Bangladesh executes 6 convicted terrorists
April 1st, 2007 by ashish
Why do we come across cases so often where democracy seems to leave a country down a decline, and then we come a strong person who seems to make things better. Pervez Musharaff was welcomed similary, the Thai generals were welcomed, and then there was General Pinochet in Chile who ruled for a long time and was not exactly hated when he was ruling.
Bangladesh, when ruled by political leaders, was not exactly a prosperous state. It had running verbal battles with big neighbour India who accused Bangladesh of harbouring terrorists, its ruling party was being backed by Islamic extremist parties and hence was accused of tolerating a rising tide of extremism, leading to a very high increase of terrorist incidents in the country (such as a synchonized mass blast day when hundreds of blasts happen).
Then elections were announced, and this just opened the gate for a massive claim and counter claim with the government being accused of manipulating the polls, and the opposition being accused of not behaving properly. In the midst of all this, the elections were cancelled and a new regime led by a former Bangladesh central bank chief Fakhruddin Ahmed took over. This is supposedly an interim measure till things stabilize enough for elections to happen and after some reform has happened.
The new regime has tried to improve things, and is pushing hard to stamp out extremism. As a part of this, 6 terrorist ring-leaders, convicted earlier were executed, in order to send out a message. It is also cracking down on corruption, jailing former government officials and politicians, and this is something that will be easily be believed by citizens.
This sort of thing is always troubling - the implication is that politicians are all venal (I am sure that a large number are), and that if you need to clean things up, you need to temporarily remove democracy, clean things with an iron hand, and then put the politicians back in control. I am not sure whether this is something that any democracy believe would really like to be set as a practise.
