Muhammad Yunus has long pleaded for peace by prosperity.
Now, the 84 -year -old Nobel Prize winner must restore stability in Bangladesh in the face of an agitated economy with young people who are angry with unemployment and citizens crushed by the inflation burden.
Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the Pioneer Micro, received the little enviable task on Tuesday to lead an interim government in his country, after Sheikh Hasina resigned from his post as Prime Minister a day earlier and fled the nation.
His departure came after weeks of anger after fatal clashes that made more than 300 lives when the security forces and supporters of the Awami League in Hasina went to the street to repress the protests of university students against public service employment quotas.
Since his departure, at least 108 people have been killed nationally.
Yunus, world -renowned as a “banker to the poor”, will enter this rage cauldron.
Many analysts, in fact, have seen the morphing of the anti-quota protest in a national anti-government, because the dissatisfaction of the economy of Bangladesh having failed in the last decade to create enough jobs for the two million people who enter the labor market each year.
In a country of around 170 million people, almost 40% of 15 to 24 years – around 12.2 million people – are neither students nor employees, according to official data.
In addition, criticisms said that Hasina had crushed dissent, would have caused forced disappearances and state institutions bent to her will.
Hasina also hated Yunus – its government members have publicly made many derogatory statements about it.
But he was the choice of students to lead the interim government. Yunus was proposed as acting head of government by university students who led anti-quota demonstrations, then national disorders against Hasina.
“If measures are necessary in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, I will take it,” Yunus told Agency France-Presse in a statement on Monday.
Asif Mahmud, a key leader in group students against discrimination, has not chosen the words in a Facebook publication, AFP reported.
“In Dr. Yunus, we have confidence,” he wrote.
‘Powder of two friends’
Yunus drew Hasina’s attention when he trained a political party during a guardian government supported by the army in 2007-2008, with swirling reports that he was trying to mark both the League Awami league and his archival Khaleda Zia.
They were involved in cases of corruption.
Hasina returned to power in 2009 and two years later, the Bangladesh central bank withdrew Yunus as the chief of the Grameen bank, the institution by which he lent to the poor and helped to withdraw millions of people from poverty.
A year later, the World Bank canceled a loan of $ 1.2 billion for the construction of the Padma bridge, citing corruption problems.
By believing that he used his friendship with the former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton to influence the World Bank to cancel the financing of the so much praised project, his supporters said that dozens of cases of political motivation had been deposited against him.
Yunus denied allegation, laughing.
“The difficult world of international decision-making does not depend on the whims of two friends,” he said via a declaration from his Yunus center in July 2022.
“However,” important “, a person, Professor Yunus, may be, whatever the number of” influential friends “he may have, a three billion dollars project cannot be stopped simply because he will wish to cancel.”
A Minister of the Hasina Government said that his statement was false and an effort “to cover vegetable fish”.
Grameen Bank
Born in 1940 in the port city of Chattogram (Chittagong), Yunus studied the economy at the University of Dacca and then received a Fulbright scholarship to study for the same diploma at Vanderbilt university in Vanderbilt based in Tennessee in the United States.
After obtaining his doctorate, Yunus became assistant professor of economics at the Middle Tennessee State University.
He returned to Bangladesh two years later and joined the economic department of the University of Chittagong as an associate teacher.
In the village of Chittagong, Yunus, Yunus in 1976 founded the Grameen Bank Project, in order to study how to provide banking services to poor rural people with high debt and usual loans.
In October 1983, the national law of Grameen Bank authorized Grameen to operate as an independent bank.
Yunus’ microcredit system has been reproduced in more than 100 countries.
Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work to “create economic and social development among which below”, according to the awards ceremony.
“In cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to provoke their own development.”
“Made” charges
In January, a Bangladesh court sentenced Yunus to six months in prison for violation of labor laws, his first conviction.
“I was punished for an offense that I did not commit. It was written in my destiny and that of the nation; I must bear it,” said Yunus after the verdict.
In June, Yunus and several others were charged by a Bangladesh court for diversion of 260 million Taka (US $ 2.2 million) from the employees of his telecommunications company.
Defense lawyer Abdullah Al Mamun said the accusations against Yunus were “manufactured” and “politically motivated”.
And two months ago, Yunus was put in a cage during a legal hearing in Dacca.
But these difficulties can pale compared to the new challenge encountered by the Octogenarian Social Entrepreneur and the Head of Civil Society.
Yunus’ defense lawyer thinks that the Nobel Prize winner would be the most appropriate person to fill the crucial time by the next general elections.
“He is the best person to lead the country to recover from the current political and economic disorders left by the Sheikh Hasina regime,” he told Benarnews, learning the new role of Yunus.
Benarnews is an online press organization affiliated with the FRG.