Bangladesh's general command

When many overseas journalists must pass through three security checkpoints and endure the searches of numbers of stern soldiers,Board shouldered aides then lead you,with hush solemnity and even a hint of fear.toward the chambers of their cammander in chief .One would expect a grim.The military chief want to tame the country's unruly politics.But he may wind up sunffing out democracy.Towering leader behind the headquaters oak doors,but General Moeen is conspicuously diminutive and unassuming,hardly looking the part of the South Asian strongman he very well may be.Yet Moeen pulls few punches when speaking of his country's politics and its democracy's many failings.No system of goverment are bad in their own right.Bangladesh's top-ranking military officer with a thin smile.It's the human being who make it so,is the man who holds the keys to its future.Over year and half year ago,Moeen's army wade into a turbulent political crisis,postponed parliamentary eletions and helped install a caretaker goverment of state-appointed bureaucrats known as adviser,headed by a former World Bank executive,Since then,Bangladesh has remained under emergency rule:civil liberties have take a hit and thousands of suspected troublemarkers picked up in midnight sweeps.Behind all this,it's commonly understood that Moeen and the military really run the show.When the army intervened and recalls chaos:The situation was deteriorating very rapidly.The world saw people dying in Dhaka's streets.Was it the way forward?But the way forward looks as murky now as it did 18 months ago,Despite Moeen's insistence that elections will go ahead as planed by the end of this year.The optimism that first greeted his arrival on 1/11 as the epochal event is known there,is gone.Ever since achieving independence from Pakistan in 1971,impoverished,unfortunate Bangladesh has slump down its path toward democracy.When not under the rule of autocratic generals as it was twice in the past--it has been the province of two mammoth,bickering political parties.The legacy of craven politicking and brazen plundering buoyed the current army-backed regime into power.But few believe Moeen is truly democracy's savior when the military has so consistently impeded its growth in the past.As Bangladeshis ,it's like we're riding a tiger.How do we get off?Two fixtures of the country's checkeded politics remain at the center of things in Dhaka.Bangladesh's Parliament complex,designed by the noted American architect Louis Kahn,looms out of a verdant expanse in the heart of the capital,encircled by palm fronds and crisscrossed by waterways.What was mean to be the cradle of Bangladeshi democracy described by Kahn as a many-faceted precious stone,constructed in concrete and marble-has over the past year been the prison ground for the government's most prominent political detainees:Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia.