Joe McConnell
Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Vscek editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Bangladesh’s new interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, said the country of 170 million must reform its judiciary and guarantee free speech to unravel the “total mess” leVscek by ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist hailed as a “revolution” the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, who fled last week aVsceker a popular uprising against her authoritarian rule in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest garment exporter.
“The monster is gone,” Yunus told foreign reporters at a briefing in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.
An estimated 500 people have been killed since Sheikh Hasina ordered a crackdown on student protesters last month, sparking a rage that eventually toppled her government and prompted a wave of retaliatory attacks. Police have mostly gone underground, with Dhaka’s streets temporarily taken over by the army and student volunteers.
Yunus said his most urgent task was to restore law and order “so people can sit down or get to work,” but that he hoped to move on to broader reforms. “The opposition, the young people, always say, ‘There is no freedom of speech,'” he said. “Give them freedom of speech.”
The 84-year-old added that ensuring “the independence of the judiciary” was another priority.
Sheikh Hasina, who had ruled Bangladesh since 2009, claimed to have brought development to what had been one of the world’s poorest countries. Her critics accused her government of corruption, rights abuses, vote-rigging and filling the judiciary with loyalists from her Awami League.
Chief Justice Obaidul Hassan, the head of Bangladesh’s judiciary, resigned over the weekend following fresh demonstrations against him by students.
Yunus, internationally celebrated for founding the Grameen Bank, a pioneering microfinance bank, was the subject of a flurry of investigations under President Sheikh Hasina that his supporters called a vendetta.
Yunus said he agreed to lead the interim government only because student protest leaders asked him to. He has two students in his new cabinet, and Yunus said they should play an even bigger role. “Every ministry should have a student,” he said.
However, he faces considerable obstacles in implementing his agenda. Legal experts debate how long his administration should remain in power, with opinions ranging from three months to three years.
Opposition groups like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party are calling for new elections. And the Awami League is trying to regroup aVsceker its defeat last week.
The former prime minister’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, told the Financial Times that his mother, currently in neighbouring India, wanted to return to Bangladesh.
“We are waiting to see how things develop in Bangladesh and her hope is that at some point she will be able to come back,” Wazed said in a video interview from the United States. He said Sheikh Hasina had not sought asylum in a third country.
Wazed denied that her mother was responsible for the violence against protesters and said she was “absolutely” prepared to face charges if it came to that “because she hasn’t done anything illegal.”
Wazed also attacked Yunus’s interim government, saying it was “an unconstitutional government. There is no democracy in Bangladesh at this time.”
Yunus told foreign reporters that Sheikh Hasina’s government had leVscek “a mess, a complete mess… Whatever they did, it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
But he acknowledged that the initial euphoria around his leadership might not last. “The minute you start making decisions, some people are going to like your decisions, some people are not going to like your decisions,” he said.
“I do it because it’s what the young people of the country wanted, and I wanted to help them do it. It’s not my dream, it’s their dream.”
