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Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been chosen to head the interim government of Bangladesh.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has been chosen to head Bangladesh's interim government after a political crisis forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country.
According to Al Jazeera, Mr. Yunus - 84 years old, who called the weeks-long student protests in Bangladesh that toppled Ms. Hasina's government "Victory Day two" - criticized Ms. Hasina's 15 years of authoritarian rule.
Protests led by student groups began against state job quotas — which reserved more than half of the positions for specific groups, including a third for descendants of 1971 war veterans. The Supreme Court struck down most of the quotas on July 21, but that did little to appease the protesters.
“This is our beautiful country with many exciting possibilities. We must protect it and make it a great country for us and for our future generations,” Mr. Yunus told reporters.
Mr Yunus, an economist and businessman, took over the country after one of the bloodiest protests in its history, which left more than 300 people dead and thousands arrested. Huge challenges lie ahead as he must restore law and order, revive the economy and pave the way for free and fair elections.
Mr. Ahmed Ahsan, a former World Bank economist and director of the Institute of Policy Research in Bangladesh, said Mr. Yunus “was a man of the hour, chosen by the students who were at the forefront of the entire movement.”
“Mr. Yunus is respected both domestically and internationally,” Mr. Ahsan said.
The owner of the “bank for the poor”
Mr. Yunus, the third of nine children, was born in 1940 in a village near the southern port city of Chittagong, then part of East Pakistan.
Mr. Yunus graduated from Dhaka University in 1961. He attended Vanderbilt University in the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright scholarship to earn a PhD in economics, completing it in 1969. He then became an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, United States.
During the 1971 war against the Pakistani army, Mr. Yunus supported efforts to create an independent Bangladesh. He founded a citizens' committee in the US city of Nashville and helped run the Bangladesh Information Center in Washington, which lobbied the US Congress to end military aid to Pakistan.
In 1972, Mr. Yunus returned to independent Bangladesh. After a brief stint at the country's new Planning Commission, he joined the economics department of Chittagong University.
In 1976, as part of a university field trip, he visited neighboring villages in Chittagong that had been affected by famine a few years earlier. Yunus lent $27 to 42 villagers and found that everyone paid back on time.
He found that small loans or micro-credit given to poor people made a huge difference. Traditional banks would not lend them money, forcing them to rely on moneylenders who charged exorbitant interest rates.
This was the beginning of Grameen Bank, a pioneer in providing micro-credit to the poor, helping them start new businesses. Mr. Yunus became known as the “banker of the poor” for helping millions of people escape poverty through his Grameen Bank.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
In 2006, Mr. Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.”
At that time, the bank had lent more than $7 billion to more than 7 million people, 97% of whom were women, with a repayment rate of nearly 100%.
“I see poor people coming out of poverty every day. I can see that we can create a world without poverty, where poverty can only be seen in museums, museums of poverty,” Yunus said at the time.
Now, Mr Yunus is facing a political turmoil that goes beyond mere theory.
His immediate task will be to restore stability after five weeks of deadly protests, but the bigger problem is an economic crisis that has seen food prices soar and private employment stagnant.
“The new government will need to stabilize the economy, contain inflation and stabilize the exchange rate,” said Ahsan from the Institute of Policy Studies.
Jon Danilowicz, a former US diplomat who spent eight years in Bangladesh, believes Yunus' appointment is a good choice because his international influence will benefit the South Asian nation of 170 million people.
“Yunus’s greatest strength is his prestige and reputation internationally, especially in the United States. He can tap into the goodwill that exists there and the goodwill of the United States to do what he can to help Bangladesh,” said Danilowicz.
The former diplomat, who is a board member of a Bangladeshi rights-to-work NGO, said the caretaker government faces three major challenges. First, addressing economic issues. Second, unraveling the politicization of the country’s institutions, including the civil service, police and judiciary. Third, finding ways to address issues of accountability for serious human rights violations.
“Mr Yunus must establish civilian control and sovereignty from the ground up and ensure the military returns to its normal role of supporting civilian authority,” Mr Danilowicz said.
On the diplomatic front, Mr Yunus will have to build friendly relations with India, which has supported Ms Hasina's government despite human rights abuses and suppression of opposition voices. Ms Hasina is believed to be in India.
“The new government must have a cooperative relationship with India because the Indian government can cause problems for Bangladesh,” Mr. Danilowicz said.
Hasina's goal
Mr Yunus became the target of Ms Hasina's wrath after he floated the idea of forming a political party in 2007.
Mr Yunus' initial idea for the party came as the two main parties - Ms Hasina's Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) - failed to tackle rampant corruption and rising income inequality.
In 2011, Ms. Hasina—who viewed the then 71-year-old economist as a political threat—fired Mr. Yunus as CEO of Grameen Bank, calling him a “bloodsucker” of the poor. Ms. Hasina’s government then launched financial investigations into his nonprofit businesses. Last year, he was convicted of violating labor laws and faces an ongoing corruption case that many say is a miscarriage of justice.
The latest protests - which began as protests against government job quotas but have morphed into a much larger grassroots movement - are a sign that the country's youth, who make up a third of the population, are looking to a new kind of politics with greater democracy and accountability.
“Mr. Yunus was constantly persecuted by the previous regime and he could have chosen to leave the country but he never considered that possibility,” Mr. Ahsan said.
