NOBEL LAUREATE MUHAMMAD Yunus has been named as the country’s interim leader after mass protests forced longtime prime minister Sheikh Hasina to flee.
The appointment came quickly after student leaders called on the 84-year-old microfinance pioneer – credited with lifting millions out of poverty in the South Asian country – to form an interim government.
The decision was made in a meeting with President Mohammed Shahabuddin, the heads of the army, navy and air force, and student leaders.
“(They) decided to form an interim government with Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus as its chief,” Shahabuddin’s office said in a statement.
“The president has asked the people to help ride out the crisis. Quick formation of an interim government is necessary to overcome the crisis.”
Yunus will have the title of chief advisor, according to Haid Islam, one of the leaders of Students Against Discrimination who participated in the meeting.
Shahabuddin agreed that the interim government “will be formed within the shortest time” possible, Islam told reporters.
Islam described the meeting as “fruitful”.
However, there were few other details about the planned government, including the role of the military.
Yunus, who is currently in Europe, told AFP on Tuesday he was willing to lead the interim government.
“If action is needed in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, then I will take it,” he said in a statement, also calling for free elections.
Hasina, 76, who had been in power since 2009, resigned on Monday as hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Dhaka demanding she stand down.
Her resignation was the culmination of more than a month of unrest, which began as protests against a plan for quotas in government jobs but morphed into an anti-Hasina movement.
Hasina, who was accused of rigging January elections and widespread human rights abuses, deployed security forces to quash the protests.
Hundreds of people were killed in the crackdown, but the military turned against Hasina on the weekend and she was forced to flee on a helicopter to neighbouring India.
Army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said on Sunday it was “time to stop the violence”.
The military has since acceded to a range of other demands from the student leaders, aside from Yunus’s appointment.
The president dissolved parliament on Tuesday, another demand of the student leaders and the major opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP).
The head of the police force, which protesters have blamed for leading Hasina’s crackdown, was sacked on Tuesday, the president’s office said in the statement announcing Yunus as leader.
Ex-prime minister and BNP chairperson Khaleda Zia, 78, was also released from years of house arrest, a presidential statement and her party said.
The military also reshuffled several generals, demoting some seen as close to Hasina, and sacking Ziaul Ahsan, a commander of the feared Rapid Action Battalion paramilitary force.
Yunus, known as the “banker of the poorest of the poor”, was born into a well-to-do family – his father was a successful goldsmith – in the coastal city of Chittagong in 1940.
He credits his mother, who offered help to anyone in need who knocked on their door, as his biggest influence.
Yunus won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States and returned soon after Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in a brutal 1971 war.
When he returned, he was chosen to head Chittagong University’s economics department, but the young country was struggling through a severe famine and he felt compelled to take practical action.
“Poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it,” he said in 2006.
“I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom… I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me.”
After years of experimenting with ways to provide credit for people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, he founded Grameen Bank in 1983.
The institution now has more than nine million clients on its books, according to its most recent annual report in 2020, and more than 97% of its borrowers are women.
Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work loaning small cash sums to rural women, allowing them to invest in farm tools or business equipment and boost their earnings.
He has won numerous high honours for his life’s work, including a US Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by Barack Obama.
In January, he and three colleagues from one of the companies he founded were sentenced to jail terms of six months – but immediately bailed pending appeal – by a Dhaka labour court, which found they had illegally failed to create a workers’ welfare fund.
Streets in the capital were largely peaceful Tuesday – with shops opening and international flights resuming at Dhaka airport – but government offices remained mostly closed.
Millions of Bangladeshis had flooded the streets to celebrate after Hasina’s departure – and jubilant crowds also stormed and looted her official residence.
“We have been freed from a dictatorship,” said Sazid Ahnaf, 21, comparing the events to the independence war that split the nation from Pakistan more than five decades ago.
Police said mobs had launched revenge attacks on Hasina’s allies and their own officers, and also freed more than 500 inmates from a prison.
Monday was the deadliest day since protests began in early July, and ten more people were killed Tuesday, taking the death toll overall to at least 432, according to an AFP tally based on police, government officials and hospital doctors.
Protesters broke into parliament and torched TV stations. Others smashed statues of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s independence hero.
Some businesses and homes owned by Hindus – a group seen by some in the Muslim-majority nation as close to Hasina – were also attacked.
Bangladeshi rights groups, as well as US and European Union diplomats, have expressed concerns about reports of attacks on religious, ethnic and other minority groups.
Neighbouring India and China, both key regional allies of Bangladesh, have called for calm.
With reporting from © AFP 2024
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