About 10,000 garment workers rioted yesterday close to the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, smashing cars and buses and vandalizing factories in anger at high food prices and low wages, police said.
Police fired tear gas and used batons to break up the protests and at least 28 people were injured.
The textile workers went on the rampage in Fatullah, some 20km south of Dhaka, demanding better pay amid soaring rice prices, police Inspector Nasir Ahmed said.
PHOTO :AP
He said they wrecked cars and buses, attacked factories, and hurled bricks and stones at police who were forced to retaliate with tear gas.
Most of the injured were police officers, he added.
Police sub-inspector Shafiqul Islam said the rampage involved around 10,000 workers from several garment factories, adding: “They became unruly demanding higher wages, saying their current wages don’t even meet basic food needs.”
The government says that food prices, notably the staple rice, have doubled in the last year, caused by a massive shortfall in production after devastating floods and a cyclone last year.
The unrest in Bangladesh was the latest incident of the fallout of mounting food prices.
At least five people have died in similar protests over high food and fuel prices in Haiti, while disturbances have rocked Egypt, Cameroon, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries in the past month.
Meanwhile, thousands of militant Islamists threw stones at police and other auxiliary forces as violence erupted for a second day on Friday around the national mosque in central Dhaka, leaving more than 70 people injured, officials and witnesses said.
Street battles broke out as police in armored cars fired teargas to disrupt rallies and chase protesters off the roads in downtown Dhaka.
Angry mobs torched police jeeps and motorbikes during the demonstration.
The violence spread to the country’s principal port city of Chittagong, where hundreds of Islamic students were involved in attacking vehicles, shops and other businesses.
Students of local madrassas also set up barricades on the highway connecting the southeastern commercial hub with the capital Dhaka.
“We will oppose any measure to improve the lot of women which goes against the injunctions of the holy Koran,” said Mufti Fazlul Huq Amini who heads a large madrassa in the private sector.
In Dhaka, protesters took shelter in mosques as police followed them with swinging batons.
About 120 protesters were injured in the two days of clashes, prominent Islamic cleric Shaikul Hadith Allama Azizul Huq said, claiming at least 25 people were arrested during the violence in Dhaka.
The protesters, belonging to the committee for the prevention of anti-Koran laws, are accusing the interim government of trying to alter the inheritance rights of men and women in order to bring about gender equality, which is said to be contrary to Islamic injunctions.
The government has denied any such move in a proposed women development policy that had been recently circulated in order to elicit public opinion.
Nearly 5,000 extra policemen were deployed in the congested squatter colonies in southern Dhaka and several sensitive installations, deputy district administrator Nahid Ahmad said.
The demonstration, banned under a state of emergency proclaimed last January, was called by the Islamic clerics who are opposed to any change in the Muslim inheritance laws considered by many development analysts as biased against female inheritors.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS