Military intervention in politics: Why and at what cost?

Bangladesh is being shoved into a tight spot by the fast-approaching election deadline and the indecisiveness of the political leaders over the modalities under which a credible election could occur. This dreadful scenario is scaring observers within and without.

Will there be an election on time? Will it be under a caretaker regime as the opposition wants or under the incumbent regime as the amended Constitution mandates? How the movement will shape up after the Ramadan if the government does not yield to the opposition demand for a caretaker regime? Is the military waiting in the wings to intervene, or, another bloody spate of civil disorder will lead to some sort of mass revolution?

These seemingly quintessential questions are echoing in the global media too, aware that the country’s political culture is not easily prone to conciliation and any unmanageable confrontation this time may lead to serious outcomes involving internal fragmentation and external intervention.

Julien Bouissou is a journalist who writes for the daily Le Monde of Paris and has covered South Asian affairs with passion and depth that made his stories thought-provoking, objective and credible. In the July 30 edition of London’s The Guardian Weekly, Bouissou wrote an insightful piece on Bangladesh: “Bangladesh’s radical Muslims uniting behind Hefazat-e-Islam.”

The author may or may not have hit the nail on the head, but his article is intuitive enough due to the innate messages concealed between the lines. The author visited the Hefazat stronghold in Hathazari, sat face to face with the Hefazat guru Allama Shah Ahmed Shafi, surveyed the ambiance and, has had exhaustive discussions with many of the Hefazat leaders before penning his article.

Of much concern is the article’s sub-heading that reads: “Government is wary of a movement led by Shah Ahmad Shafi that has gathered strength since its launch in 2010.” Why the government is wary is explained in the concluding part of the article that reads: “The fact that [the Awami League] will not hear of an interim government may mean that it thinks it is going to lose. You may win without the support of the Islamists, but you cannot win against them. Safe behind the walls of his madrasa, Shafi could well act as the kingmaker in the next election.”

Bouissou seems to have discovered the eyeball of a lingering political whirlwind in Bangladesh which is likely to derail the holding of the next general election, as it did in 2007. In the latest city council polls, Hefazat threw its support to the opposition 18 party candidates and the outcome proved miraculous. In the five city council polls, ruling AL and its allies were trounced in all; with incredulous margin of votes ranging between 50 – 70% favouring the anti-government camps in some of the cities.

That does not imply, per se, that the Hefazat has amassed a vote bank that can outpace the support of the major political parties of the country. Hefazat is not even registered as a political party. What it does confirm, however, is that the budding Islamist outfit has become a force to be reckoned with and the Islamists of all hues seem to have anchored their faith onto this pseudo-religious movement that is seeking political reforms in conformity with the Quranic guidelines.

And that is what is making many in the so called secular camps unease, within and outside of Bangladesh. It also explains, as the election deadline approaches, why the government is getting tougher on conceding to holding the polls under no other dispensation save its own, while a section of the media and the civil society, mindful that a deal between the government and the opposition is unlikely, is vouching for another military intervention in politics.

The perception in some quarters that the military has a panacea to cure the nation’s ills is a myth, both in its context and content. Today’s crisis is a legacy of the last military intervention in 2007 when the military engineered the coming to power of a certain political party and created an intractable constitutional crisis for which much blood has been shed over the last five years. That move, too, aimed at destroying the Islamists who have now re-emerged even stronger.

As the crisis enters its last phase in the run up to another election, an educated inference from all the scenarios is an obvious one: For the  incumbent AL, military is preferable to any BNP-led rule; victory of BNP-Islamist alliance; or the ascend of the Islamists into the political limelight following what the government did to exterminate them since coming to power in 2009.

Wrong steps in politics being often irreversible, the government must reflect on how it governed the nation since 2009 January. In a country where the vote bank of the Islamists never attained to any recognizable matrix, why they are so popular now is a question that the AL and its loony left allies must answer.

Under the rubric of democratic credentials, the government not only did not allow the Islamists to even organize a rally, Hefazat activists faced alleged genocide in the hands of the country’s security forces.

Besides, changes brought into the text books to the country’s Constitution were done with little concern for the sentiment of a people that are predominantly of Islamic faith. Most ominously, some external powers were allowed to overtake everything this nation has intrinsically valued for centuries as its own.

That game plan has been exposed, and, the Islamists are trying doggedly to ride on the crest of swelling public sentiments that have turned disgustful of the government. Faced with that challenge amidst a convoluted ambiance ripe with desperate dashes to stay onto power, corrupt heads in the ruling coterie have decided to resort to circuitous means to use religion, or jingle of secularism, to tighten their grip onto power permanently. This treacherous game is being played at the cost of throwing the nation into the abyss of another regrettable disaster.

To paraphrase George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Bangladesh today fits into that syndrome quite perfectly. But why, and at what cost?

Lately, the Egyptian military has displayed a rare disgust against the will of the people by overthrowing the Islamic brotherhood regime, which has won the 2012 election. Similar crises are jolting Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and other countries where Islamists just came to power through popular mandate after decades of struggle.

These undemocratic moves by military-civil cabals linked to global capitalist metropolis are sucking many nations into protracted civil wars by flouting a fundamental tenet that absence of justice unmistakably denotes absence of peace. Death toll in Egypt over the last four weeks alone has surpassed 500, according to reports from the region. Thousands others have been maimed by bullet wounds. Egypt now sits in the vortex of a powder keg.

Algeria was plunged into a bloody civil war in 1991, with an estimated death toll of over 250,000 by now; from a 1990-estimated population of about 25 m. The Algerian conflict began when, in December 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) began to win the election, scaring the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN). In a desperate move, carried out reportedly on the advice of some external powers, the FLN cancelled elections after the first round and sent the military to power. The military’s banning of the FIS and the arrest of thousands of its members led the Islamists to wage a guerrilla warfare that still rages on.

Conversely, the Pakistani decision to hold an election early this year under a caretaker regime has pulled the country from the brink of a total civil war due to the moderate Islamists allying with the age-old Muslim League party and saving democracy under a civilian regime; the Taliban’s ongoing war of attrition, spurred by the invasion of Afghanistan by foreign forces, notwithstanding.

As the intrusion of, and intervention by, extra-constitutional forces often lead to intervention from without due to the inevitable degeneration in the internal polity and the interest of the outsiders to back chosen warring factions within, Bangladesh faces a stark choice to either hold onto its democratic values at any cost, or, lose everything it strove to gain in the over four decades of post-liberation political vicissitudes.

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The author’s latest book, Geopolitics of Islamic Revival, is being launched in South Asia by Arial Publications.

Source: Weekly Holiday