Khaleda Zia

Begum Khaleda Zia (Bengali pronunciation: [kʰaled̪a dʒija]; born Khaleda Khanam Putul in 1945) is a Bangladeshi politician who served as the prime minister of Bangladesh from March 1991 to March 1996, and again from June 2001 to October 2006. She was the first female prime minister of Bangladesh and second female prime minister in the Muslim world, after Benazir Bhutto. She is the widow of former president of Bangladesh Ziaur Rahman. She is the chairperson and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) since 1984, which was founded by her late husband in 1978.

After a military coup in 1982, led by Army Chief General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, Zia helped lead the movement for democracy until the fall of Ershad in 1990. She became the prime minister following the BNP party win in the 1991 general election. She also served briefly in the short-lived government in 1996, when other parties had boycotted the first election. In the next round of general elections of 1996, the Awami League came to power. Her party came to power again in 2001. She has been elected to five separate parliamentary constituencies in the general elections of 1991, 1996 and 2001.

She developed a reputation as the "Uncompromising leader" due to her staunch opposition against military dictatorship of Ershad in the 1980s and her commitment to restore democracy in Bangladesh. She was put under house arrest several times by Ershad government, and later by Sheikh Hasina led government. She was honored as “Fighter for Democracy” by the New Jersey’s State Senate in 2011.

In its list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World, Forbes magazine ranked Zia at number 14 in 2004, number 29 in 2005, and number 33 in 2006.

Following her government's term end in 2006, the scheduled January 2007 elections were delayed due to political violence and in-fighting, resulting in a bloodless military takeover of the caretaker government. During its interim rule, it charged Zia and her two sons with corruption.

Since the 1980s, Zia's chief rival has been Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina. Since 1991, they have been the only two serving as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

Zia was sentenced to a total of 17 years in prison for the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case and Zia Charitable Trust corruption case in 2018. A local court handed her the verdict for abusing power as the prime minister while disbursing a fund in favor of newly formed Zia Orphanage Trust. Referring to the international and domestic legal experts, the U.S. State Department in its 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices opined that “lack of evidence to support the conviction” suggests the case was a political ploy to remove her from the electoral process. Amnesty International raised concerns that her “fair trial rights are not respected.”

Zia was transferred to a hospital for medical treatment in April 2019. In March 2020, she was released for six months on humanitarian grounds with the conditions that she would stay at her home in Gulshan, Dhaka and not travel abroad. She is also informally prohibited from making political moves, as doing so would result in re-imprisonment. In September 2022, the 6-month period suspension of her sentence was granted for the sixth consecutive time.