Thursday, Jun. 19, 2008
General Command
By Ishaan Tharoor/Dhaka
TIME MAGAZINE
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1815984,00.html
To reach the office of General Moeen Uddin Ahmed in
Little is known about the 55-year-old Moeen other than that he, more than anybody else in this nation of 150 million, is the man who holds the keys to its future. Over a year and a half ago, Moeen's army waded into a turbulent political crisis, postponed parliamentary elections and helped install a caretaker government of state-appointed bureaucrats known as "advisers," headed by a former World Bank executive, Fakhruddin Ahmed. Since then,
But the way forward looks as murky now as it did 18 months ago. Despite Moeen's insistence that elections will go ahead as planned by the end of this year, the optimism that first greeted his arrival on "1/11," as the epochal event is known there, is gone. Ever since achieving independence from
The Caged Begums
Two fixtures of the country's checkered politics remain at the center of things in
The two women, daughter and widow, respectively, of the founders of the AL and the BNP and still the parties' leaders, have dominated Bangladesh's political landscape for over a decade, swapping spells as Prime Minister. But they ended up behind bars, casualties of an anticorruption drive launched by the caretaker government post-1/11. "Before, it was a free-for-all," says Muzaffer Ahmed, a respected academic and the head of
It's this history of political dysfunction and avarice that Moeen claims he wants to expunge. The caretaker government has prided itself on its efforts to rebuild
The military takeover following 1/11 was widely accepted and applauded at first. In the run-up to parliamentary elections, Zia's incumbent government attempted to manipulate the democratic process. Mass protests from the
In political terms, the military's biggest failure in the many months it has held sway over the country has been its inability to smash the power of the AL and BNP. Efforts to force Hasina and Zia into the type of exile imposed upon
As the caretaker government seeks to cleanse the country's politics, many in
Growing frustrations with the military come as
A Sense of Unease
The political parties have seized upon the government's diminishing credibility. "We're in grave economic peril," says Hussain of the BNP. "It's time for democratic unity." His party and the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that has existed for decades in direct antagonism to the secular-left Awami League, took the unprecedented step of calling for even Hasina's release from prison. They bridle at the caretaker government's undemocratic attempts to reform democracy from the top down. "Just see the
The sense of solidarity that these parties now share flies in the face of their past: since the restoration of electoral politics in the 1990s, Zia's BNP and Hasina's AL alternated divisive spells in power, terms that were marked by bitter partisanship, rampant corruption and little to no sense of national consensus. "We need to reduce the cost of electoral defeat. [Elections] used to be winner-take-all with the loser in the streets," says Foreign Adviser Iftekhar Chowdhury. To that end, the government has attempted to engage political parties in an ongoing series of dialogues focused on constitutional reform, pivotal in the advisers' estimation to strengthening democratic governance. But the main parties, including the BNP and Jamaat, have so far refused to join in the discussion — though with Hasina's recent release, the
Many Bangladeshis suspect that Moeen and the advisers are happy to press ahead with both local and national elections, crafting a government of "national unity" with handpicked candidates and without the backing of any of the major parties. If Hasina and Zia are convicted of crimes before December, they'll be disqualified from competing in the polls. This, reckons one Western diplomat, may finally break the parties and lead to a series of significant defections.
But another scenario is also possible: that the growing outrage among the political parties and their cadres may spill onto the streets in the form of mass people-power protests. "If they want to make trouble," says Moeen, "let them" — but that belies very real concerns on the part of the government of the threat of widespread dissent. Across the walls of
The government has made no promises about when it will lift the emergency. Shying away from democratic commitments, Moeen is far more eager to talk about building effective leadership in Bangladesh and educating its vast, illiterate masses — as he himself puts it — "so that they don't keep on cutting off their own feet." Such a tone is fitting for a man who styles himself the redeemer of his country. "You can judge the people of a nation by the type of leaders they select," he concludes. Most Bangladeshis are wondering when they'll really get that chance.
With reporting by Haroon Habib/Dhaka
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