Shawdesh Desk:

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina on Tuesday came down heavily on the leaders of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party leaders for comments that Awami League won’t get the way to flee the country.

‘Sheikh Hasina or Awami League never runs away,’ she said at a blood donation programme in Dhaka.

‘We hear from our opposition party – though they can’t be called an opposition party as they are not in Parliament – that we (Awami League) won’t get the way to flee. I would like to remind the leader, who made this remark, that Sheikh Hasina or Awami League never runs away and never did,’ she said.

The PM was addressing a voluntary blood donation programme and discussion at the auditorium of Krishibid Institution Bangladesh in the city’s Farmgate area.

Bangladesh Krishak League arranged the blood donation programme, discussion and Doa Mahfil ahead of the National Mourning Day to be observed on August 15.

Hasina, the president of Bangladesh Awami League, said that their master, Ziaur Rahman, had made efforts to annihilate the Awami League, but failed. Then Ershad and Khaleda Zia tried without any syccess.

She said that Khaleda, during her rule, carried out massacre like the genocide committed by Pakistani occupation force in 1971.

Some 21,000 AL leaders and activists were killed, many others tortured, houses were burnt and occupied. But they finally didn’t sustain despite such misdeeds, she said.

Noting that Khaleda’s son Tarique Rahman fled the country in 2007 giving a bond that he would not do politics anymore, the PM said and added that, now the people, whose party leader is a convicted one, were making big remarks.

Sheikh Hasina said that she returned home despite threats and strong obstructions from the then caretaker government.

‘You (BNP leaders) already remain fugitives. How come they can make such big remarks under the supervision of a convicted fugitive?’ she said.

PM Hasina said that her government believed in democracy and is showing tolerance.

Referring to the arson violence carried out in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and the repression unleashed by BNP on AL leaders and activists, she said,

‘If we took one per cent revenge (of these misdeeds), now your whereabouts can’t be found. We don’t believe in revenge,’ she added.

At the beginning, one-minute silence was observed to pay tribute to the country’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his family members and others who were martyred on August 15, 1975.

Bangladesh Awami League presidium members Engr Mosharraf Hossain, Begum Matia Chowdhury and Muhammad Abdur Razzaque, its joint general secretaries Mahbubul Alam Hanif and AFM Bahauddin Nasim also spoke at the discussion.

Krishak League president Samir Chanda presided over the event moderated by its general secretary Umme Kulsum Smriti.