Global Leaders Call on Bangladesh PM to Stop Persecuting Nobel Winner Yunus
Sheikh Hasina’s decade-long campaign against Grameen Bank founder
By: Nava Thakuria
Recently, 40 global leaders including former United Nations General Secretary complained in an open letter to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed over her government’s treatment of the 82-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, whose brainchild of microfinance has revolutionized global lending to the poor, and who remains quite active in developing philosophies to help the poor.
The Dhaka-based Yunus, despite worldwide acclaim or his radical reinvention of finance for the poor, has been on the losing end of a vendetta started by Sheikh Hasina for more than a decade for reasons that are unclear, although common gossip speculates she feels she should have won the 2006 Nobel Prize instead of Yunus for her efforts in pacifying south Bangladesh’s warring hill tribes. She is also said to be angry that Yunus was one of a group of prominent Bangladeshis who attempted to establish an independent political party called Nagarik Shakti in 2007. Yunus quickly abandoned the effort and has since said he has no interest in politics.
The attacks on Yunus have picked up in recent months as Bangladesh nears national elections. The current parliament is due to expire at end January 2024 and Sheikh Hasina has lost popularity despite a relatively robust economy, which grew by 72 percent in 2022, with 6.4 percent expected in 2023. However, the government remains unpopular, with Human Rights Watch reporting increasing attacks against political opposition members, raising concerns about violence and repression ahead of the upcoming polls. The media is tightly controlled, with Dainik Dinkal, the opposition’s only daily broadsheet, closed earlier this year. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet in August 2022 called on the government to protect rights and establish an independent mechanism to “investigate allegations of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.”…