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More than two dozen people have been killed in Bangladesh as a wave of student protests over jobs has exposed widespread fury against Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian government and deep economic distress in the world’s second-largest garments exporter.
University students in the country of 170mn have for weeks been demanding the end of a controversial government job quota system they say benefits supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s ruling Awami League party and has become a symbol of the corruption that has flourished under her two-decade rule.
At least 39 people have been killed in the unrest, according to French news agency AFP, citing figures from local hospitals, with approximately two-thirds of the victims apparently wounded by police weapons including rubber bullets. Other news agencies and local media put the death toll at between 24 and 28.
Authorities have closed universities and blocked internet services across the country, while mobile networks also appeared to be disrupted. The Financial Times was unable to connect calls to sources inside Bangladesh on Friday morning.
Students say they have been set upon by Awami League supporters and police, while authorities blame protesters for vandalism, including setting fire to the offices of the country’s state broadcaster BTV on Thursday.
Volker Türk, the UN’s human rights commissioner, called on the government to engage with the protesters. “All acts of violence and use of force, especially resulting in loss of life, must be investigated and perpetrators held to account,” he said on X. Sheikh Hasina condemned the deaths, and her government has said it will hold talks with students, an offer the protesters have rejected as disingenuous.
The quota system, which was suspended in 2018 and reinstated by a court last month, reserves about a third of public sector jobs for descendants of veterans of Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1971. Critics say the system is designed to benefit loyalists to the Awami League, which styles itself as the only true heir of the independence movement.
Sheikh Hasina, the world’s longest-serving female leader, was re-elected for a fifth term in January in a vote marred by irregularities including a police crackdown on her political rivals ahead of the polls. The Bangladesh Nationalist party, her main rivals, called for a strike in the capital Dhaka in solidarity with the students.
Anger over the quota system highlights the lack of opportunities in Bangladesh despite rapid economic growth that has helped turn it from one of the world’s poorest countries into a hub for global manufacturers such as H&M and Zara. Its GDP a head is now higher than that of neighbouring India.
Yet the economy has struggled through a grinding slowdown since the Covid-19 pandemic, with painful inflation, blackouts and falling foreign reserves stoking popular anger with Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly autocratic rule.
Her government has enjoyed robust support from neighbouring India and China, who see her secularism as a bulwark against Islamism in the region, but ties with the US and Europe have been strained by her proximity to Beijing.
The US state department said this week it was monitoring the protests and “condemn[ed] any violence against peaceful protesters”.
A case over the quota system is set to make its way to the country’s Supreme Court.
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