The minus-two solution

This article published in The Economist magazine, London on September 6, 2007 was censored in Bangladesh by military backed interim government. We reproduce this article with a comment by by Anti-Corruption Commission chairman Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury/Editor

Both the country's leading civilian politicians are in detention. One way or another, the future looks green

EARLIER this year Bangladesh's generals tried and failed to consign the countries' two leading civilian politicians to exile. Now they have locked them both up. On September 3rd police arrested Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and prime minister until last October, and her younger son, on charges of corruption. Mrs Zia (pictured above after her arrest) will be the next-door prisoner in Dhaka's idle parliament building to her nemesis, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, prime minister from 1996-2001 and leader of the Awami League, the other big party.

This will be uncomfortable for both women, who loathe each other. Judging from the sentences meted out in recent months by specially created courts to members of their kleptocratic coteries, they can expect long jail sentences. Until now, despite Bangladesh's regular appearance at the top of global corruption league tables, the only politician ever convicted of graft was General Hossain Muhammad Ershad, Bangladesh' s military ruler in the 1980s. In a rare moment of unity, the two women ousted him in 1990. Since then the parties that they managed to turn into patronage-based personality cults have won about 90% of votes in election.

But so appalling was the begums' record of governing the country that most of its 150m people were relieved when the generals took control in January. The mechanism intended to rescue democracy from viciously confrontational two-party politics—an unelected caretaker government to oversee elections—collapsed because the BNP picked a partisan president to rig the poll. Instead, the army forced him to resign as the head of the caretaker government, cancelled parliamentary elections, declared a state of emergency and installed an interim regime to pave the way for elections by December 2008.

Encouragingly, the army has so far resisted following the example of so many military regimes that form their own political parties to prolong their rule. But this, of course, might change. There is little to reassure Bangladeshis that the generals' attempt to redesign society and stamp out corruption will not end up as the totalitarian disaster that follows so many coups.

It is not clear for how much longer the emergency government will be able to keep people quiet. Since January it has detained an extraordinary number: more than 250,000, according to Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group. The army chief, Moeen U Ahmed, has accused “evil forces” of instigating student riots last month. To Bangladeshis, such language is as painfully familiar as the repression that followed the students' call for the early restoration of democracy—censorship, arrests without warrants, and the beating-up of intellectuals and journalists.

Last week a magistrate's court heard two professors allege they were tortured while detained on suspicion of fuelling the campus violence. The court released them back into army custody. According to Odhikar, a Dhaka-based human-rights group, 126 people have been killed by law enforcement agencies since emergency rule began; at least 22 were tortured to death.

Despite the elections promised for next year, and efforts to mend a voters' list bloated with millions of extra names, this is not a country preparing for a return to democratic politics. The government refuses to lift the state of emergency. Even if it did, that would not resuscitate the political process. The BNP is in a mess. Hours before her arrest, Khaleda Zia expelled Mannan Bhuiyan, the BNP's secretary-general, for “a conspiracy to split the party”. The League, for its part, has found it impossible to part with Sheikh Hasina, who remains popular. No self-respecting politician will enter the fray while the army runs the show. Mohammad Yunus, a Nobel-prize-winning microcredit pioneer once seen as a potential candidate to fill the political vacuum, floated a party earlier in the year, but has scrapped plans to enter politics.

The generals and their civilian front are finding that their legitimacy, which rests on their competence, is eroding. In part, this stems from bad luck. Devastating floods and rising international prices for oil and food have worsened the plight of the poor. But the economic consequences of military rule have become apparent.

Garment exports, the economy's backbone, have plummeted. Investment has ground to a halt. To reverse the trend, business leaders, the army chief and the pliable head of the civilian administration, Fakhruddin Ahmed, this week held a “brainstorming” session. It is more likely to have made investors cringe than reach for their wallets. The state is desperately trying to hold down prices through administrative measures, though they will inevitably rise further during Ramadan later this month. Last month it decided, in effect, to use $300m of its foreign reserves to pay for fuel subsidies.

Meanwhile Western governments and donors, who backed the army's seizure of power, are getting cold feet as human-rights abuses mount and public opinion turns. Even so, diplomats say that the present regime is “the only game in town”. The generals' secular stance and tough opposition to Islamist extremism still make them attractive to Western governments. But with the two big parties decapitated, the fear is that the Islamists, both the mainstream and a more radical margin, will profit from the political vacuum and growing economic discontent.

This week India, alarmed by the alleged involvement of Bangladeshi terrorists in last month's bombings in the southern city of Hyderabad, urged its neighbour to speed up the restoration of democracy. It would be messy, but as India knows from watching its other neighbour, Pakistan, so is the alternative. #

This article was first published in The Economist magazine, Sep 6th 2007 http://economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9769010