The 1st anniversary of the July Revolution in Bangladesh

DHAKA

In the days when the 8th anniversary commemorations of 15 July were being held in Turkey, last year in Bangladesh a popular uprising against Sheikh Hasina, who had been ruling the country for 16 years with a repressive dictatorship, was continuing to gain momentum with each passing day. That uprising went down in the record as a revolution when Hasina fled to India on 5 August. We are in Dhaka for the events marking the 1st anniversary of this event, which is today called the July Revolution, with commemorations and celebrations.

The commemoration meetings have in fact been continuing since the beginning of July with a series of conferences, workshops and meetings in which Bangladesh's future, owing to its transition period, is discussed. But 27 July has begun to be celebrated as the day on which the Revolution has by now been given its name.

During her 16-year rule, Hasina waged a vindictive war particularly against the members of Jamaat-e-Islami, but it was not only they who suffered from her repression. However, her special grudge against Jamaat-e-Islami came from her having linked them, if not directly then indirectly, with the killing of her father. Hasina's father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader and first President of Bangladesh, was massacred together with his family in his home during a military coup on 15 August 1975. In fact this assassination was carried out not by Jamaat-e-Islami or any of its members, but by a group of young officers in the Bangladesh army. In the attack about 20 family members were killed, including Sheikh Mujib's wife, his sons, his daughters-in-law and a young child. Sheikh Hasina, who was abroad at the time, and her sister Sheikh Rehana became the only close family members to survive the attack. Jamaat-e-Islami was not responsible for this, but it was judged to have opposed Bangladesh's struggle for independence from Pakistan and to have cooperated with the Pakistani army.

In fact, because the country later came closer to India than necessary, being pro-Pakistan has in the eyes of the people rather become a tendency with more legitimacy. However, Bangladesh's official national identity and politics were based on anti-Pakistan sentiment. This opposition between the tendencies of the people and the official state was undoubtedly one of Bangladesh's paradoxes, as in many Islamic countries. This paradox ultimately also formed an important motivation for the uprising against Hasina, who had produced a weariness among the people with both her repression and her excessive corruption and arbitrary practices.

Although Hasina's linking of Jamaat-e-Islami with her father's death was in fact a result of putting all opponents in one basket, the cause of this war was of course not based only on personal reasons. She was applying the cliché Islamophobic politics of all the dictatorships in the Islamic world, and this politics, unfortunately, again found encouragement from some Islamic countries. But the stronger motivation of Hasina's Islamophobic discourse and policies was her relations with India.

Bangladesh, which was founded in 1971 by a war of independence against Pakistan after it had gained independence from India as a part of Pakistan, built its national identity against Pakistan because of this war, but over time it moved closer to India. However, this rapprochement developed increasingly toward a place where Bangladesh came entirely under India's guidance economically, culturally and politically. It was of course the Islamists who provided the national and ideological leadership in this situation's giving rise to a desire for independence among the Bangladeshi people.

At the end of June last year, the regulation that the Hasina administration wanted to make in order to increase somewhat further the employment quota already applied to the relatives of those who fell as martyrs in this 1971 war of independence became the fire that lit the fuse of the uprising. While the official ideology founded on independence from Pakistan was already a practice that the people had not embraced in any way, in a Bangladeshi society suffering from very high unemployment such a practice led to an explosion against all the discontent concerning the regime. In the student actions that developed with this explosion, when Hasina labeled the participants Razakar (meaning traitors who cooperated with Pakistan in the war of independence), all the protesters marched saying "we are all Razakars," and so the revolution took place not only against Hasina's person, but against the regime with its whole ideology, its Islamophobia, and its cultural and political dependence on India.

During her 16-year rule, Sheikh Hasina tried to establish, on her own scale, an intelligence-state regime (muhabarat) similar to the Baath regime and built a complete regime of fear over citizens, and not content with that, she had reached the very bottom of corruption. The student protests and broad-based popular marches that ended with her fleeing Bangladesh on 5 August brought about the most hopeful developments of recent years. In our assessment of 2024, together with the popular revolution in Syria on 8 December and the ceasefire reached on 15 December at the end of the 1.5-year Zionist crime of genocide in Gaza, we described the July Revolution in Bangladesh as making 2024 the herald of a new spring for the Islamic world.

In fact, in April, an International Conference on Bangladesh Studies was organized at Istanbul Ticaret University by the Bangladesh-based Centre for Political and Social Research (CPSR). The fact that the conference, which brought together academics, policymakers and diplomats to examine Bangladesh's political transformation and its policy development and reform initiatives, took place in Istanbul is a spontaneously manifested expression of the deep closeness between Turkey and a Bangladeshi state that has become one with its own people.

In Turkey there is a considerable elite Bangladeshi diaspora, who emigrated to Turkey particularly as a result of Hasina's repressive policies. Hundreds of young people, all studying at quality schools, extremely intelligent, hardworking and intellectual, candidates to hold a role in the country's future. With the great majority of them I met with great enthusiasm and affection in the conference and meeting halls in Bangladesh, where I had come for the event.

At the international conference titled "Building Bangladesh 2.0 in the Spirit of the July Revolution," organized in April by Bangladeshi students and academics living in Turkey, the most important thing that caught my attention was that it was a conference organized with an amateur spirit but as professionally as possible. The enthusiasm for organization and activity that I saw in all the events I attended in Bangladesh showed once more that this was no coincidence. Bangladesh truly has a very promising, intelligent, hardworking, smart, enthusiastic and faithful youth. This is a youth that has proven its existence and its difference by making a revolution.

I will continue to write my impressions, God willing.