Political feuds propelled by recent student unrest and long-standing animosity among leaders have raised concerns among overseas donors and friendly governments about impoverished Bangladesh's long-term stability. Delegates at this month's Bangladesh Development Forum meeting committed - for now - to further assistance to the South Asian nation of 150 million people to reduce poverty and develop power, energy and infrastructure. But they warned Bangladeshi participants against a bitterly personal and rigidly partisan political climate undercutting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's goal of making the country, where some 40 percent of the population now gets by on under $1 a day, a middle income nation by 2021. Renata Dessallien, UN Resident Director in Bangladesh, told the meeting that “Bangladesh's democracy has been hampered by excessive competition between the two major political parties - a competition that has sometimes exceeded normal democratic parameters.” “Yes,” said Bangladesh Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith. “Political division is harmful for development activities and so we are trying to make parliament functional.” But even as the meeting was in progress, lawmakers from Hasina's Awami League and ex-prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) fiercely traded what parliament's speaker said were “unparliamentary and abusive” words, and the BNP staged several walkouts from the legislative body at the time of the aid meeting. The BNP only recently started attending parliament at all, after a near year-long boycott, claiming unfair treatment by the Awami League, which leads a coalition with a more than two-thirds majority in the 345-seat legislature. The December 2008 election that brought the Awami League to power after a period of military-backed emergency rule was considered relatively fair and peaceful by Bangladesh standards. Hopes for change That brought hopes for political stability and possible cooperation among the top two parties - each headed by a strong-willed woman from families long prominent in politics - in a country whose near 40 years of independence have seen sporadic bouts of military rule and street fighting and violence between the parties. Indeed, foreign direct investment in Bangladesh totaled $941 million in the fiscal year to June 2009, covering the run-up to the election and the first months of the Hasina government, compared to $650 million in the previous year, the central bank said. “Usually aid volumes depend on the mood of the donors but investment flows are linked to business and profit, which can be badly affected unless our acrimonious political leaders settle their disputes amicably,” Badiul Alam Majumdar, an analyst and secretary of a prominent pro-democracy group, Citizens for Good Governance, told Reuters. “A return to street violence and destructive actions could jeopardise democracy, development and the economy,” he said. “What we see today was not expected,” said A.S.M. Abur Rob, a former minister and an ex-student leader of the 1970s. “In a display of unending vengeance, politicians on either side of the divide look very eager to shower abuse ... on past and present leaders,” he told Reuters. He was referring to growing clashes among student political groups that at many universities have become little more than mini-mafias, competing for cuts from money-generating activities and for control of the campuses. “What now happens in the universities is nothing but terrorism,” A.B.M. Musa, a former newspaper editor, columnist and analyst, said in a recent television appearance. The naming game Even as little progress is made in dealing with such critical issues, top politicians play what critics call tit-for-tat games. In one example, the government last week renamed Dhaka's Zia International Airport after a Muslim saint, rather than BNP leader Khaleda's late husband Ziaur Rahman, assassinated in 1981 while serving as Bangladesh president. The BNP has denounced the decision and called for protests in Dhaka this week, which officials fear could lead to violence. Hasina defended the move, saying the airport's name was changed to “teach the BNP a lesson” because it earlier renamed many installations that had been named after her slain father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's founding leader. Bangladesh has substantial potential for economic development thanks to abundant cheap labor and natural resources like gas and coal. “Bangladesh has enormous untapped resources and by exploring those, the country could easily achieve 8-9 per cent annual growth,” Board of Investment executive chairman S. A. Samad has said. That would be up from six percent currently. But squabbling among leaders and political parties, sometimes degenerating into violence, and failures of various governments to follow through on needed reforms such as reducing corruption and increasing transparency, get in the way of making the most of such assets.
