Bangladesh's main opposition admitted Thursday it would fail in its bid to force Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's government to quit by month's end but pushed ahead with the latest in a series of strikes.
The Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina Wajed had set Friday as a deadline for Zia to quit or face a "mass peoples campaign" over what the opposition claims is the government's failure to clean up corruption and crime.
The government, which has a two-thirds majority, has refused, describing the opposition demand as "insane."
"It will take some time to achieve our goal and to implement our strategy, which as you know is a changing process," said Awami League general secretary Abdul Jalil.
"We are not backtracking. Our campaign will go on. It is just taking a little bit more time for strategic reasons," he told AFP.
"We have won a moral victory by proving that the government has lost the people's confidence," he said, rejecting suggestions that the League had failed in its campaign.
Analysts said few Bangladeshis had expected the League to force the government to quit but that its campaign and it strike calls had highlighted the problem of crime and corruption in the South Asian country.
Jalil declined to set a new time frame for forcing Zia's government out, saying the party would meet in the coming days to decide its strategy.
Zia's Islamist-allied government has charged that the Awami League had "hatched a conspiracy" to force its resignation "unconstitutionally," but that it had been foiled.
The government is to present evidence of the conspiracy to the High Court in reply to an order to explain why more than 15,000 people were arrested across Bangladesh in a clampdown ahead of the two-day strike ending Thursday and the Friday deadline, said Law Minister Moudud Ahmed.
"Some innocent people might have been harassed, but the arrests served the greater interest of the nation," he said.
Ahmed added, "We have evidence that the opposition wanted to topple the government in a unconstitutional way."
Thursday's strike - the ninth in three months - closed all schools and most private offices and banks.
But unlike previous strikes, ports functioned, some businesses opened, public buses were running, government offices were operating at virtually full strength and many more cars were on the roads.
Awami League leaders and activists staged protests in several areas of Dhaka amid a tight police cordon. Police said there were no reports of violence during the first hours of the strike Thursday.
At least seven crude bombs were exploded by suspected activists during the first day of the strike Wednesday near the homes of judges and a minister and at the gates of the state-run television offices, police said.
The coalition government is led by Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party which has a mandate until 2006 and says it is working hard to tackle a grim law-and-order situation inherited from the previous Awami League government.
Business leaders and international donors have appealed to parties to stop calling general strikes, a common form of protest in Bangladesh, as they cost the impoverished South Asian nation at least 60 million dollars a day.
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