[Bangla Daily Star] Jamaat-Shibir activists continued to be on the rampage and clashed with law enforcers in different parts of the country yesterday, the second day of hartal... a peculiarly Bangla combination of a general strike and a riot, used by both major political groups in lieu of actual governance ...
in protest at the verdict in the war crimes trial of ex-Jamaat-e-Islami
...
The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka
The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an
independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
chief Ghulam Azam.
The violence left three persons and a child dead and scores of others, including 10 coppers, maimed in the districts of Satkhira, Dinajpur and Gazipur yesterday. The corpse count rose to nine in two days.
In contrast, the hartal called by the youths of Shahbagh and 10 left-leaning student organizations passed peacefully.
They observed the shutdown yesterday demanding the death penalty for Ghulam Azam, who was sentenced by International Crimes Tribunal-1 on Monday to 90 years in prison for criminal masterminding genocide and other crimes against humanity during the Liberation War in 1971.
The Jamaat has also called for another daylong shutdown today and threatened to extend it to 24 hours, if the party's secretary general, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed, is convicted of wartime offences by the tribunal which is set to deliver the verdict this morning.
The country virtually has fallen into a hartal trap with five continuous shutdowns beginning from Sunday. There will be no working day until next Sunday if the Jamaat enforces hartal tomorrow.
Already suffering from the heat of political unrest, the economy is facing another spell of damage when the country is trying to get rid of a stigma by holding trials of those who actively opposed the birth of Bangladesh and collaborated with the Pakistain occupation army.