Breaking Down

This should be a golden time for Bangladesh, with its GDP surging by almost 7% last year, fueled by strong foreign investment, buoyant exports and a resurgent agricultural sector. But Bangladesh’s leaders rarely miss an opportunity to sabotage their country’s fortunes. In the run-up to elections planned for Jan. 22, long-standing political tensions erupted again, pushing the nation to the brink of chaos. Opposing political activists fought one another and police and soldiers for months, leaving at least 45 dead and hundreds injured. On Jan. 11, President Iajuddin Ahmed, presumably with the backing of the army, called a state of emergency, imposed night curfews across the country and postponed the elections indefinitely. An interim government promises to revamp the compromised election commission, fix dodgy electoral rolls and root out corruption. Just don’t expect an election anytime soon.

This political mayhem has its roots in the compromises sometimes required in Asia’s more fragile democracies. After Bangladesh returned to civilian leadership in 1991 following 15 years of mostly military rule, the two main political parties—the secular, nationalist Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina and the more Islamic-leaning and pro-business Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by outgoing Prime Minister Khaleda Zia—agreed that the incumbent party would step down a couple of months before every election. A neutral caretaker government would briefly run the country and the election commission until a new government was elected. The system is an admission of the coddling Bangladesh’s democracy needs to survive. But, despite some hiccups, it has worked ever since, with the two parties alternating in power after elections that, if not always peaceful, at least took place.

This time, though, the Awami League and other smaller allied parties accused the BNP, which ruled from 2001 and stood down as constitutionally mandated in October, of stacking the caretaker government and the electoral commission with partisans. Iajuddin was made the head of the interim government, for instance, even though he is a member of the BNP. The accusation of unfair play was echoed by diplomats such as U.S. Ambassador Patricia A. Butenis, who observed that the interim body “has not always conducted itself neutrally, and the nation has suffered as a result.” The Awami League also accused the BNP of altering the voter roll in an attempt to rig the election. The National Democratic Institute, a U.S.-based monitoring group, found in December that the electoral roll had 13 million extra names, though most of these it put down to migrating citizens registering in two places. The BNP concedes there are problems with the roll but denies manipulating it. “Number one, [the Awami League] cannot really establish [the roll was tampered with],” BNP joint secretary-general Nazrul Islam Khan told TIME. “Number two, we did not do it.”

The Awami League is not blameless either. Western diplomats in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, say the party’s stubborn refusal to compromise on any of its demands, its calls to take the fight to the streets and its decision earlier this month to boycott the election—”we’ll resist the one-sided polls at any cost,” Hasina told a rally—all made confrontation inevitable. “It’s hard to see that there’s a good-faith effort on either side,” said one Western diplomat before Iajuddin called off the election.

Now the country must work out a way to get to fresh polls without triggering more violence. The new interim government—Iajuddin has stepped down as its head, though he remains the country’s President—is made up of technocrats led by Fakhruddin Ahmed, a widely respected former central banker. But the task of healing the nation is heavy. The BNP is furious with the election delay and is demanding that the polls be held as soon as possible. Before Iajuddin called off the ballot, Zia described the Awami League and its allies as “conspirators” plotting to undermine the electoral process. It doesn’t help that there’s a seething rivalry between the two main leaders—Zia, 61, the widow of assassinated President Ziaur Rahman, and Hasina, 59, daughter of Bangladesh’s first President, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was also murdered. Hasina believes Zia’s husband knew of the plot to kill her father. Six years ago, on a visit to Dhaka, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter tried to get the two to shake hands, but neither could bring herself even to look at the other. At a service for Armed Forces Day two months ago, the two women sat on a dais with 14 chairs between them. “God forbid that they should talk and work through some issues,” says Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury, editor of the Bangladesh Observer, the country’s oldest English-language paper.

The differences between the two parties go much deeper than the personal feuds of their leaders. The Awami League came of age during the liberation struggle in the early 1970s when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan. The party paints itself as the protector of those early secular, nationalist ideals, and a bulwark against radical Islam. The BNP, which is closer to Pakistan and embraces political Islam, argues that it is more religious and tougher on crime. During its recent stint in power the BNP counted on the support of fundamentalist Islamic parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami, sparking Western concerns that the government may have been turning a blind eye as Bangladesh became a base for militant jihadi groups. The BNP and Jamaat consistently denied that the country was harboring terrorists, but a series of bombings nationwide over three years—culminating in 500 near-simultaneous explosions in August 2005—finally forced the government to act. The authorities belatedly cracked down on extremists, rounding up jihadi leaders and jailing them.

Some characterize such events as part of an epic struggle to determine whether or not this nation of 145 million people will become a fundamentalist Islamic state. Cynical observers see a more venal struggle—over who gets to control the country’s coffers for the next few years. “[A lot of politicians] cast themselves in these mantles of competing nationalisms, but the bottom line is they’re a bunch of crooks,” says the Western diplomat. Reinforcing that impression, Bangladesh has had the unhappy distinction over the past five years of being ranked worst or near worst on Berlin-based Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. (As for the years the country was not the most corrupt, Bangladeshis joke that officials must have bribed their way out of the bottom spot.) Muzaffer Ahmad, chairman of Transparency International’s Bangladesh chapter, says both main parties are guilty of sleaze: “Making money, if you control the government, is an easy thing.”

Bangladeshi politics has become so rotten that many businessmen and foreign investors quietly hope for a military government (though a glance at the recently installed regime in Thailand suggests economic stability is no certainty with soldiers in charge). Even some political scientists think it’s time to take a break from democracy. “We don’t want in the 21st century to be ruled by the military, but if we can’t agree and we always fight then there needs to be an umpire, and the military can play that role,” says Ataur Rahman, a professor of political science at Dhaka University. “I’ve got to be honest with you. It is now very difficult to deal with these politicians. You can sit and talk with them for hours and come up with nothing. They are as ignorant as they are proud.”

Though the army may have backed Iajuddin’s decision to delay the election, a complete military takeover, while hardly impossible, seems unlikely. Since the country’s return to democracy a decade and a half ago, the army has become far more professional. Bangladesh is now one of the biggest providers of troops to U.N. peacekeeping missions, which not only helps the country’s international standing but allows thousands of soldiers to earn enough for early retirement. A coup, with soldiers taking the reigns of power, would end that because the U.N. doesn’t like to use troops from a military dictatorship. Many newspapers and civil-society groups have called for a new party to be formed by local hero Muhammad Yunus, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit. But though the affable economist has occasionally commented on his country’s crisis—it is important that parties field “clean candidates,” he said in December—he seems reluctant to enter politics.

With the election now delayed indefinitely, there is some hope that the standoff can be resolved. A new electoral commission and voter roll should placate the Awami League and, so long as the BNP does not in turn boycott a fresh ballot, fair elections are a real possibility. But Bangladesh’s citizens aren’t holding their breath. People “are hostage to the power struggle and who will be sharing the booty,” says editor Chowdhury. “Politics has been polluted.” A group of students from a private university in a Dhaka suburb concurs. Tauhid Jalil, 21, who is in his fourth year of a degree in finance and economics and wants to study abroad, says he has lost all faith in Bangladesh’s leaders—in “the way they talk, the way they express themselves, the way they act like kids, the way they don’t compromise.” Nearby, beneath election posters strung across a street and fluttering in a gentle breeze, Nazrul Islam, a father of three, agrees. Nazrul sells flags for a living. The past few months have been tough going—the unrest has halved his earnings to about $4 a day as fewer people have dared to venture outside. “The future,” he laments “doesn’t look too positive.”