DHAKA: Rival students in Bangladesh clashed on Monday leaving at least 100 people injured, as demonstrators opposing quotas for coveted government jobs battled counter-protesters loyal to the ruling party, police said.
Police and witnesses said hundreds of anti-quota protesters and students backing the ruling Awami League party battled for hours on Dhaka University campus, hurling rocks, fighting with sticks and beating each other with iron rods.
Some carried machetes while others threw petrol bombs, witnesses said.
The quota system reserves more than half of well-paid civil service posts totalling hundreds of thousands of government jobs for specific groups, including children of heroes from the country’s 1971 liberation war from Pakistan.
“They clashed with sticks and threw rocks at each other,” local police station chief Mostajirur Rahman told AFP.
Masud Mia, a police inspector, said “around 100 students including women” were injured, and had been taken to hospital. “More people are coming,” Mia added.
Students launched protests earlier this month demanding a merit-based system.
They have continued despite Bangladesh’s top court suspending the quota scheme.
Anti-quota protesters blamed the ruling party students for the violence.
“They attacked our peaceful procession with rods, sticks and rocks,” Nahid Islam, the national coordinator of the anti-quota protests, told AFP.
“They beat our female protesters. At least 150 students were injured including 30 women, and conditions of 20 students are serious.”
Critics say the system benefits children of pro-government groups who back Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Hasina, 76, won her fourth consecutive general election in January, in a vote without genuine opposition parties that saw a major crackdown against her political opponents, who boycotted the poll.
Injured student Shahinur Shumi, 26, said the protesters were taken by surprise.
“We were holding our procession peacefully,” she said from her hospital bed at Dhaka Medical Hospital.
“Suddenly, the Chhatra League (the ruling party student wing) attacked us with sticks, machetes, iron rods, and bricks.”
Police said hundreds of students from several private universities shouting anti-quota slogans joined the protests in Dhaka, halting traffic near the US embassy for more than four hours.
“Some 200 students squatted and stood on the road,” deputy police commissioner Hasanuzzaman Molla told AFP.
Thousands of students also marched in a dozen universities overnight Sunday into the early hours of Monday morning, protesting against what they said were Hasina’s disparaging comments.
Protesters said they were compared to collaborators of the Pakistani army during Bangladesh’s war of independence.
“This is unacceptable,” a female student from Dhaka University said, asking not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“We want a reform of the quota system so that meritorious students can get a fair chance.”
Violence also erupted during protests in Bangladesh’s second city Chittagong late on Sunday, anti-quota students said.
Khan Talat Mahmud Rafy, the organizer, said two fellow protesters were injured.
“Dozens of Chhatra League activists attacked one of our processions,” Rafy said.
Students are demanding that only those quotas supporting ethnic minorities and disabled people — six percent of jobs — should remain.
Bangladesh was one of the world’s poorest countries when it gained independence in 1971, but it has grown an average of more than six percent each year since 2009.
But much of that growth has been on the back of the mostly female factory workforce powering its garment export industry, and economists say there is an acute crisis of jobs for millions of university students.

KARACHI: The families of six Pakistani nationals allegedly taken “hostage” by fake job scammers in Myanmar have appealed to Pakistani authorities this week to secure their release, saying their loved ones were being subjected to the “worst forms of torture.” 
Families of the Pakistani nationals say that they were lured by a group of alleged Chinese scammers in Thailand with the offer of lucrative jobs and were now being forced to work up to 18 hours a day and being tortured, including through sleep deprivation and electric shocks, according to their family members. 
Arab News could not independently verify that the Pakistanis were scammed by Chinese nationals but a spokesperson at the Chinese consulate in Karachi said that they were looking into the case but there was no evidence so far of the involvement of Chinese nationals in the “unsubstantiated” accusations. 
While the exact nature of the work the Pakistanis are allegedly being forced to do is not known, the scammers had set a performance target of $150,000 per employee against a salary of $200 a month for the first six months and $500 a month thereafter for a year. 
A copy of a contract by a company called YONGQIAN Group seen by Arab News did not specify the type of work the Pakistanis were required to do in return for the $150,000 target but said that their employment period would be extended until the goal was achieved, while any employee resigning before 18 months would have to pay $8,000 to the company.
In one case, Qamar Zaman, a Pakistani working in Thailand for 10 years, told Arab News that he had invited his son, Muhammad Zain, to the Southeast Asian country from Pakistan’s Punjab province a month and a half ago on a family visa to start a business. 
An acquaintance of the Zaman family, Shahid Mehmood, another Pakistani from Punjab’s Sialkot married to a Thai woman with two children, also convinced Zaman to send over his son.
“He (Mehmood) told me he had a great offer and that he would secure the job only if my son accompanied him,” Zaman told Arab News, saying that Mehmood was not involved with the scammers.
“He promised my son a lucrative salary, but instead, I have brought upon myself a living hell. My life now is worse than hell itself.”
Zaman said that both his son and Mehmood were now trapped in a fake job scam and had gotten in touch with him by using the “secret phone” of three other Pakistani nationals from the Sindh province who were also being held captive on the Myanmar side of the Thailand-Myanmar border.
“‘Papa, get me out of here before I die,’ he pleaded with me on the phone,” Zaman said. “He was crying in agony.”
Zaman, who hails from the city of Gujrat, said that he lodged a complaint about his son’s “abduction” with the Thai police on June 12 and was struggling to bring him home. 
In another case, Muhammad Amir Hussain from Punjab’s Mandi Bahauddin, was also “taken hostage” along with Zain and Mehmood, according to Zain’s father.
In a third case, a resident from Sindh’s Hyderabad, Ashiq Hussain, has written a letter to the Pakistani embassy in Myanmar saying his son Kashif Hussain, 22, and two of his friends, Faraz Khan and Shehroz Khan, had gone to visit Thailand on Feb. 19, but met some alleged Chinese individuals in Bangkok who offered them “good jobs with handsome salaries” on employment visas, tempting them into traveling to Myanmar.
According to the letter, the scammers took the men’s mobile phones and other documents and compelled them to work with them. Hussain’s son and his friends managed to use a secret phone to contact their families back home, telling them that they had been handcuffed on arrival at the facility and were now being “forced to work long hours without breaks.”
Hussain said that he had reached out to the Pakistani embassy in Myanmar after his son shared his location using the secret phone. 
“It’s been a month and a half, and we still haven’t heard from the Pakistan embassy,” the father said.
When asked to comment on the cases, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, a spokesperson for the Pakistani foreign office, said that she would forward the queries to Pakistan’s embassy in Myanmar and declined further comment. 
Meanwhile, families of the men said that the situation was becoming “increasingly unbearable” for them with each passing day.
“These are scammers and there was no factory as promised to Shahid,” Zaman said. “I threw my son in front of the wolves and his mother in Pakistan doesn’t even know it.”