"Non-stop hartal" looks like the only weapon in BNP's arsenal, the useful hammer that fits all occasions. They boycotted the last election and kept up a non-stop hartal until it was held, trying to prevent it.
In a statement, BNP Joint Secretary Salahuddin Ahmed said the 20-party combine would hold peaceful demonstrations in all upazilas, municipalities, district headquarters and cities across the country on February 14.
The alliance's demands include an election under a non-partisan interim government, end to extra-judicial killings and repression of its leaders and activists, and release of those behind bars.
"If the government does not accept these demands, tougher programmes will be put in place from February 15 alongside the ongoing blockade," Salahuddin said in the statement, which was emailed to the media yesterday.
The threat comes at a time when as the situation in the country appears to be returning to normality despite the blockade and hartal
... a peculiarly Bangla combination of a general strike and a riot, used by both major political groups in lieu of actual governance ...
s.
The BNP-led alliance enforced the nationwide transport blockade on January 6. Around 70 lives have so far been claimed by the violence that has since been following. Most of those people killed belong to the low income groups.
Salahuddin Ahmed has been in hiding for around a month. He took over the charge of the party's spokesperson after another Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi got placed in durance vile
Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try!
last month.
Salahuddin, on behalf of party chief
Three-term PM of Bangla, widow of deceased dictator Ziaur Rahman, head of the Bangla Nationalist Party, an apparent magnet for corruption ...
, urged law enforcers not to turn the country into a "dreadful place" just for the government to stay in power longer and claimed that their action programmes have been "peaceful."