Bangladesh imposes curfew, deploys army as job quota protests continue

The curfew comes amid a telecommunications blackout that has left the country of 170 million cut off from the world.

Bangladesh has announced the imposition of a curfew and the deployment of military forces after days of clashes at protests against government job quotas across the country.

“The government has decided to impose a curfew and deploy the military in aid of the civilian authorities,” Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s press secretary Nayeemul Islam Khan, told the news agency AFP, adding that the curfew would take immediate effect.

Police in the capital, Dhaka, earlier banned all public gatherings for the day – a first since protests began – to forestall more violence.

However, that did not stop another round of confrontations between police and protesters around the sprawling city of 20 million people despite an internet shutdown aimed at frustrating the organisation of rallies.

Al Jazeera’s Tanvir Chowdhury, reporting from Dhaka, said the introduction of the curfew, which began at midnight (18:00 GMT on Friday) will only add to the public’s confusion and a sense of unrest in the country.

“People weren’t able to go out the last two days because of the shutdown. Now you have a curfew, and the internet has been completely shut down since early yesterday [Thursday] evening,” he said.

Chowdhury said the government hopes to keep “students and the public off the street” with the curfew because it senses it is losing control of the protests.

He added that the protesters appeared to be in “no mood for compromise” while the government is “increasingly losing control of the situation on the street despite using paramilitary forces and police”.

The student protests erupted after the High Court on June 5 ordered the