global hot spot. Last year, about 11,600 fatalities were linked to Islamist extremists, more than a threefold increase since 2020, following a series of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. according to the Washington-based Africa. — Rachel Chason Read on: U.S. troops withdraw from strategic West African base as militant threat grows |
|  (Martin Bureau/AP)
By Gretchen Reynolds and Teddy Amenabar |
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