Fight for future of Bangladesh plays out in street

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — The fight for the future of Bangladesh is playing out in the streets of this troubled south Asian nation.

For a month, masses of moderate activists have camped at a Dhaka intersection demanding harsh punishment for those accused of crimes during the 1971 independence war from Pakistan, a stance that dovetails with the prime minister's position.

Meanwhile, their bitter enemies in a hardline Islamic opposition party that wants to install Shariah law have been attacking government buildings and setting fire to trains in a rampage that — along with a crackdown by security forces — has killed more than 60 people. The party, Jamaat-e-islami, says the government is using a war crimes tribunal to decimate the party leadership, and claims it is in a fight for its very existence.

"Our backs have been pushed to the wall. If we can't stop the fascist government from holding the trials, all our main leaders will be hanged," said Rafiqul Haq, a Jamaat leader based in Dhaka's Uttara district. "We will die rather than let the government kill our leaders."

The latest round of violence — sparked by the tribunal sentencing a party leader to death — has prompted calls for Jamaat to be branded a terrorist organization, and Law Minister Shafiq Ahmed told Parliament this week that the government was looking into ways to ban the party.

Looming over the protests and violence are general elections expected within the next year, and fears that in this fledgling democracy with a history of coups, the military might take over if the situation in the streets gets too far out of hand.

"The people are deeply worried about what is going on," said Hassan Shahriar, a political analyst. "If the violence continues, the government may hit back with harsh measures like a state of emergency." Military intervention is possible as well, he said.

Much of the chaos centers on the fate of Jamaat, the country's largest Islamic party. Its leaders are facing charges they helped Pakistani forces in the fighting four decades ago, which Bangladesh says left 3 million people dead and 200,000 women raped.

Jamaat had opposed breaking away from Pakistan, arguing that staying as one strong Muslim-majority nation would be better for Islam. Citizen brigades formed by Jamaat helped Pakistani forces, unfamiliar with Bangladesh, identify independence activists. Jamaat leaders deny any link to war crimes.

After independence, founding President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, banned the party and stripped many of its leaders of citizenship. But he was slain in 1975 and military ruler Ziaur Rahman, husband of current opposition leader Khaleda Zia, lifted the ban and wooed Jamaat as an ally for his Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Though Jamaat has never won big at the ballot box, routinely garnering around 4 percent, it has been an important coalition ally for Zia, and even received Cabinet posts when she won elections in 2001

Despite its violent history, Jamaat developed a loyal cadre by devoting attention to the poor. It runs a bevy of charities, hospitals and hundreds of Islamic schools. It has gained the loyalty of poor students through its scholarships and earned a reputation, even among opponents, for honest behavior amid the usual government corruption.

"The activists are highly dedicated and Jamaat also has lots of money to maintain a huge army of trained cadres," Shahriar said. He noted that its loyalists are trained almost like guerrilla fighters.

At the same time, its ideology has failed to make much headway in the country, where many look down on it as a local version of Pakistan's Taliban. And many remain angry that the party never apologized for its role in the war.

When the war crimes tribunals inaugurated by Hasina began handing down decisions earlier this year, lines were drawn. Many cheered that the country was finally dealing with its past. Others lashed them as a plot to destroy the opposition, since 11 of the 12 defendants are politicians from Jamaat and Zia's opposition party.

"The trials are nothing but a ploy to hide the failures of the government," Zia said last week.

When Abdul Quader Mollah appeared smiling last month after being given a life sentence, people poured into the streets, demanding his execution. Many here believe that if Zia wins the upcoming election, she will grant clemency to those convicted, leaving a swift execution as the only way of ensuring justice is delivered.

"I'm not bothered about politics," said Nazrul Islam, a Dhaka University student who was among the protesters. "What I want is that those who killed our people, raped our women must be punished."

When Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a top Jamaat leader, was then given a death sentence last week, Jamaat struck back with violent attacks.

In northern Bogra district, Jamaat activists used loudspeakers to urge supporters to pour into the streets and then led them to attack police stations, dragging four policemen from the outposts and beating them to death, police and private TV stations reported. In eastern Noakhali and Comilla districts, Jamaat activists attacked about a dozen temples and dozens of Hindu homes, police said. Hindus are seen as supporters of Hasina's ruling party.

Images of bloodied and bullet-ridden bodies heaped on ashes of burned homes were shown on television.

With most of Jamaat's top leaders in jail, including its president, Matiur Rahman Nizami, the party is being run by mid-level leaders, most of them in hiding.

"It's a do or die situation for Jamaat," said political analyst Mofizur Rahman, with Dhaka University. "The entire leadership of Jamaat is facing elimination."

Many people left homeless after their houses were torched were confused and devastated that they were dragged into this national crisis.

"Have we committed any crime?" asked Pushpa Das, a 45-year-old woman as she sat on the wreckage of her tin-roof house, destroyed by attackers in Chittagong district, southeast of Dhaka. "Why have they attacked us?"

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Mexico plays hardball in jailing of union boss

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The arrest of Mexico's most powerful union leader echoes the hardball tactics of Mexico's once-imperial presidency while pushing forward an education reform that Enrique Pena Nieto has made a centerpiece of his new administration.

Elba Esther Gordillo, known for flashing her Hermes handbags and heels, stood behind bars Wednesday in a grim prison in eastern Mexico City as a judge read off charges of embezzlement and organized crime. The arrest sidelined a woman who had tried to mobilize teachers to block a schools shake-up designed to end her control over hiring and firing of teachers across the country.

It also sent a message to other union bosses and business magnates: Don't get in the way of Pena Nieto, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party has newly returned to the power it held for seven straight decades, when incoming presidents often crushed those who challenged them.

"This is an old tactic, let's hope that it doesn't just stop there, as it did in the past, when a single case was enough to calm things down and add legitimacy" to presidential power, said Jose Antonio Crespo, an analyst at the Center for Economic Studies. "Let's hope this doesn't stop and that it becomes something more systematic, for which there is a burning need."

Crespo was referring to the business magnates and union bosses who have built fortunes and political power by dominating whole sectors of the economy. Like Gordillo, their resistance could be an obstacle to Pena Nieto's pledges to modernize and open up Mexico's economy.

But the tough message of Tuesday's arrest may have been enough.

Gordillo, whose 1.5 million-member National Union of Education Workers organized protests against Pena Nieto's education reform signed into law this week, was pulled off a plane arriving from San Diego late Tuesday and taken to Mexico City's women's prison.

It was a dizzying fall from power for a woman often credited with swinging a presidential election and who maintained properties worth millions of dollars in Southern California.

Gordillo, 68, was charged with embezzling 2 billion pesos (about $160 million) from the union she has led for nearly a quarter century. The judge in the case said he would rule in three to six days on whether the evidence is sufficient to merit a trial.

If found guilty, Gordillo could face 30 years in prison.

As in past cases, officials denied any political motive. Asked if he had other cases planned, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told the Televisa news network, "I don't have evidence as clear as in this case."

Still, analysts said other powerful figures will surely take notice.

"I think there will be more willingness to negotiate and accept" reforms "rather than engage in confrontation," said Crespo.

With education reform now enacted, Pena Nieto is also proposing to open the state oil company to more private investment, a move that could awaken opposition from the oil workers union. The administration is also proposing measures to bring more competition in the highly concentrated television and telecom sectors, steps that business magnates have long tried to stymie with court appeals.

There is a sense that "this is a message to all the other corrupt leaders," said Humberto Castillo, a 55-year-old retired teacher from Mexico State, who was reading a newspaper story about Gordillo's arrest while he waited for his daughter to come out of a job interview. "I thought she was untouchable."

For many, Gordillo stood as a symbol of the powers that dominate Mexico. She was a favorite of newspaper cartoonists because of her immediately recognizable face and designer clothes and accessories. Prosecutors said she spent nearly $3 million in purchases at Neiman Marcus department stores using union funds, as well as $17,000 in U.S. plastic surgery bills and $1 million to buy a home in San Diego.

It was unclear if the arrest would force Gordillo out of her union leadership position. Mexican mining union boss Napoleon Gomez Urrutia has continued to hold his post more than four years after he moved to Canada amid accusations that he misappropriated $55 million in union funds.

Many Mexicans immediately began suggesting prosecution of other union leaders. Opposition parties mentioned the boss of the oil workers union, Carlos Romero Deschamps, who, according to Mexican news media, gave his son a $2 million Ferrari and whose daughter posted Facebook photos of her trips to Europe aboard private jets and yachts.

Romero Deschamps' immunity from prosecution as a legislator — a status he still enjoys — helped keep him from going to jail in a scandal over his union's illegal $61.3 million campaign donation to the PRI in 2000.

But if Deschamps stayed within the womb of the PRI while under fire, Gordillo was unusually defiant, allying at times with the new non-PRI presidents, helping create a new political party and finally bolting from the PRI, where she had long been an influential figure. Many credited her party with pulling enough votes to swing the narrow 2006 election to National Action Party's Felipe Calderon.

Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst at the elite Colegio de Mexico, said Gordillo "wasn't just a shadow power, but one that wanted to be a political power."

"In Pena Nieto's vision of Mexico, no one can be above the president," Aguayo said. "It's the same old imperial presidency."

Gordillo's combativeness may have led her to miscalculate Pena Nieto's willingness to reinstate the old tradition of unquestioned presidential authority.

"She underestimated him," columnist and political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio said of Pena Nieto.

The PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, spent 12 years out of power before returning to the presidency with Pena Nieto's 2012 election victory.

Gordillo's arrest recalled the 1989 detention of once-feared oil union boss Joaquin Hernandez Galicia. He had criticized the presidential candidacy of Carlos Salinas and threatened a strike if Salinas privatized any part of the government oil monopoly.

On Jan. 10, 1989, about a month after Salinas took office, soldiers used a bazooka to blow down the door of Hernandez's home in the Gulf Coast city of Ciudad Madero.

He was freed from prison after Salinas left office.

Salinas' sweep of old, uncooperative union bosses also led to opening the way for a new, up-and-coming leader in the teachers union, Gordillo, who was at first seen as a reformer.

Gordillo's arrest alone is far from enough to help Pena Nieto improve Mexico's schools. So great is the union's control over hiring that even the government acknowledges it's not sure how many schools, teachers or students exist in Mexico.

The Mexican education system has been persistently one of the worst performers among the world's developed economies, with few signs of improvement. Nearly every Mexican 4-year-old is in pre-school, but only 47 percent are expected to graduate high school. In the U.S., the number is closer to 80 percent.

In a television interview last week about education reform, the interviewer told Gordillo that she was the most hated woman in Mexico.

"There is no one more loved by their people than I," Gordillo answered. "I care about the teachers. This is a deep and serious dispute about public education."

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Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez, Adriana Gomez Licon and Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.

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