Bangladesh’s embattled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned Monday under pressure from the military following escalating clashes between police and anti-government protesters that resulted in at least 300 deaths, including more than 90 on Sunday alone.
Reports that Hasina had stepped down circulated before Bangladesh army chief Waker-uz-Zaman confirmed the news in an address to the nation at 4 p.m. local time, prompting widespread jubilation among crowds that poured onto the street, honking car horns and waving flags.
“Prime Minister Sheik Hasina has resigned and an interim government will run the country,” army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman told the nation. He added there was no more need for a curfew or state of emergency at present but urged protesters to return home.
Barricades were removed and internet access suddenly restored as rumors circulated that Hasina had fled overseas. Even before Waker-uz-Zaman’s announcement, which was repeatedly delayed amid negotiations with political players, protesters had already stormed the Ganabhaban, the prime minister’s official residence in the capital Dhaka.
What began last month as peaceful student demonstrations against civil service employment quotas for descendants of the nation’s 1971 war of independence spiraled into a campaign of protest and civil disobedience across the South Asian nation of over 170 million. Hundreds of thousands of protesters had taken to the street over the weekend with crowds swelling to millions by Monday amid calls to march on the Ganabhaban to force Hasina’s ouster. The prospect of a bloody confrontation spurred the military into action.
Until the end, Hasina, 76, had been defiant, leading commentators to assume that her departure was effectively a coup d’etat. In comments following a meeting with security chiefs, she insisted demonstrators were “not students but terrorists who are out to destabilize the nation.” Still, the scale and breadth of public anger made the position of her Awami League party—which was returned for a fourth straight term in January elections boycotted by the opposition and denounced by observers as neither free nor fair—increasingly untenable.
“Public reactions after the brutal crackdown showed that the people were waiting for a leadership to challenge the regime,” says Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi-American political scientist and professor at Illinois State University. “Keeping with the long tradition of student activism in Bangladesh, these leaders stepped up.”
Hasina’s downfall was especially dramatic as it metastasized quickly out of nowhere. Her chief mistake appears to have been dispatching the Chhatra League, the Awami League’s aggressive student wing, to confront initially peaceful demonstrators. Those clashes spurred a brutal crackdown by security forces, which diplomatic sources tell TIME could in truth involve over 1,000 killed. A subsequent nationwide curfew and internet blackout alienated both private citizens and business leaders across South Asia’s second biggest economy.
After an uneasy calm was restored, security forces set about rounding up student leaders and thousands of opposition activists. This purge alongside a deluge of cellphone footage of unarmed students killed in the street spurred protesters to increase their demand that Hasina step down. In particular, UNICEF reports that at least 32 children had been killed during the demonstrations, many shot inside their homes, further outraged the public. Hasina appeared aloof and callous throughout, ostentatiously crying over damage to a train station while lambasting deceased students as “traitors” and “terrorists.”
Hasina’s position always relied on Bangladesh’s military, which has historically meddled in politics though had recently been staunch backers of the Awami League. Yet on Sunday, Waker-uz-Zaman tellingly said the armed forces “always stood by the people,” while his influential predecessor, General Ikbal Karim Bhuiyan, denounced “egregious killings” of a “disgraceful campaign” and called on troops to return to the barracks.
The U.N. had already raised objections to vehicles emblazoned with its insignia being used to target protesters, prompting calls to ban the Bangladesh military from the bloc’s peacekeeping missions, further alienating its top brass. On Sunday, the U.N.’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, urged the government to “cease targeting those participating peacefully in the protest movement, immediately release those arbitrarily detained, restore full internet access, and create conditions for meaningful dialogue.”
Riaz says the generals were likely assessing the “resilience capacity of the movement in the face of repression, and also trying to see whether Sheikh Hasina needs an exit window” before acting. “It would rather wait until it becomes the only option to the political forces and the public at large.”
Still, the fall of Hasina is only the first step in what will no doubt be a bitter reconciliation process. With practically every government institution politicized by the Awami League, distrust of the security services, military, courts, and civil service runs deep across society.
“There is a huge trust deficit between the ruling party, activists, police and the people,” says Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi scholar at the University of Oslo in Norway. “If there is no effective reconciliation process, the country may go into uncharted territory.”
