Ten or more Bangladesh police officers drag a protester across the streets of Dhaka by force.
Bangladesh police detain a protester at the University of Dhaka in July 2024. Two recent reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch find Sheikh Hasina and her lieutenants’ crackdown on the student-led revolt possibly amounted to crimes against humanity – but also paint an unflattering picture of the interim government’s failure to stop abusive practices.IMAGO/NurPhoto

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

Reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch confirm the Awami League regime’s responsibility for the bloodshed of the Monsoon Revolution, but also warn the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government about persisting abusive practices

Cyrus Naji was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews. From 2022 to 2023, he was a teaching fellow at the Asian University for Women, a private university in Chittagong.

Published on

“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.

Loading content, please wait...
Himal Southasian
www.himalmag.com