Bangladeshi students pick Nobel laureate to lead government as parliament dissolved

Bangladesh Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, center, addresses a press conference at his office in Dhaka on Feb. 15, 2024. (AFP)

• Muhammad Yunus was awarded Nobel prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing micro loans
• Longtime PM Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country after weeks of deadly protests, 300 killed since July

DHAKA: Leaders of Bangladesh’s student protests said on Tuesday economist and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus should lead an interim government following the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the dissolution of parliament.
Hasina resigned and fled to neighboring India on Monday following protests that started peacefully in early July but soon turned violent as security forces clashed with demonstrators, leaving 300 people dead since last month.
President Mohammed Shahabuddin dissolved parliament on Tuesday, clearing the way for an interim administration that will preside over new elections.
Student leaders, who have repeatedly said they would not accept military rule, published a video message on Facebook on Tuesday morning, saying that “no government other than the one proposed by the students will be accepted.”
Nahid Islam, coordinator of Students Against Discrimination, the main protest organizing group, named the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yunus as the chief adviser to the interim administration.
Flanked by two other student leaders, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder, Islam said they had already spoken with Yunus and “he agreed to take this important responsibility to protect Bangladesh on the request of the students.”
Yunus, 84, is an economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, who introduced micro loans to help poor people establish creditworthiness and financial self-sufficiency.
Since its establishment in 1983, the bank has advanced to the forefront of a world movement toward eradicating poverty through microlending, and its replicas were launched in more than 100 countries.
In 2006, Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to “create economic and social development from below.”
Lamiya Morshed, Yunus’s spokesperson and executive director of his think tank Yunus Center in Dhaka, confirmed to the local media that he had “agreed to the proposal of the students.”
“The date of the new election will be decided by the new government. The government will be formed, and then they will take the decision how and when they will conduct the election,” Joynal Abedin, press secretary of the president, told Arab News.
“The process is underway.”
Student protests broke out across the country against a rule that reserved a bulk of government jobs for the descendants of those who fought in the country’s 1971 liberation war.
After the deadly clashes and a week-long communications blackout, the Supreme Court eventually scrapped most of the quotas, but the ruling was followed by a state crackdown on protesters.
The arrests of 11,000 participants of the rallies, mostly students, triggered new demonstrations last week, which culminated in a civil disobedience movement. Bangladesh’s military chief, Waker-Uz-Zaman assumed control on Monday and announced Hasina’s resignation.