BNP equally responsible for Jan 5 \\\'farcical election\\\': Ex-US envoy

Former US Ambassador in Dhaka William B Milam has said BNP is ‘equally responsible’ for the Jan 5 ‘farcical election’ as it continues to refer to it because of its many ‘errors of strategy and judgment’. Milam, also a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and former US Ambassador to Pakistan, came up with the observation in his latest write-up – Is the worst yet to come? – published in the Express Tribune on Tuesday. Had BNP contested and won even 50 seats in a rigged election (a low estimate, my friends tell me, given its popularity in the polls), there would be a brake on the Awami League ambitions, even if the AL had a two-thirds majority, he mentions in his article. “Many still wish for a ‘third force’, but I can’t see the AL providing political space. The BNP it is, and after success in the recent Upazila (local) elections, this moment for reform must not be lost,” he says. Milam thinks the election and its role as the opposition could have presented the BNP with the opportunity to refine its image, construct a coherent centre-right voice — to contrast with the center-left AL — and to use that voice in the parliament and in the public to constrain the increasing authoritarian actions of this government. This would be a juicy agenda — the rapid rise of extrajudicial killings, the increasing attacks on minorities, and the growing attempts to intimidate opposition leaders and media voices, who speak out against such government acts, he writes. It would be important for a reformed opposition to reestablish that the true intellectual and moral foundations of the state are political rights, freedom and economic equality, and insist that a one-party government leads away from these foundations, Milam mentions, according to UNB.