The interim government in Bangladesh led by Muhammad Yunus on Thursday night banned all activities of the Awami League, the political party headed by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted last year in a movement, local media reported.
The cabinet at a meeting decided to ban the party, which led country´s Liberation War in 1971, under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act and the ban will continue until a special tribunal completes a trial of the party and its leaders over the deaths of protesters during the anti-government movement in July and August last year.
The decision was taken following a protest by supporters of a newly formed political party by July-August protesters and the members of the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party opposed Bangladesh´s independence and helped the Pakistani army in 1971.
The protesters, which led the movement in July-August 2024 to oust the Awami League government, formed the interim government headed by Nobel Laurate Muhammad Yunus in August 2024.
The interim government lodged hundreds of murder cases against the Awami League leaders and activists, leaders of pro-liberation organisations, cultural activists and journalists indiscriminately.
The government also took various anti-liberation moves and indulged the activities and vandalisms by the July-August protesters, Islamists and religious fundamentalists all over the country.
US based newspaper The New York Times in a report entitled “As Bangladesh Reinvents Itself, Islamist Hard-Liners See an Opening” focused the rise of Islamists during the regime of Muhammad Yunus led government.
Earlier, On February 5, the protesters under the banner of anti-discrimination student movement, demolished the residence of Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, housing the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka.
In February this year, a group of religious extremists stormed into a stall at a book fair in Bangladesh protesting against selling of a book written by exiled feminist writer Taslima Nasrin and forced the publisher to close the stall.
Read more: Bangladesh at risk as interim regime targets secular forces, favours extremists.
Source: www.dailyfinland.fi
