Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/19/bangladesh-demonstrations-police-hasina/

by perihelions • 2 years ago

451 169 2 years ago

I think it's worth noting why this is happening. The country has been giving out degrees and jobs to people who instead of working and studying hard, to descendants of veterans in the country's war against pakistan, and this level of nepotism has been going on since the 70s which as you can easily imagine is not great for those who see the value in getting these "basic livelihood for hard work" things. So when people started protesting recently, because for anyone with half a brain this is completely wrong, the people without half a brain who benefit from this completely fucked system responded by killing and raping students and now there's no internet.

This is definitely how you drain a country of all its competent people very fast by the way.

esafak• 2 years ago

People who run a country into the ground are happy to maintain the status quo as long as they're getting their share? Who knew!?

adolph• 2 years ago

Conjecture: there is no exit from despotry because more than deriving happiness from the current state, the despot fears dissolution. A counter-example might be post apartheid South Africa or Idi Amin’s exile, but there are sufficient examples of worse personal and family outcomes to rule out simple projections of psychopaths.

sagman• 2 years ago

I don't know about running a country to the ground. They are economically doing quite well with metrics exceeding those of neighboring countries like India.

dash2• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is really far from accurate, which is absolutely not to justify Sheikh Hasina's antics. GDP has shot up in the 21st century and the trend growth appears to be accelerating. Bangladesh was a very poor country, but it is getting rich fast. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/BGD?zo... https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-ti...

david_shi2• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Chhatra_League

The ruling party seems to be allied with a student paramilitary to help act as their enforcers.

"Chhatra League distributes dormitory seats at Chittagong University instead of authorities. Only those who join Chhatra League after being enrolled, get the chance to stay in the residential halls."

alephnerd8• 2 years ago

Slight quibble - the student paramilitary IS part of Hasina's party (BAP).

It's the student wing.

In South Asia, all party student wings are basically paramilitaries and gangs.

pmarreck7• 2 years ago

The general secretary of Bangladesh Chhatra League Jahangirnagar University unit, Jasimuddin Manik and his followers celebrated the rape of 100th girls including at least 20 students of the university in 1998.

Is it poverty that brings out the worst in people? Or something else?

mtalantikite• 2 years ago

Important to note it wasn't just a 'war against Pakistan', but a war for independence from Pakistan [1], which also included a genocide against Bengalis by Pakistan and their allies [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide

pmarreck7• 2 years ago

from that link about the Bangladesh genocide (wow, I never heard of this):

Pakistan's imams declared Bengali Hindu women to be "war booty”;[11][12] and Pakistani fatwa were issued legitimizing Bengali Hindu women as spoils of war.[12][13] Women who were targeted often died in Pakistani captivity or committed suicide, while others fled to India.

This is based on a non-contextual reading of Quran 4:24, Quran 8:69, Quran 23:5-6:, Quran 33:50 and various hadiths, which continue to be taken literally (when it is convenient to do so) by belligerents, hundreds of years after they were written. I refuse to cite them here because they are offensive to humanitarian/modern ethical worldviews (and because I do not wish to play a game of moral relativism).

jl6• 2 years ago

Degrees as well as jobs? Are Bangladeshi universities diploma mills?

trilbyglens• 2 years ago

Country probably entirely underwater in the next 50 years anyways....

petre• 2 years ago

So its inhabitants need to be subjected to injustices for another 50 years?

jtbayly• 2 years ago

Talking about why it is happening is helpful.

I’m just surprised nobody is talking about the reason the government claims it has limited access to information: preventing disinformation.

Not a single person here has commented about disinformation, but it is the single most applicable part of this article for Americans.

Preventing the spread of disinformation has been the supposed in the last decade reason for the largest censorship campaigns our nation has ever seen.

amanaplanacanal• 2 years ago

Which nation are you from?

sbdaman• 2 years ago

There is also a widespread cellular outage. It's very, very difficult (near impossible) to reach anyone in the country right now.

chad1n• 2 years ago

I've talked with a guy from Bangladesh over the last 3 days and he said that he was at a party and he was about to be killed, so he stopped going and started filming how other students are being beaten by local police. The fact that the government blocked the internet is pretty sad and I wish that no more people die.

arrowsmith4• 2 years ago

he was at a party and he was about to be killed

I feel like your story is really missing some details.

pvarangot• 2 years ago

I mean, those are the best parties

hackerlytest• 2 years ago

Some context: Students are protesting to reform the quota system. Which was abolished in 2018 after protest but recently brought back again. The Quota system basically reserves 56% of public sector jobs, i.e. 30% to relatives of war veteran.

The war happened in 1971. To get public job and avail the quota, it must be their 3rd or 4th generation now. Which is plain unfair.

But it’s not about that, the gov loyalists and their goons fake these veteran certificates to land these jobs. Bangladesh is one of the most corrupted countries in the world after all. So real veteran relatives are seldom the beneficiary.

These students just wanted to reform this system. But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.) This was completely unprovoked and unnecessary. Basically any forms of dissent have been dealt with this way since 2009. No one can criticize or protest the big brother.

We have a dictatorship since 2009. People are angry - due to corruption, inflation, joblessness and tyranny. This is just some outburst of it.

When you see the videos how the police are killing teenagers and university students in the road - our future generation - no one can tolerate this.

Now the fascist gov has closed all internet and phone connection to outside world. I can't contact my family anymore. I don't know their well being.

There is of course more to it. But this is the summary.

xeromal• 2 years ago

Thank you for the information. I'm sorry for you and your family. Are public jobs so numerous that a lot of people survive off of them?

geodel• 2 years ago

Nope. It won't be numerous but grab whatever of the tiny pie is the point. I am from neigboring country but situation is same for jobs. For 10 govt job, 10K people can show up and create riot like situation in little time.

csomar2• 2 years ago

I think it's more about justice than the number of jobs or whether you get it or not. Many people will be happy when they perceive that a fair process has been established in granting these jobs. Especially when income is hard to come by.

Willian03• 2 years ago

At 140,000 square kilometres, Bangladesh is about the size of New York State, with 170 million people. Problems are inevitable, there are not so many job opportunities at all, and there will always be people who are dissatisfied

alephnerd8• 2 years ago

Now the fascist gov has closed all internet

I agree that Sheikh Hasina is extremely authoritarian and corrupt dictator but imo JeI are the actual fascists, and the BNP has absolutely been enabling them.

That said, I agree with you that Hasina's authoritarianism needs to end.

Ideally all these old fossils (Hasina, Zia, Rahman, etc) need to be purged and the actual youth (who are the majority of Bangladesh) get a chance to have their voice in power.

It's a handful of elite 70 year olds who have been running a country where the median age is 25 and are ruining it due to their own personal drama from the 70s and 80s.

Karrot_Kream10• 2 years ago

Yeah I think "fascist" is too much for any actor not JeI but authoritarian is right. They've cut off Internet and telecom access after all, a dangerous game given how physically close they are to West Bengal.

trompetenaccoun3• 2 years ago

Independent of points for or against their rule, the ageist argument makes little sense. 25 year olds are generally politically naive and easily manipulated. The average person in their twenties has no idea about economics, geopolitics or other such topics that are important to understand for running a country. When you look at uprisings against ancient leaders in countries with very young populations, they regularly end up even worse then before, sadly. Take Sudan as an example.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

agree that Sheikh Hasina is extremely authoritarian and corrupt dictator but imo JeI are the actual fascists

The challenge of escalating partisanship is self-reïnforcing polarisation. The worse the leadership, the worse the opposition.

The operant question, thus, is not who is good but who is less evil, in the hope that this ratchet, a few times turned, yields goodness.

rayiner• 2 years ago

That’s a terrible idea and would set Bangladesh back generations. Hasina is authoritarian, but Bangladeshis need someone like her to run such a disorderly population. She’s not Lee Kuan Yew, but she’s the best in that direction Bangladesh can hope for. And a third-rate copy of LKY is a hell of a lot better than whatever Islamic socialist would replace her.

thisislife22• 2 years ago

It's a handful of elite 70 year olds who have been running a country where the median age is 25 and are ruining it due to their own personal drama from the 70s and 80s.

Really? Are you going to totally ignore that it is those very 25+ years old that gave the current premiere of Bangladesh her massive majority? (See also https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/88356/why-are-m... ).

That said, I agree with you that Hasina's authoritarianism needs to end. ...

Beware of what you wish for! It's all nice and easy to harp at "undemocratic" and "authoritarianism". But understand the political context and history of Bangladesh before passing such blanket judgement. The reality of Bangladesh politics is:

1. Political violence is a fact there - Mrs. Hasina's father, a hugely popular leader, was assassinated and 18 members of her family, including her 10-year-old brother, and relatives were massacred. She had to seek refuge abroad to survive.

2. Bangladesh has also seen many military coups.

3. Some opposition parties of Bangladesh are backed by the military.

4. Some of the opposition lean towards religious fundamentalism and, as you pointed out, also associate with extremist groups.

5. Foreign powers - USA (and other western countries acting in cohort with the US), China and India - often interfere in Bangladesh's internal affairs.

(Source: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/80654/ )

Being a young democracy, amidst such a political environment necessarily requires an authoritarian streak in a politician to survive and to nurture a secular democracy. As an indian, I genuinely admire her commitment to create a democracy in an Islamic republic that is easily prone to religious fundamentalism and sectarianism - sometimes she reminds me of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who did the same with Turkiye. (Remember that Bangladesh is one of the few islamic Republics that has actually committed to democratic political values).

-----

All that said, it is very clear that the current protests were very poorly handled and will be politically damaging to her, and could be a turning point in Bangladesh politics. Whether it will be good for Bangladesh totally depends on how her government handles these protest. Even if the matter is sub-judice, and being examined by the Bangladesh Supreme Court, the government should have engaged more deeply with the protestors and anticipated the political violence.

dotancohen• 2 years ago

  > But our fascist gov and their goons used force and killed 50+ unarmed students until yesterday (3 from my alma mater alone.)

Is this what those students with the colored flags have been protesting about in US universities for the past half year or so?

0x1ch• 2 years ago

Not sure if you're a troll or not, but that would be related to Israel and Palestine.

einpoklum3• 2 years ago

I'd call it a US-manipulated military oligarchy with a democratic facade:

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/05/imran-khan-interview/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/10/did-us-ask-for-imra...

sparky_z• 2 years ago

You seem to have confused Pakistan for Bangladesh. Unless I'm misunderstanding your point.

tempodox• 2 years ago

Thank you, the news article was suspiciously stingy on these salient details.

constantcrying3• 2 years ago

Why are you seething about this from the other side of the world?

You are presumably an intelligent person, but you, and everyone else that could, left your home country for economic opportunities elsewhere. Now, your home country is administrated and governed by the people without the opportunity to leave and you are on the other side of the world.

I think it is extremely weird to see the people with the best opportunity to reshape their country leave and then from overseas complain about the politics in that country.

AlexeyBelov4• 2 years ago

What do you mean by seething? Their comment appears emotionally balanced to me.

Honestly, it sounds like you want to gatekeep political discussion. Am I misunderstanding you?

ramon156• 2 years ago

Huh? Even if he was seethings, why is caring about your family a bad thing? Is your opinion suddenly not relevant anymore when you've fled the country? Weird mindset

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

News from yesterday

Related article for some context: https://www.engadget.com/bangladesh-is-experiencing-a-near-t...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41001370)

TulliusCicero3• 2 years ago

I wish the protestors all the best. Sad that this kind of situation is happening.

TyrianPurple• 2 years ago

When governments do such things, expect bad results. The protesters' demands aren't unreasonable at all. Just be meritocratic in civil service appointments.

InitialLastName• 2 years ago

Yep, it's easy. Just flip the "off" switch on the privilege structure that a huge chunk of the people who operate your society benefit from (and expect their children to benefit from). What could possibly go wrong?

im3w1l• 2 years ago

It's not so obvious to me. I think it's easy for a rich country to just "solve" security by throwing money at fancy gear, but these poor countries they must have some way of incentivizing people to die helplessly in a ditch. Handing out privileges to relatives is one such way.

There is some similarity to the system of nobility. Although this seems to give lesser privileges but to more people compared to that.

Now what these protests reveal is that similar to the warriors of the past, these protestors are willing to risk death for these privileges. This suggests a pragmatic solution, that instead of abolishing the privilege, they could offer a path for these protestors to also be granted it. This could redirect their youthful energy and ambition into more useful avenues.

</armchair>

frabjoused• 2 years ago

If this can happen, can you imagine if the Internet was centralized?

elashri• 2 years ago

Internet is quasi centralized already. An outage or intentional disruption by a couple of companies under US Jurisdiction can disrupt global internet. Yes you would still have some clustered connections here or there but most of internet infrastructure is almost centralized already.

hdhshdhshdjd• 2 years ago

We’ve got three operating systems, three giant cloud providers, and a near monoculture of browser engines. It’s not great, even if it could be worse.

duxup• 2 years ago

Telecom providers of various kinds are responsive to governments so I'm not sure that it "isn't" centralized as far as the ability for bad people to do these things goes.

TheRealPomax• 2 years ago

Rather than an outage, this is a national internet kill switch being used to deny the population access to information and the ability to organize.

Because the supreme court reinstated a law that reserves a whopping 30% of all government jobs to only people with family members who fought in a war 50 years ago. As anyone could have trivially predicted, that doesn't sit well with the entire generation that's currently in school and hoping to actually, you know, get a job in the next few years.

fragmede• 2 years ago

looking at https://outage.ant.isi.edu/ it seems Europe is having a bad day too

jheidemann• 2 years ago

In https://outage.ant.isi.edu, one should look at the circle colors, not just sizes. Circle colors indicate the fraction of networks (technically: /24 IPv4 newtork prefixes) that are down, and in Bangladesh, the hard red means nearly 100% are unreachable.

While Europe has many circles and therefore some networks are down, because they are blue that means it's only a few that are unreachable. Europe has many, many networks.

trompetenaccoun3• 2 years ago

What's the explanation for what's going on in Europe though? Is that the regular state of their network?

rbax• 2 years ago

Has there been any indication from NetBlocks how they think the government is blocking internet access? I can still see subnets being announced from Bangledesh associated providers.

AS 17494 AS 38592 AS 136246 AS 152304 AS 24323

DaiPlusPlus• 2 years ago

There's a Crowdstrike joke in there...

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

Fascism, CrowdStriking since 1922.

oxqbldpxo• 2 years ago

Is this how an Ai take over or state sponsored cyber attack would look like?

spencerchubb• 2 years ago

It is a state sponsored cyber attack. It doesn't just look like one

neets• 2 years ago

Is this just practice for September?

BadHumans3• 2 years ago

I dare ask, what happens in September?

lionkor• 2 years ago

Probably something American, considering the lack of specificity

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007396

workfromspace• 2 years ago

Warning: recursion

Foofoobar123456• 2 years ago

A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings. The country doesn’t yet have resilient infrastructure. For example, internet and telecommunication go through a single point of failure. Last year, that building was accidentally set on fire and it led to 2 weeks of poor internet for everyone.

Bangladesh as such has a severe lack of capital, and rebuilding all this is costly.

Ideally protests should be peaceful. But along with protestors, we tend to unleash anarchists who just want to watch the world burn.

They also have rival political parties who clearly use this situation to their advantage.

All is not what it seems. Truth is whatever you believe.

I hope for a swift restoration of law and order, followed by productive dialogue. And for the love of god, let’s not condone setting things on fire. That will destroy innocent lives and what little financial security they have built.

TulliusCicero3• 2 years ago

Ideally protests should be peaceful.

Other people in the thread are saying that Bangladesh is a dictatorship, and security forces are killing people for protesting.

Just to be clear, if that's the case, violence against the state is entirely justified. There is nothing morally wrong about rebelling against autocracy, in fact, it's quite a good thing.

Foofoobar123456• 2 years ago

It’s easy to encourage this when there’s nothing at stake. I personally have friends and family who are trapped and fear violent protestors as much as violent police.

And when the protests die down in a few days or weeks, there will be even fewer jobs. And the attacks aren’t against the state but against the people as well.

ridiculous_leke2• 2 years ago

Just to be clear, if that's the case, violence against the state is entirely justified. There is nothing morally wrong about rebelling against autocracy, in fact, it's quite a good thing.

Only if you have evidence against the state. Otherwise the state (which always has more resources) is going to take it to the next level.

__green_pixel__• 2 years ago

The protest WAS peaceful until one protester was killed by the Police for no reason.

Not sure how you are blaming the massive countrywide internet outage on the protesters. It was literally announced by the government that they were shutting everything down to control the movement.

Foofoobar123456• 2 years ago

I’m not blaming anyone for anything. I’m saying buildings were set on fire.

And yes we know that internet was shut by the government, but we had a day of burning overhead optical fiber that serves as the backbone for many peoples home internet connections.

My team of network engineers was brought in by some companies to try and reroute and stabilize the country’s infrastructure before the full shut down.

And when the internet is turned back on, there are the unlucky ones such as us who have to debug the remaining issues and asses the damage of a burnt central node that all ISPs connect through.

AlexeyBelov4• 2 years ago

The protest WAS peaceful until one protester was killed by the Police for no reason.

I'm inclined to believe it, but let's be honest: protesters always say that. From their point of view that's how it always is and they are never in the wrong. Statistically it's very unlikely.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

Ideally protests should be peaceful.

When there's no consequences for bad authoritarian behavior, you get more of it. Your plea for law and order is (probably inadvertently) a plea for the ongoing dominance of the established order. If it's peaceful only because everyone is afraid or unable to resist, then what you have is a police state. And in authoritarian societies like that, peaceful protest doesn't make any postive difference whatsoever, while often making things noticeably worse for the protesters.

Even in places like the US/UK, nonviolent protests attract violent repression and call by some people for even more violent repression. Simply passively standing against the established order is treated by some as a license to commit violence upon the protesters.

You are right about Bangladesh having a lack of capital and the costs of rebuilding, but you're basically arguing that capital matters more than the people in society. I'm sure you would never advocate just killing off/stripping the rights of some % of the population to increase the average wealth, but that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do in practice. There's always a favored in-group (sometimes described as a 'selectorate', imbued with sufficient political power to prop up the incumbent regime in exchange for policy rewards) and a disfavored out-group (the wrong ethnicity, or the wrong idea-havers, or the wrong socioeconomic class) that gets saddled with the costs. The recipe for successful authoritarians is to strip wealth from the out-group(s) fast enough to keep the in-group happy but not so fast that the out-groups decide they have nothing to lose or that their loss rate is unacceptable, causing them to react violently against the authority structure and/or the in-group that benefits from it.

Capitalistic abundance through the satisfaction of demands by enterprise and markets is a nice idea, but it is in no way guaranteed. Very often the beneficial goods and services come with negative externalities (pollution, waste, second-order effects) that do not fall on the consumer beneficiaries. Capitalists and industrialists (who are often but not always the same) frequently avoid accounting for these; where they do acknowledge the problems, they promote changing consumer behavior to mitigate the problem, recycling being the most obvious example. Sometimes this is effective, often not. The problem is that you don't have to generate positive externalities to succeed in a capitalist system; you can have a zero- or even negative-sum strategy and still win in many situations, as long as you are good at divide-and-conquer and frustrating attempts by your detractors to coordinate against you politically/economically. This is why corporations spend so much money on lobbying lawmakers and regulators, and also why branding is such a huge industry, differentiating products as much as possible while downplaying the identity of producers to minimize the appearance of oligopoly.

Foofoobar123456• 2 years ago

Both sides of the political spectrum are authoritarian. Each dominant party will do whatever in their power to hold onto it.

That said, law and order is needed to sustain the population. The pop density of BD is incredible - imagine half the population of US crammed into the state of New York. Systems and processes were what BD out of being considered a “basket case “ as Henry Kissinger (?) once famously called it. A lot of it were built by NGOs and private parties.

Now you have these students who are protesting something valid. But they are also not mature enough to realize that if they start burning away the optical fibers and data centers, they’re destroying the systems they are using to self-organize.

And what happens once they topple the govt? Who runs their nuclear reactor and power stations? Who runs their comms?

Let’s not throw away the baby with the bathwater and try and find a more reasonable way.

yupyupyups• 2 years ago

A friend of mine who works in a startup in Bangladesh tells me that critical infrastructure is being set on fire indiscriminately. Buildings such as data centers. He shared videos of many such burning buildings.

Targeting critical infrastructure doesn't sound like purely "anarchistic" rioting to me. It sounds like something a foreign hostile power would want to happen.

It reminds me of what is happening in Ukraine at the moment, where critical infrastructure is being targeted to hurt the civilian population. But here, instead of rockets, we have goons who are paid to burn things down?

t_mahmood5• 2 years ago

Students didn't burn the buildings, nor any other hostile power. As the hostile power already have their puppet installed. Only building they might've burnt is the Government sponsored, tv office.

Its classic tactic employed by the government, many times over and over again. It's done by their student wing

And there are no opposition party left to do such attacks anymore, they've been systematically eradicated

ridiculous_leke2• 2 years ago

South Asia is a messy place. Governments do have a terrible human rights record but these governments are democratically elected and are clearly a representation of the general sentiment.

kkaahh• 2 years ago

This protest, which started peacefully is currently the consequence of absolute mishandling and mismanagement by the government that resulted in close to 100 being shot dead by the police.

The current protest is not about the quota system anymore. It is the result of the systematic breakdown of social and economic opportunities that stems from years of corruption and favouritism within every sect of the economy.

logicchains• 2 years ago

Is meshnet technology currently feasible/cheap enough that it could be used to work around an internet shutdown in a country with very high population density like Bangladesh?

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

You would need to educate the masses first on how to use this stuff. And you end up sort of carrying an active beacon around. Which probably isn't a great strategy if you want to hide in plain sight of people empowered to just shoot you on sight.

Most phones don't have a huge range in any case. So, covering a wide area with a mesh network would be very vulnerable against repression. Just take out all the nodes that you can detect. If your phone picks them up, the suspect is within line of sight probably.

Technology has very few answers to repressive regimes like this. Mostly people get afraid and refrain from using the things that might get them in jail and self police. That also breeds trust issues. The DDR regime ultimately got children to rat out their relatives. Modern repressive regimes are learning from each other as well when it comes to identifying and neutralizing pockets of resistance. The Bangladesh playbook was perfected by the Chinese, Iran, Myanmar, etc.

Usually those regimes only end when people get hungry and angry enough. As long as you keep the economy going, regimes can last a long time. And of course North Korea perfected the art of repressing a starving nation. So even that is not a show stopper.

We're not at zero risk of regressing into living under oppressive regimes like that. I live in Germany where the scars of communism and fascism are still very visible. It only takes some rogue fools to win an election to roll back the clock a century.

ianburrell• 2 years ago

Mesh doesn’t have the bandwidth. You would be sending a whole country over a wireless link. Multiple wireless links. Even with some special point to point links, you can’t beat fiber.

The other problem would be how to do the routing. The world sends the IP addresses to routers which are disconnected. Network is centralized so all the packets from country go to the router. Would have to VPN, which the whole country would have to install.

floxy• 2 years ago

Anyone know more about Starlink availability in Bangladesh? I see there were some news articles last year mentioning trials. And the prohibitive cost to the locals.

einpoklum3• 2 years ago

Maybe they just had Crowdstrike installed at some of their Internet exchange control machines? :-\

Karrot_Kream10• 2 years ago

My friends are mostly Bdesh expats at this point. I wonder how dangerous it would be to setup a link from Bdesh into India. It would be a useful lifeline. Best wishes for the students and the people of Bdesh, but the stuff we were seeing as late as yesterday on Twitter was ugly. I hope those that can are using their mobiles to take proof.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

The last thing India wants is Bangladeshi refugees. I mean the Modi government is actively in the process of trying to expel the Muslim Bangladeshis that came in the 1970s.

Karrot_Kream10• 2 years ago

Sorry when I meant link I specifically meant a network link. A way to route net traffic out of the country. It wouldn't be too hard given how far the outskirts of Dhaka are from the West Bengal border and plenty of Indian Bengalis have ties in Bangladesh.

AlexDragusin• 2 years ago

If you need visuals of the flatlining here it is: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bd

observationist2• 2 years ago

"Bangladesh imposes a near total internet shutdown to stifle coverage and online engagement with police killings at student protest"

Calling things what they are instead of tortuously passive and neutral descriptions should be standard. The headline sounds like it's describing two separate things that just coincidentally happen to be occurring at the same time.

bobthepanda2• 2 years ago

Headlines are usually written like this to avoid libel suits. Even if you have a defensible case it’s quite expensive to go through the motions of a lawsuit.

observationist2• 2 years ago

Bangladesh is going to sue US journalists in a US court for accurate headlines?

I'd love libel suits from hostile authoritarian regimes, personally. For a journalism organization, that would seem to be a badge of honor.

Something is deeply wrong if you have to essentially lie on behalf of the bad guys or risk significant financial penalties.

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

Does Starlink work in Bangladesh?

pkaye• 2 years ago

From what I read it got approved but their government last year but Star Link plans were to make it available next year. But it likely need a ground station which could still be blocked by the government.

anigbrowl3• 2 years ago

Given the prevalence of this sort of thing in authoritarian countries, it's disappointing that mesh networking apps like Briar and Firechat are not more well-resourced/ developed/ promoted. Popular messaging platforms like Signal, WeChat, and Telegram offer a blend of convenience and security (different apps having different priorities, eg Telegram prioritizes the former over the latter), but they're all vulnerable to internet shutdowns, which instantly dissolves any online community trying to coordinate.

Mesh networks are generally slower and less reliable for large-scale data transfer as well as less secure by virtue of their distributed nature, but are more resilient in the event that natural/ social disasters take down communications infrastructure. Even janky analog radios work better.

dang• 2 years ago

I changed the URL from https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/112808500770031751 after getting this email from a user:

If you figure the event is significant enough to be on the front page, isn't something about the event itself more appropriate? as opposed to a tweet about the network being down as stand-in

That seems like a good point. I hope it doesn't context-shift the comments too much (I'm in a meeting atm and don't have time to check.)

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

It is really odd to me that Bangladesh even exists as a nation, and that it is an officially Islamic nation. This country was formed as a result of the partition of India, where the British empire left a mess on their way out by subdividing India into what is now Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. But really these countries should be recombined into India - their status as religious ethnostates is unacceptable in the modern world and given that Islam came to the region through brutal genocidal invasions by Arabs in the Middle East, it seems strange to give those colonizing invaders their own land and ethnostate. Pakistan and Bangladesh have also been messy throughout their existence, and continually on the brink - as current conditions show.

vinnyvichy2• 2 years ago

Mostly under the (non-)guidance of one Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the one described as "every inch the King".

https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/25/1/89/151/Gene...

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

I am not very familiar with the backstory here. Are you saying one person pushed for this? I assumed it was a purposeful strategy of the crown, for a departing colonizer (Britain) to weaken a former vassal state that might otherwise seek revenge for hundreds of years of colonial rule.

nradov• 2 years ago

I doubt that most Indians would want to be "recombined" with Pakistan and Bangladesh. What's in it for them?

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

I assume claiming back their ancestral land lost to colonizers, much like what native Americans would desire.

throwawaybd• 2 years ago

I am here to give context, in as much unbiased way as I can.

Bangladesh started its journey as East Pakistan in 1947 after breaking away from India. Pakistan's political upper echelon were dominated by Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis. And it siphoned all resources and wealth of East Pakistan to West, and treated it as its colony. Bangladesh, or EP was more populous and more resources-rich. But it suffered under WP. Now, after a massive cyclone and loss of thousands of lives with millions homeless and uprooted, WP rulers did not come to aid. And, in an unrelated way, a Bengali politician was to be elected Prime Minister for whole of Pakistan. But WP elites didn't want that. In this time, WP rulers wanted to eradicate Bengali, the mother tongue of EP, the more populous fraction of population and impose Urdu. Bangladeshi people revolted taking the issues of election, cyclone, and language simultaneously. Protests started peacefully.

But WP rulers used military for genocide and massacre. Tens of thousands of women were gangraped, raped and killed. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and tortured- many students and intellectuals. Hindus were the main target, but they didn’t spare Bengali Muslims either.

So, a war of independence ensued, and rebels become victorious. India engaged in a war with Pakistan and won that war, too.

Now, there was a small but non trivial part population of EP supported the WP rulers in name of radical religion. They and their descendants are in current BD population, too. They are in political-religious org Jamat-e-Islami. Supported and allied by BNP.

So, Sheikh Hasina, the current PM, was actually popular and won elections fairly in the beginning. But, she wouldn’t concede fair seats to opponents who were often pro-Pakistan but not always. In the name of national integrity and safety.

In tandem, the ruling party became corrupt to the core, and its loyalists and cronies made bank in corruption.

There is always consensus against the ruling party and the PM. And what began as a anti-quota protest, now has become a anti-establishment movement.

The people protesting now are mostly normal people. But a significant portion are pro-Pakistan radical Islamist fundamentalist.

But the rulers want to paint all of them as being pro-Pak, fundamentalists. This is how dissent was handled for the last 15 years.

I have many friends in Bangladesh or who lived there. Now, ruler party's central policies are pro-minority. But, local partymen do perpetrate against minority. So, they have slowly become what they fought.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

thoughts and prayers to those caught up in this and i hope for a peaceful resolution.

this should ring alarm bells for the other south asian neighbours who shared similar colonialism past.

socialist policies for the marginalized several decades ago seems to always bite back when leaders don't bring out more opportunities and instead play with the politics of handing out favourable access.

if some of these countries dream to call themselves developed in the future, they need to introspect whether you would need quotas and reservations after achieving it.

cute_boi• 2 years ago

When Government bans internet, people should never vote for them. They are the most evil one and I think all country should get together and sanction them.

rysertio• 2 years ago

The government rigs the elections here.

bvan• 2 years ago

I lived in BGD back in the 70’s, and the same two alternating dynasties still seem to have a hold on the country. Very sad.

Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests

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