Bangladeshi students mourned classmates killed in protests against officials’ admissions rules on Wednesday, a day after the government ordered an indefinite nationwide school closure to restore order.
Six people were killed in clashes across the country on Tuesday, as rival student groups threw bricks and bamboo sticks at each other and police dispersed the gatherings with tear gas and rubber bullets.
It was the most violent day yet in weeks of rallies demanding an end to the quota system for lucrative government jobs, which opponents say unfairly favors members of Bangladesh’s ruling party.
Protesters planned to gather to hold a public funeral for the dead at the main university in the capital Dhaka, but were stopped by riot police who blocked entrances with barbed wire barriers.
About 200 students tried to march to the ceremony site after hours of unrest on campus before police threw a stun grenade to disperse them.
University students spent Tuesday evening searching the halls and expelling pro-government classmates in an attempt to end the violence.
“When the students were killed yesterday, there was a lot of anger,” Abdullah Mohammad Ruhel, a master’s student at Dhaka University, told AFP.
“It was like a domino effect. The female students started throwing out the Awami League students first, then the male dormitories followed.”
Others on campus told AFP that all members of the ruling party’s youth wing were ordered to leave their dormitories and those who refused were dragged away.
The government called on all schools, universities and Islamic seminaries in the country to close their doors until further notice late on Tuesday, soon after deploying paramilitary forces in several major cities to restore order.
Police later raided the headquarters of the country’s main opposition party in central Dhaka and arrested seven members of its student wing.
Detective Branch Chief Harun-or-Rashid told reporters that police found weapons at the offices of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Internet users in Bangladesh reported widespread outages on Facebook, the main platform used to organize protests.
Still, protests continued across the country on Wednesday, with hundreds of students blocking a railway line in the central city of Narayanganj.
‘Don’t get your hopes up’
Almost daily marches this month have called for an end to the quota system that reserves more than half of civil service jobs for specific groups, including children of veterans of the country’s 1971 war.
Critics say the program benefits children from pro-government groups that support Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, 76, who won her fourth straight election in January after voting without real opposition.
“If you are a university student in Bangladesh today, you would know how dangerously uncertain your future is,” Asif Saleh, director of one of Bangladesh’s largest charities, BRAC, wrote on Facebook in response to the unrest.
“My email inbox is flooded with job requests. When I go to the village, fathers tell me: I spent so much on my son’s education, but he can’t get a job.”
A spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres also called on the government on Tuesday “to protect protesters from any form of threat or violence”.
