Dhaka: UN secretary-general Ban-Ki-moon has sent letters to Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina and her arch-rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chief Khaleda Zia seeking to end the current spate of political violence that has claimed more than 100 lives in the past one-and-a-half months, reports said on Wednesday.
“Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has recently sent the letters,” the Daily Star reported, quoting UN spokesperson Farhan Haq.
Haq told the newspaper that Ban wrote the letters informing the two feuding leaders that he assigned UN’s assistant secretary-general Oscar Fernandez-Taranco to be in contact with the government and the opposition.
A UN spokeswoman in its Dhaka office, however, declined to make any comment on the matter immediately, but said “the secretary-general is gravely concerned about the situation in Bangladesh and seeks to end the violence”.
In regular briefing at the UN headquarters late yesterday, Haq, however, said Taranco currently had no plan for an immediate visit to Dhaka.
“He [Taranco] has been there before. He has been tasked by the secretary-general to be in contact with the government and the opposition, and he will continue with those efforts. But, at this point, like I said, there’s no travel to announce,” the UN spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the BNP chief said the ex-premier received the letter, but the prime minister’s office so far has not made any comment on the matter. On several recent occasions, however, Hasina has ruled out possibilities of dialogue with Zia, equating the violent campaign of her party and its crucial ally fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami with that of Daesh.
“Talks? With whom? With killers who are burning people? ... Question does not arise,” Hasina told newsmen last week as she visited the arson victims at a major state-run facility in the capital.
The government leaders said there were no scope for mediation between the two parties, and BNP needed to be denounced for its mindless attacks on innocent people since its nationwide blockade was launched on January 6.
BNP earlier called for UN mediation as it spearheads the fierce campaign demanding a midterm election, which is actually scheduled for 2019. Hasina rejected the demand and asked Zia to wait until then to test her popularity.
The newly-appointed US ambassador in Dhaka, Marcia Stephens Bloom Bernicat, meanwhile, in her maiden press briefing late on yesterday said Washington “stands ready to help if the help is requested since Bangladesh’s friends all over the world were concerned over the current political situation”.
“[But] Let me take this opportunity to say very directly that the United States does not back any particularly political force or party in Bangladesh,” she said.
According to a general perception, the ruling Awami League developed a strained relation with Washington after last year’s divisive January 5 elections as the US, at that time, expressed its reservations about the election since it was boycotted by the main opposition BNP.
The US envoy, however, said her country would not meddle in the internal politics of Bangladesh and it was for Bangladeshis to come up with their own solutions, but condemned in the “strongest term”, the use of violence for political gains.
The UN and US comments came days after Bangladesh’s High Court ordered government steps to stop violence and anarchic activities as the current spate of unrest while nearly 70 of the casualty victims were killed in clandestine arson attacks when the suspected blockaders or hired goons hurled fire bombs on buses and trucks.
The government earlier declared a bounty, encouraging people to track down the culprits while over a dozen of alleged arsonists were killed in what officials said “encounters” with law enforcement agencies.
Angry people captured themselves several arsonists as they threw or tried to hurl petrol bombs, but most of them were found to be under-aged street children who said they were hired by junior local leaders of BNP for small amounts of money.
Police said their intervention saved these arsonists from the wrath of a mob as the angry people nearly lynched them, in some incidents attempting to set them alight by pouring petrol or kerosene on their bodies.
BNP was in disarray for nearly a year, but Zia launched the fierce campaign coinciding with the first anniversary of January 5, 2014 elections.