Jatiya party to boycott Bangladesh polls

BANGLADESH: Bangladesh's third-largest party announced it will boycott elections next month after the election commission Sunday rejected pleas by its leader to contest polls.

Former military strongman and general, Hussain Mohammad Ershad, who heads the Jatiya Party, made an appeal to contest in five parliament constituencies after his nomination was barred by local election offices last week.

"The election commission heard his five appeals today and rejected all of them. He cannot now participate in the January 22 national elections," commission spokesman S.M. Asaduzzaman told AFP. A.B.M. Ruhul Amin Howlader, the secretary general of Jatiya Party, told AFP his party would not take part in the election after the rejection.

"We will boycott the elections. Our stand is firm and clear: no Ershad, no elections," Howlader told AFP, adding the decision to bar Ershad from elections was "politically motivated".

The Jatiya Party was the third-largest in Bangladesh's outgoing parliament and is allied with the main opposition Awami League party in the upcoming polls. Howlader said the party would now go to the Supreme Court to make a last-ditch attempt to revive Ershad's nomination application.

The appeals to the election commission were spurned after the country's Supreme Court Tuesday rejected a plea by Ershad to overturn a two-year jail sentence given by a lower court three years ago for squandering government funds.

Bangladeshi law bars anyone with a criminal record from contesting parliamentary elections for five years following completion of the sentence.

Ershad is a popular political figure in Bangladesh and was seen as a potential kingmaker in the elections. He seized power in a bloodless coup in March 1982, but was ousted by a people's revolt in 1990.

The opposition and its allies have accused the outgoing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of appointing party loyalists to key positions in the caretaker government and election commission in an attempt to rig the polls.

But earlier this month they agreed to participate in the polls and end protests that left at least 35 dead since October and caused massive disruption in the impoverished country of 144 million people.

Bangladesh, Monday, AFP.