Bangladesh’s fugitive former leader Sheikh Hasina has warned that excluding her Awami League party from next year’s elections would deepen divisions in the country as millions of her supporters are set to boycott the vote.

Now exiled in India, the 78-year-old is currently being tried for crimes against humanity after being toppled in August 2024 by a student-led uprising that, according to the United Nations, saw up to 1,400 people killed in crackdowns as she clung to power.

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The interim government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has pledged to hold elections in February but has banned the Awami League under amendments to the antiterrorism act, citing national security threats and war crimes investigations into the party’s senior leaders.

“The ban on the Awami League is not only unjust, it is self-defeating,” Hasina said in emailed comments to the Reuters news agency published on Wednesday.

“Millions of people support the Awami League, so as things stand, they will not vote. You cannot disenfranchise millions of people if you want a political system that works.”

The Awami League and the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have long dominated the politics of Bangladesh, which has more than 126 million registered voters. The elections in January 2024 were boycotted by the BNP as its top leaders were either jailed or in exile.

Human Rights Watch has condemned the ban on the Awami League as “draconian”. In the party’s absence, the BNP is predicted to lead in next year’s election while Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim-majority country’s largest Islamist party, is rising in popularity.

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“We are not asking Awami League voters to support other parties,” Hasina told Reuters of the upcoming elections. “We still hope common sense will prevail and we will be allowed to contest the election ourselves.”

‘The nucleus’ of all crimes

The International Crimes Tribunal, Bangladesh’s domestic war crimes court, has concluded proceedings against Hasina, and a verdict is expected on November 13.

Chief Prosecutor Tajul Islam accused Hasina of being “the nucleus around whom all the crimes were committed” during the uprising and called for the death penalty if she is found guilty.

Prosecutors also alleged she oversaw disappearances and torture of opposition activists at clandestine detention centres run by security agencies.

Hasina has defied court orders to return to attend the trial. She told Reuters the proceedings were “a politically motivated charade”.

“They’ve been brought by kangaroo courts with guilty verdicts a foregone conclusion.”

In an emailed interview with the AFP news agency also published on Wednesday, Hasina called charges that she had ordered security forces to fire on protesters as “bogus” and said she “mourned all the lives lost during the terrible days” of her crackdown.

The prosecution, which insisted her trial was fair, has played audiotapes verified by police that suggested Hasina directly ordered her security forces to “use lethal weapons” against protesters.

This month, lawyers for the Awami League requested that the International Criminal Court in The Hague investigate reported “retaliatory violence”, including allegations of “beatings and lynchings”.