[Bangla Daily Star] Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami... a Pakistani catspaw remaining active in Bangla politix, loosely affiliated with the Pak religious party of the same name and closely affiliated with most of the terror organizations in Bangla. A member of the BNP's four party governing coalition....
-sponsored countrywide daylong hartal
... a peculiarly Bangla combination of a general strike and a riot, used by both major political groups in lieu of actual governance ...
started Tuesday morning.
Obstructed to hold rallies on Monday, Jamaat called the hartal in a desperate bid to fight the government on the street.
Hours after the announcement, the main opposition BNP late last night extended moral support to its main ally's hartal.
The hartal announcement came around 12:10pm through a blurb signed by Jamaat's acting secretary general Shafiqur Rahman. In the statement, all units of Jamaat had been called upon to enforce the strike.
“We are left with no other choice since we were denied permission for today's [Monday's] rally,” said Shafiqur Rahman.
Meanwhile,
...back at the comedy club, Boogie was cracking himself up, but nobody else seemed to be getting the non-stop jokes...
in a pre-hartal showdown, Jamaat men set fire to a vehicle and vandalised four more in the capital's Jatrabari area. Jamaat activists also clashed with police in Dinajpur. The clash left one Jamaat man dead.
The party was supposed to hold rallies in the capital and in some other districts Monday afternoon to press the government to release the top Jamaat leaders facing trials on charges of crimes against humanity.
Although being a key component of the BNP-led opposition alliance, Jamaat has alone been taking to the streets to press their core demands -- cancellation of, what they had termed, “farcical war crimes trial” and release of their party high-ups.
In their statement, Jamaat, however, cited restoration of the caretaker government system, price hike of essentials, deterioration of law and order, misrule of the government and attack on the values of Islam as the issues for the hartal.
Jamaat is also agitating along with the opposition alliance that had already declared a series of agitation programmes for December, including a nationwide road blockade on the 9th.