DHAKA šC The Yemeni peace activist Tawakkol Karman once said that youth is a revolution; they cannot be stopped, they cannot be oppressed and they cannot be silenced.
That was certainly true in Bangladesh on Aug. 5. The sudden toppling of the country¡¯s authoritarian ruler, Sheikh Hasina, led Karman¡¯s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus to declare it Bangladesh¡¯s ¡°second independence day.¡±
What began as a nonviolent student protest against the country¡¯s highly politicized system of public-sector job quotas quickly escalated into an anti-government Gen Z revolution. This youth uprising lit a match in a society that was already deeply dissatisfied with rising living costs, corruption and violent crackdowns on dissent.
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