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However, none of the media reports announcing this decision mentioned who among the 140 million people of Bangladesh endorsed this extension, or how the so-called public interest was measured.
This lack of public consultation or debate is not new to Bangladeshis, however. The authorities frequently exploit the name of the public to impose their own decisions upon the country's citizens, without inquiring whether the people like it or hate it. Like many other occasions in the past, the current caretaker government -- which is backed by the armed forces in which Gen. Moeen plays a key role -- declared the outcome of its deliberations under the rationale of upholding the "public interest."
Many Bangladeshis laughed when they learned of this decision from the media, even though nowadays it is very hard for people to laugh under the present famine-like environment in the country.
In the past, all the ruling political parties imposed their decisions upon the nation, ignoring due process of law or the choice of the people. However, it has not yet been disclosed by the immediate past ruling political parties, led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whether they still support their decision to appoint Moeen to his current position, especially as this choice has brought many unexpected setbacks to their party including the detention of the party's top leaders on corruption charges.
Similar occurrences have taken place even when legislation was enacted in Parliament. If a ruling party intended to acquire instruments to harass the opposition they framed a law, such as the Public Safety Act of 2000, which was conceived by the Awami League just one year before its tenure was over. This law resulted in the detention of thousands of the party's opponents in the "interest of public safety."
The same attitudes were reflected in the programs of other political parties. They went on "hartal," or strike, which compels all institutions to close for hours, days, weeks or months -- as long they wished. Such strikes had a number of devastating outcomes: they ruined the nation's economic and social life; many companies lost business, including the readymade garment factories, resulting in large-scale unemployment; many seriously ill patients died due to a lack of transportation to hospitals; students missed their classes and private tutors for indefinite periods although they had to pay school fees; food and other daily commodities became scarce, driving up prices; and political violence killed innocent bystanders, including children.
All these violent actions have taken place in the name of the "public interest," although the people know they were not a fight for anyone's rights. Instead, they were just shortcuts to secure government power. Ironically, in this process, the public interest becomes public suffering.
The rulers and groups which greedily seek to capture the seat of power and prolong their tenure hardly realize or try to understand the meaning of the "public interest." The government in power imposes its own decisions upon the people and compels the nation to accept them. They use the term "public interest" as an extra card in a deck of playing cards. When a necessary card is found missing, the players use this "joker" to continue playing their hand. This simple example illustrates the way the power game is played in Bangladesh.
Sadly, the public interest now exists in the country only as a joke. On many occasions, it causes intolerable pain as a result of its cruel abuse, which the people have not yet been able to overcome.
If the present military-backed government had any intention of serving the public interest, they would have worked to reduce food prices to match people's buying capacity instead of offering empty rhetoric. In particular, they would have withdrawn the state of emergency and other rules and regulations that are multiplying human rights abuses.
In short, in order to prove their concern for the people's best interests, the government would have respected the fundamental rights of its citizens. They would have stopped, for instance, detaining people and applying such arbitrary laws as the Emergency Powers Rules of 2007 and the Special Powers Act of 1974.
They would also have ensured that victims of these laws received fair trials, and they would work to bring to trial perpetrators of state-sponsored brutality and extrajudicial killings. Policies, laws and government actions in general must not continue in a lawless manner as they do now.
After all these years and unpleasant experiences, the government should have learned that the prolonged presence of a person as the head of the army contributes nothing to the public interest. Rather, it creates problems for the democratic process and the army itself. If they have any doubts, they should ask the people of Bangladesh.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
