Bangladesh
Prime Minister
Hijri 1366–Present (AH); Common Era 1947-Present (CE)
Born in 1947 to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence from Pakistan, Sheikh Hasina Wazed took an active role in politics as early as the 1960s. She acted as her father’s political liaison during his imprisonment in the late 1960s, when she was a student at the University of Dhaka. In 1968, she married M.A. Wazed Miah. In 1975, her father and brothers were assassinated in a coup, but she and her sister survived because they were in Germany at the time. She returned to Bangladesh in 1981 and ran against the military government of General Hossain Mohammad Ershad. However, she spent much of the 1980s under house arrest or in prison. In 1991, her political rival, Khaleda Zia, of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won the Bangladesh’s first elections after the resignation of General Ershad. However in 1996, Sheikh Hasina was elected Prime Minister when her party, The Awami League, won 146 parliamentary seats. It was during this time that she was credited with signing a peace treaty with rebels in the mountainous southeast of the country. In 2001, she was forced into the opposition again as her party fell out of political favor, due to corruption charges and because it was seen as being too close to the government of India. Since 2001, corruption and murder charges have been leveled against Sheikh Hasina, resulting in temporary forced exile. However, in 2008, she returned to Bangladesh to lead her party in the general elections. The Awami League received a landslide victory, and Skeikh Hasina became Prime Minister for the second time.
