Bangladesh students demand PM's resignation

Announce nationwide civil disobedience campaign

DHAKA:

Bangladeshi student leaders on Saturday said they would carry on a planned nationwide civil disobedience campaign until Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned following last month's deadly police crackdown on protesters.

Rallies against civil service job quotas sparked days of mayhem in July that killed more than 200 people in some of the worst unrest of Hasina's 15-year tenure.

Troop deployments briefly restored order but crowds returned to the streets in huge numbers this week ahead of an all-out non-cooperation movement aimed at paralysing the government planned to begin on Sunday.

Students Against Discrimination, the group responsible for organising the initial protests, rebuffed an offer of talks with Hasina earlier in the day before announcing their campaign would continue until the premier and her government step down.

"She must resign and she must face trial," Nahid Islam, the group's leader, told a crowd of thousands at a monument to national heroes in the capital Dhaka to roars of approval.

Students Against Discrimination have asked their compatriots to cease paying taxes and utility bills from Sunday to pile pressure on the government.

They have also asked government workers and labourers in the country's economically vital garment factories to strike.

"She must go because we don't need this authoritarian government," Nijhum Yasmin, 20, told AFP from one of many protests staged around Dhaka on Saturday.

"Did we liberate the country to see our brothers and sisters shot dead by this regime?"

The looming non-cooperation campaign deliberately evokes a historical civil disobedience campaign during Bangladesh's 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.