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Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has resigned and fled the nation, ending her lengthy rule after weeks of escalating anti-government demonstrations.

Sheikh Hasina’s dramatic downfall after a complete of twenty years in workplace opened a brand new period of political and financial uncertainty for the nation of 170mn, a vital provider to the worldwide clothes business.

Scholar protests that began final month towards a job quota system developed right into a broader rebellion towards Sheikh Hasina after police and authorities loyalists cracked down on the demonstrators, killing an estimated 300 folks.

Bangladesh military chief Waker-Uz-Zaman introduced in a televised tackle on Monday that Sheikh Hasina had resigned and the navy would maintain talks with the president and representatives of political events on forming an interim authorities.

“I provide you with my phrase that every one killings, all injustice shall be examined,” Zaman mentioned. “Please sustain your belief within the military . . . We are going to restore peace within the nation. Please co-operate.”

Zaman spoke shortly after demonstrators started flooding into Sheikh Hasina’s official residence in central Dhaka, dancing, lounging on furnishings and carrying away home items in scenes paying homage to Sri Lankans’ overthrow of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022.

However elation on the finish of Sheikh Hasina’s rule was combined with trepidation, with unrest persevering with on the streets of Dhaka within the hours following her resignation.

BBC Bangla, the UK broadcaster’s native language service, reported that demonstrators had set on hearth buildings together with the house minister’s residence and a memorial to Sheikh Hasina’s father, assassinated independence chief Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The navy introduced Dhaka’s airport could be shut for six hours on Monday.

“Greater than a decade and a half of tyrannical, unpopular rule the place folks’s voting rights have been stolen, their voice was stolen and so they have been below an oppressive tyranny — it has lastly ended,” mentioned Shafqat Munir, senior fellow with the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Safety Research. 

“Justice must be served,” he continued. “However proper now the precedence is to revive order, keep away from any type of anarchy and provides energy again to the folks.”

Within the quick aftermath of her resignation, Sheikh Hasina flew to an air power base close to Delhi in neighbouring India, native media reported. India’s exterior affairs ministry didn’t reply to a request for remark. 

Bangladesh was as soon as one of many world’s poorest nations, however has change into the world’s second-largest clothes exporter and an important low-cost manufacturing centre for western manufacturers together with Walmart, Primark and H&M.

This helped Sheikh Hasina bask within the standing of an essential financial and geopolitical companion to governments from India and China to the US and Europe.

She was the world’s longest-serving feminine chief, first taking energy within the Nineteen Nineties earlier than returning to workplace in 2009.

However her rule was marked by rising authoritarianism, corruption and human rights abuses. She was re-elected to a fifth time period earlier this yr after authorities rounded up hundreds of members of the principle opposition social gathering, which boycotted the vote.

The supreme courtroom final month watered down the job quota scheme, which reserved a 3rd of presidency positions for descendants of veterans of the nation’s 1971 independence struggle with Pakistan, however public protests continued.

Nearly 100 folks have been killed over the weekend alone as demonstrators clashed with police and supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League social gathering. She denounced the protesters as “terrorists” and ordered the navy to implement a curfew.

The weeks of protests had upended Bangladesh’s economic system, forcing clothes factories to shut and delaying orders for international manufacturers.

Clothes retailer H&M mentioned it was “involved in regards to the developments and the violence and hope for a peaceable settlement. Our groups on the bottom are repeatedly monitoring the developments”.

The beforehand highly effective chief’s departure will go away a vacuum in Bangladeshi politics, which has lengthy been dominated by a corrosive rivalry between the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist social gathering.

The coed protesters had known as for a break with the nation’s dynastic politics. However Zillur Rahman, government director of the Dhaka-based think-tank the Centre for Governance Research, warned their victory would possibly nonetheless be “hijacked by somebody”. “We aren’t certain in regards to the coming days or months,” he mentioned.

Bangladesh has a historical past of coups and navy rule, with a military-backed caretaker authorities most not too long ago operating the nation from 2007 to 2008.

Her resignation shall be a blow to India, south Asia’s main energy, whose chief Narendra Modi noticed Sheikh Hasina as a vital ally and bulwark towards Islamism within the area. Tensions between Sheikh Hasina and western nations had grown lately and in 2023 she accused the US of making an attempt a regime change after it imposed visa curbs on her authorities.

“It’s a fork within the highway for Bangladesh,” mentioned Sayem Faruk, an entrepreneur who took half within the protests. “As a nation we have now a brand new ethical stance and we’ll make the perfect of it. We gained’t let politicians like these take over once more.”