New reports caution Bangladesh against “replicating poor practices” of the Sheikh Hasina regime

“ARREST THE RINGLEADERS of the protests, the troublemakers, kill them and hide their bodies.” This was the order Sheikh Hasina gave to security forces at the height of the protests that rocked Bangladesh last summer, according to the just-published report of a United Nations fact-finding mission. 

Coming from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the report anchors the widely-accepted narrative of Hasina’s fall: that she brutalised her own people right up to the end, after 15 years of unrestrained state capture. It will therefore make for difficult reading in New Delhi, which stood by Hasina throughout, and in the hiding places around the world of her exiled supporters. But the report also offers a sobering corrective to Bangladesh’s interim government, led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. It paints an unflattering picture not just of the Hasina government’s brutality but also of the interim government’s failure to stop abusive practices that continue to this day.