Bangladesh opposition head under 'virtual house arrest'

Bangladesh's opposition accused authorities of placing their leader under virtual house arrest Thursday as tens of thousands of troops were deployed across the country ahead of elections next month.

Amid growing violence in the build-up to the January 5 general election, the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) said police were barring anyone from visiting their leader Khaleda Zia at her home in Dhaka.

The move comes after Zia, a two-time former premier and arch rival of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, called for supporters to stage a mass march on the capital this Sunday aimed at scuppering the polls.

The BNP is one of 21 opposition parties which are boycotting the elections over Hasina's refusal to stand aside and allow a neutral caretaker government to organise the contest.

The country's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has also been banned from taking part.

"Since yesterday she has been under virtual house arrest," BNP vice-president Shamsher Mobin Chowdhury told AFP.

"Police are not allowing anyone, including party leaders and activists, to meet her. It is part of a government move to foil the December 29 march for democracy."

Deputy commissioner of Dhaka police Lutful Kabir confirmed that extra officers had been deployed outside Zia's home in the upmarket Gulshan neighbourhood but said the move was designed to "enhance her security".

Police confirmed two senior BNP members, including a current lawmaker, were detained outside Zia's home on Wednesday night but denied the arrests were made because they wanted to meet her.

With Hasina and her Awami League party determined the election goes ahead, troops are being sent to nearly every corner of the country at the end of what has been an unprecedented year for political violence.

A total of 269 people have been killed since January, either in protests at the elections or by Islamists who have seen several of their leaders sentenced to death from crimes dating back to the 1971 independence war.

The authorities are expecting Sunday's rally to further inflame tensions with Zia having made clear its purpose is to force a last-minute cancellation of the polls.

"This march is to say 'no' to these farcical elections and to say 'yes' to democracy," she said in a speech on Tuesday.

Troop deployments

The troop deployments are expected to infuriate the BNP which has accused the government of trying to set the army up against normal civilians.

Election Commission spokesman S.M. Asaduzzaman said that troops would be deployed in at least 59 of the country's 64 districts.

"They'll be used as a striking force if there is any violence and they will patrol important areas, streets and highways," he told AFP.

While a small number of soldiers had begun taking up positions earlier this week, military spokesman Muhammad Reza-ul Karim said the mass deployment began Thursday and will continue until January 9.

"The troops have been deployed at the request of the Election Commission... in an effort to ensure free, fair and peaceful elections," Karim said in a statement.

The soldiers would initially be deployed to the main towns and cities in the districts before then moving into more rural areas.

He did not say how many troops were being deployed but local media put the number at around 50,000.

The boycotts have highlighted the growing political polarisation in the country of 153 million.

While Bangladesh has had a deeply troubled history since independence, with nearly two dozen coups, this year has been the bloodiest since it broke free from its former rulers in Islamabad 42 years ago.

A constable was burned to death in a petrol bomb attack on a police vehicle Tuesday night while two more people succumbed to their burn injuries Wednesday.

Much of the violence has been blamed on supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami, one of whose leaders was hanged earlier this month for war crimes.

Three rounds of UN-brokered talks between the government and opposition have failed to resolve the dispute between the Awami League and the BNP whose leaders despise each other.

The United States, European Union and the Commonwealth countries have announced they will not send observers to the election, seriously denting its credibility.

Strikes and blockades have crippled the economy, affecting millions of poor farmers and the urban middle class in what is the world's eighth most populous country and one of the poorest in Asia.

The strikes have done further damage to an economy already reeling from the impact on the crucial garment sector from a factory collapse in April which sparked widespread industrial unrest.

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Pussy Riot: symbol of the new anti-Putin opposition

Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot, whose two jailed members were freed in an amnesty on Monday, went from nearly unknown rebels to a global cause celebre for their defiant opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

The all girl band, with their home-made balaclavas and flashy neon dresses, decried repression of civic dissent under the Russian strongman in impromptu public performances.

Starting in October 2011, they staged shows in locations like a Moscow subway station and even the Red Square. But notoriety hit on February 21, 2012 when they climbed onto the altar of Moscow's biggest church for their most provocative stunt.

Before the gold-leaf Orthodox altarpiece, they jumped around and attempted to sing what they called a "punk prayer" entitled "Virgin Mary, Redeem Us of Putin".

As church security officials rushed into the Catherdral of Christ the Saviour to break up the performance, some of the band members escaped and their identities never made public.

But Maria Alyokhina, 25, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 31, were identified, later arrested and in August found guilty on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.

Samutsevich was released in October after being given a suspended sentence, but a Moscow city court upheld on appeal the two-year prison camp terms for Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina -- both mothers of young children.

Each woman had barely two months left to serve when they walked free on Monday.

Pugnacious even on release, they denounced the amnesty as a publicity stunt and vowed to continue fighting for the rights of prisoners.

Some in the Russian opposition movement feel the ?athedral performance was ill-judged and in poor taste.

But the women's plight became a rallying cause for anti-Putin activists outraged by what they called the severity of the sentence.

Above all, they came to symbolise a new breed of young opposition activists embracing the Internet and willing to use bold, novel methods to challenge Putin's authority.

And their jailing echoed far beyond Russian borders, sparking a wave of international condemnation and support from luminaries ranging from Madonna to Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

NADEZHDA TOLOKONNIKOVA

Tolokonnikova was born in the Norilsk nickel mining city above the Arctic Circle that Stalin developed using Soviet prison labour.

She studied at Russia's top-rated Moscow State University and is married to Pyotr Verzilov, one of the leading members of the controversial Voina (War) performance art group to which Pussy Riot is closely linked. They have a young daughter.

But most notoriously, Tolokonnikova, Verzilov and several Voina members had public sex in a Moscow biological museum in 2008 -- a stunt to mock Putin's protege Dmitry Medvedev whose name means bear.

Tolokonnikova, heavily pregnant at the time, gave birth days later.

During the trial and appeals process, Tolokonnikova always insisted that the cathedral "punk prayer" was aimed against Putin, not religious believers.

After her appeal was rejected, Tolokonnikova was sent to Penal Colony Number 14 in the central Russian region of Mordovia where she had repeated brushes with other inmates and prison authorities.

She went on hunger strike after releasing a letter complaining that women at the penal colony were treated like "slaves" and worked 17-hour days in a sewing workshop.

Tolokonnikova was then moved to a new prison in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, where she was kept at a hospital for convicts rather than the prison itself.

"Prisoners should be treated like normal human beings ... not like trash," the telegenic brunette said after her release, vowing to create alongside Alyokhina a rights group for prisoners.

MARIA ALYOKHINA

The single mother of a young son was an environmental activist who has campaigned over passionate defence of a small forest outside Moscow.

A slight figure with curly hair, Alyokhina is a highly articulate individual and gave graphic descriptions about the routine of her prison life in Corrective Labour Colony No 28 in the Perm region of the Urals.

She was then moved to a facility in the Nizhny Novgorod region after proving "inconvenient" for the Russian prison authorities, according to her lawyer.

After her release, she told the Dozhd channel that given the choice she would have stayed in prison as the amnesty that released her was a sham.

"I don't think it's an amnesty, it's a profanation," she said. "I don't think the amnesty is a humanitarian act, I think it's a PR stunt."

She said she planned to continue fighting for the rights of her fellow inmates in the Nizhny Novgorod prison camp whose rights she said were being violated.

"The hardest thing in prison was to see how people give up, they lose heart, and turn into a mass," she said.

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