Justnewsbd.com :
About December 30 parliamentary election of Bangladesh , former US Ambassador William B. Milam, Senior Scholar at the Wilson Center, said the real truth is that the election was stolen and the government is illegitimate.
Ambassador William B. Milam expresses his view on Bangladesh election in an opined published in The Friday Times on last Friday.
The full article is given below for our readers:
The Awami League (AL) has finally proven what many outside observers had thought since 2011: a free and fair election is not possible in Bangladesh under its current political structure. The December 30 election appears from the results as well as the mounting evidence of an all-out wave of terror against the opposition, to be the most dishonest election held since the Soviet Union disappeared. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League won 97.66 percent of the seats in the Bangladesh Parliament last Sunday, by pulling every dirty trick in the election stealer’s handbook.
Opposition candidates were threatened with violence if they campaigned or went to their constituencies; some were arrested on spurious charges; some had spurious cases filed against them in courts; some were disappeared; at least two people were killed. Opposition polling agents, vital cogs, were told not to go to their polling places on the pain of death; almost none braved the threats. Voters were threatened if they went to vote; in the rural areas, women voters were told by Awami League toughs that it was dangerous to vote; those voters that tried were kept out of the polls by threat or by the police; while inside the ballot boxes were being stuffed by AL apparatchiks. An enterprising reporter for the Daily Star wrote a matter-of fact article of the officially reported voting numbers of a random sample of 25 polling places, some of which some of which recorded 100 percent turnout (quite rare anywhere) and in most of which almost all the votes were for the AL candidate. One of my friends reported that every vote in a polling place he knew went to the AL.
It would take this entire article to describe the full extent of this wave of intimidation and violence waged by the AL government, using the forces at its disposal, the police, the Bangladesh version of Fascist Brownshirts (the AL paramilitary Chatra League) to win such an outlandish majority. I am told that there is no one in Bangladesh, even AL supporters, who believe it. And even most AL supporters are likely to view it as overkill (although they would not dare say so). Opinion polls by respectable pollsters showed that the AL would probably win a free and fair election. But public opinion is volatile and polls are unreliable because many Bangladeshis fear giving their political opinions in circumstances in which they might be identified, so clearly Sheikh Hasina concluded that the AL needed to ensure its re-election by unlawful means. Whether the PM meant to go so far and get such a large and clearly rigged majority is unclear. She seems, however, to be basking in the warm spotlight of victory and is very unlikely ever to give in to the increasing calls for a new election.
Since the AL plan to ensure its victory was on view for several weeks before the election, its actions in the last few days and on election day, though intensified, were not a surprise to onlookers. As the saying goes, the AL telegraphed its punches. The only unknown was the attitude of the army, the deployment of which was delayed by about two weeks on the order, I guess, of the election commission. Some of us who remembered fondly the army’s pro-democracy history had placed hope that it would create a safe space for voters and ensure the votes were valid and counted correctly.
