Down with the murderous Hasina regime! Victory to Bangladeshi students! – RCI statement

The Revolutionary Communist International salutes the inspiring bravery of the students of Bangladesh. Their movement, which began in protest against a rotten quota system, has escalated to demand the downfall of the murderous Hasina regime. Our comrades, in over 40 countries around the world, stand in full solidarity with you. The just cause of Bangladesh’s students is the cause of the working class and youth of the whole world! The world must know what is really happening in Bangladesh.

This long ago ceased to be merely about the corrupt quota system, used by Hasina’s regime to reward its loyalest lackeys. Since the regime responded with murder, arrests and torture, it has become clear that a free and dignified existence for the masses in Bangladesh is impossible whilst this regime stands. It must be brought down and the killers brought to justice. In the words of the students, “first we count the bodies, then we count the quota”.

The need for international solidarity is urgent. Despite the campaign of murder conducted by the Hasina regime, the defiant students have refused to back down on even a single demand. The repression has not abated either. Police are continuing their door-to-door round ups. Over 2,000 have been arrested according to official figures.

Bodies are still arriving at the morgues. Doctors are reporting that bodies are being stacked on top of one another as morgues fill to overflowing. Newspapers in Bangladesh have counted over 200 dead, but this figure is likely to be a gross underestimate.

The regime is desperately trying to cover its tracks. Police have gone from hospital to hospital, and have confiscated the registers of the deceased so that no one can know the true scale of their crime. But we will not allow this cover up to succeed!

It is the internationalist duty of students and workers everywhere to shine a light on the crimes of Hasina’s regime, and to break the complicit conspiracy of silence of the international media.

We express our utter condemnation of this wall of silence by the media. The billionaire-owned press see Hasina as a loyal representative of their class. She has turned Bangladesh into a paradise of cheap labour for their class to exploit. From the blood of the Bangladeshi working class, they coin enormous profits every year. They therefore shamefully close their eyes to the shedding of further blood to maintain their loyal stooge.

We likewise express our utter condemnation of the so-called ‘international community’. They have not moved a muscle. This ‘community’ is one of plunderers and exploiters. Hasina is one of their own. These rotten capitalist regimes sense a subterranean mood of revolutionary anger among the workers and youth of their own countries. Nothing strikes greater fear into their hearts than the prospect of the brave example of Bangladesh’s students being replicated at home.

That is true of the regimes in the United States, in Britain, in India, and even in Pakistan. The Hasina regime tries to blame the old enemy of Pakistan and ‘shadowy actors’ manipulating the protests. They lie! The rotten ruling cliques in all these countries – be they friends or rivals of Hasina and her gang – fear the example of Bangladesh’s students!

The poor and downtrodden everywhere look with the warmest sympathy upon your struggle / Image: Rayhan9d, Wikimedia Commons

But the poor and downtrodden everywhere look with the warmest sympathy upon your struggle. To the students of Bangladesh we say: here alone is your one real ally, the youth and working class of Bangladesh and of the whole world!

We will do everything we can to bring the attention of the working class everywhere to your plight. We call for protests of solidarity in all major campuses, outside embassies and media outlets; we call for trade unions and workers’ organisations, and student organisations everywhere, to link up with diaspora communities to organise protests denouncing the slaughter.

Make no mistake, this is a class war that Hasina is waging. Her regime has only one aim: to create an ‘orderly’ situation in which the capitalist class – the garment manufacturers and giant multinationals, and, of course, her own clique – can exploit and rob the working masses of Bangladesh in peace.

The masses are being crushed mercilessly by the crisis of capitalism, by inflation, unemployment and poverty. Millions have been forced to emigrate in the search for jobs with which to maintain their families back home, often ending up in low-paid jobs with no rights, and suffering racism and oppression in the countries they have gone to.

They have reached the limit of what they can take. They identified the students’ struggle with that against their own hated oppression and exploitation. Hasina was threatened with an explosion of the working class. It would have brought down her regime, of that there can be no doubt. She thus opted for the swiftest and most brutal repression before such a movement could spread to the workers.

Sheikh Hasina called the student protesters razakar (counter-revolutionary paramilitaries used during the 1971 war of independence), but in reality, it is the Awami League and the Bangladeshi ruling class as a whole who have betrayed the liberation struggle, which was waged by the workers, students and poor peasants. In fact, the Bangladeshi students in their movement against quotas are rekindling the flame of revolutionary struggle and retying the knot of history with the best of the revolutionary traditions of the past.

But whilst using the utmost brutality against the masses, she has done everything in her power to please the capitalists and ensure the masses are crushed without hurting their profits. The curfew and blackout have created harsh suffering for the masses. However, Hasina has exempted 400 garment factories in the Chittagong EPZ (Export Processing Zones), where 500,000 garment workers are employed.

They are being allowed to remain open in order that the capitalists can continue making their fabulous profits unimpeded. However, there is nothing that Hasina and the ruling class fears more than the student movement linking up with the workers, and especially the garment workers, whose power we had a glimpse of during the wave of strikes in November.

We have thus seen state forces being used to stop anyone getting in or out of EPZs. The regime is trying to establish a cordon sanitaire between the students and these powerful sections of the working class.

In order to bring victory to the movement, we must break through this cordon. In order to bring down the Hasina regime, the power of the working class must be mobilised. What is needed is an all-out hartal (general strike and shutdown), linked to the formation of saṅgrāma pariṣada (councils of struggle) bringing students and workers together.

Through such action committees, organised at the local, city, district and national level, it would be possible not only to coordinate self-defence and to systematically broaden the movement, but to form organs of workers’ power that could challenge the brutal regime and pose the question of who rules the country. The point is not to replace the Awami League for the equally corrupt BNP, which also serves the interests of the capitalists and the multinationals, but that the working people of Bangladesh should take the running of the country into their own hands.

Victory to the students of Bangladesh! Long live international solidarity!

Down with the Hasina regime! Down with capitalism!