Protests stop an open-pit coal mine

The people of Bangladesh were fed up. Asia Energy PLC, a British mining company, was building a massive open-pit coal mine at a cost of $3 billion at Phulbari in the northern Dinajpur district in northwest Bangladesh.

The complex was expected to produce high-grade coal and electricity to be exported to India. While Asia Energy boasted about the hundreds of jobs this project would create, opponents claimed that 200,000 people would be forced off their land, which for farmers means losing their livelihood.

At least four people were killed—some reports said six—and more than 100 injured when police opened fire on people trying to storm an office of Asia Energy in Dhaka on Aug. 26. They were intent on stopping the open-pit mine.

Police fired hundreds of shots and 50 tear gas shells to disperse the angry crowds, said witnesses. “It was a hell of a scene with hundreds of gun-shooting police confronting nearly 20,000 protesters in the hours of battle,” one witness told Reuters. Marianne, a French newspaper with a reporter in Dhaka, reported that 50,000 people were in the streets.

Police called in paramilitary troops as reinforcements after they failed to scare off the protesters, district officials told reporters.

But the deaths did not stop the protests.

On Aug. 28, the house of a company official was burned. The next day, opponents of the open pit and students called a general strike. On Aug. 30, a cop was mortally wounded.

The strike was solid. Schools were paralyzed, stores and offices closed, the ports were shut down.

Finally, the government gave in.

It halted work at the open-pit site in the northern Dinajpur district and suspended mining contracts late on Aug. 30.

“No coal mine or other project will be allowed at Phulbari against the interests of local people,” promised Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan, minister of local government and rural development and secretary-general of the ruling Bangladesh Nation alist Party.

Asia Energy lost half its value on the London Stock Exchange.

But opponents of the government didn’t stop their protests. The Opposition Alliance, a 14-party coalition, called a general strike Sept. 10 to protest the recent police action against its activists demanding electoral reforms. That’s a Sunday, which is a work day in Muslim Bangladesh.

According to preliminary reports, the strike was successful but less confrontational than the previous one against the open pit.