Bangladeshi community in St. John's fighting treatment of student protesters back home

Students from Bangladesh living in Newfoundland won't let a 24-hour mobile internet ban in their country prevent them from speaking out about what's happening back at home.

"The people in our country, they want change, but the government they won't allow it," said Junaid Haque, who helped organize a demonstration at Memorial University on Sunday.

"I'm lucky to be in a country where everything is perfect, close to perfect I will say. I have my rights, but I just feel bad."

On Saturday, thousands of students in Bangladesh took to the streets in the capital city Dhaka to demand safer roads, following the deaths of two college students last week after they were hit by a pair of buses.

Many people were injured after police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse a crowd of hundreds of students that day, according to an Associated Press journalist who was at the protests.

At Memorial University on Sunday morning, around 40 people joined together to speak out about this treatment.

​Haque says he was motivated to rally the Bangladeshi community together and do something after hearing reports that the Bangladesh government blocked mobile internet access for 24 hours in response to the protests, which have been ongoing for the past week. 

"With a heavy heart I have to say that I'm ashamed of the government in our country," he said.

Hits close to home 

Fellow student Sheikh Ahamed says the protests are happening just a five minute walk from his family home in Dhaka.

"Not being in my country where my friends, my classmates, people younger than me are on the road fighting across the corrupt system that's going on in our country, I really feel helpless," he said.

"There was not a safe road in the first place to begin with. We just want our traffic rules to be maintained, and right now that is escalating quickly in different situations, and we never wanted that." 

​Anamika Purni, a second-year engineering student at MUN, says seeing what's happening to her peers back home in Bangladesh is hard to watch.

"My 16-year-old sister, my eight-year-old sister — we could have been here, this could have been us," she said.

Haque says he expects further protests to be organized in the coming weeks, as he and other members of the Bangladeshi community aim to show what's happening in the country to an international audience.

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