World Tour: Ruling party in Bangladesh holds onto power

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour with our reporter in Africa, Onize Ohikere.

ONIZE OHIKERE: Gambian trial begins —We start today’s roundup at a federal criminal court in Switzerland where a former minister from The Gambia is facing charges of crimes against humanity.

Ousman Sonko served as interior minister under The Gambia’s former leader Yahya Jammeh.

Prosecutors say Sonko deliberately killed, tortured, and raped people between 2000 and 2016.

Swiss authorities detained him in 2017 after he sought asylum.

Ramzia Diab is a former lawmaker and one of nine plaintiffs present at the trial.

DIAB: And he's bringing back all my emotions all over again! Because I was right there, I was tortured, I was molested, everything happened to us!

The trial began Monday and will run through the rest of the month. Sonko faces a maximum life sentence if found guilty.

AUDIO: [Opposition chants]

Bangladesh vote — In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina clinched a fourth consecutive term in office after a weekend vote boycotted by the opposition.

Hasina has held the office for a total of 20 years, including an earlier term. In the election, her Awami League party also scored a parliamentary majority.

AUDIO: [Chanting protesters]

Opposition party members boycotted the vote with protests on Sunday.

The party said that security officials have detained more than 20,000 opposition members since October. Authorities have disputed the real count as about 10,000.

MAN: [Speaking Bengali]

This voter said he didn’t bother going to the polls, because he didn’t expect the election would be fair.

This voter said he didn’t bother going to the polls, because he didn’t expect the election would be fair.

The electoral commission put voter turnout at 40 percent.

AUDIO: [Chanting]

Nicaraguans in Costa Rica — Over in Costa Rica, several dozen exiled Nicaraguans are demanding an end to persecution against Roman Catholic leaders in their home country.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government has detained at least 14 priests and three seminarians since Christmas.

Tensions between Ortega’s government and the Catholic Church have grown since 2018 when authorities clamped down on anti-government protests.

The government has expelled priests and nuns and sentenced other priests on treason and cybercrime charges.

At the weekend demonstration, protesters in Costa Rica’s capital of San José read out the names of all the detained clergy and the dates of their arrests.

Yaritza Mairena is a representative of a union for Nicaraguan political prisoners.

MAIRENA: [Speaking Spanish]

She says here that the regime will not allow the Church to serve as a symbol of unity or a source of criticism.

AUDIO: [Procession]

Orthodox Christmas celebrations — We wrap up today at an Orthodox Christmas procession in Georgia—a country that straddles Eastern Europe and West Asia.

Hundreds of people, dressed in costumes depicting nativity scenes, marched through the streets of Tbilisi on Sunday.

Participants collect donations for orphans during the procession.

Many Western churches that follow the Gregorian calendar celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25. Orthodox Christians mark the birth of Christ on Jan. 7, keeping with the Julian calendar.

AUDIO: [Church singing]

In Bethlehem, Christians huddled inside the Church of the Nativity for a midnight Mass led by Patriarch Theophilos III. Christians in Gaza City also worshiped together at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius.

AUDIO: [Singing]

And in Ethiopia, thousands of worshippers prayed outside the Medhane Alem Cathedral in Addis Ababa.

That’s it for today’s WORLD Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

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