Anti jobs-quota protesters clash with Bangladesh Chhatra League activists in Dhaka on Tuesday amid violence in which at least six people died and hundreds were injured during nationwide demonstrations demanding an end to a government recruitment system that reserves up to half of all positions for certain groups in society. Photo by Monirul Alam/EPA-EFE
July 17 (UPI) — At least six people were killed and several hundred injured in Bangladesh after violence flared between pro-government students, police and rival students and jobless protesters over public sector employment quotas, prompting the shuttering of schools and universities across the country.
Authorities said two people were killed in clashes in the capital, Dhaka, three were killed in the southern port of Chittagong and a student was killed in the northern city of Rangpur after being hit by a stray bullet, amid a major escalation in the unrest Tuesday.
The so-called Bangla Blockade has seen riot police in several cities fire tear gas and plastic bullets to break up clashes between the student wing of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, known as the Chhatra League, and students demanding an end to a system where almost half of government jobs are reserved for certain groups, mostly relatives of veterans of the country’s independence war more than five decades ago.
Three of those killed are reported to be students and the elite Border Guard Bangladesh have been deployed in Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Faridpur, Bogura and Cox’s Bazar as the unrest spread and the government and the anti-quota reform movement traded blame.
“We blame Chhatra League members for the violence. They killed the protesters. Police didn’t intervene to save the ordinary students,” Bangla Blockade coordinator Abdullah Shaleheen Oyon told the BBC.
Law Minister Anisul Huq blamed the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party whom he alleged had infiltrated the anti-quota movement.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday rebuked the Bangladeshi government over its handling of the demonstrations.
“We call on the Government of Bangladesh to protect the demonstrators against any form of threat or violence, and especially those who may be protesting peacefully who may need extra protection, such as young people or children or people with disabilities., he said via his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.
“It is a fundamental human right to be able to demonstrate peacefully, and governments should protect those rights.”
Dhaka University announced Wednesday the indefinite closure of its campus giving students until 6 p.m. to vacate their dorms, following a directive from the University Grants Commission for all universities to suspend academic activities and halls of residence to be emptied.
However, students at Rajshahi University, 150 miles northwest of Dhaka, refused to leave with hundreds staging a campus sit-in in front of the vice chancellor’s residence in defiance of an order to vacate their dorms by noon local time.
The students said university closures were a bid by the government to crack down on the anti-quota movement and that they wanted to remain in their dorms.
Tensions that have been building since the High Court ruled last month that government guidance abolishing the quotas was illegal spilled over into violence in the past few days after the Supreme Court granted a 30-day stay of the judgment.
Hasina threw a match under dispute Sunday by referring to anti-quota protestors as the grandchildren of a Pakistan-backed paramilitary group that carried out atrocities during the war of independence.
Both sides blame each other for the unrest with the Bangla Blockade leaders accusing Hasina of inciting Chhatra League violence against its supporters.
The Bangla Blockade is pushing for a permanent solution of a merit-based system of recruitment for the hundreds of thousands of well-paid government jobs where the only reserved positions would be for disabled people and minorities, arguing that even the brightest university students are unable to get good jobs under the old quotas.
