Who is Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize winner and leader of the interim government of Bangladesh?

CNN
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A Nobel laureate known as the “banker to the poor” will seek to bring stability to Bangladesh after responding to a call from student protesters who demanded he take interim leadership of the troubled country following weeks of deadly anti-government demonstrations.

Muhammad Yunus, 84, will head an interim government after the South Asian country’s prime minister is overthrown and parliament is dissolved, according to the Bangladeshi president’s spokesman.

Yunus is a social entrepreneur and banker who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microfinance, which has contributed to poverty reduction in Bangladesh and has found widespread adoption around the world.

He is also a long-time critic of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned from office earlier this week and fled the country after years of increasingly authoritarian rule.

Her departure sparked joy in the student movement that forced her to do so, but also some concern about whether the military would step up to fill the leadership void.

A CNN source this week said Yunus was in France for a minor medical procedure but would soon return to Bangladesh to take over as interim leader.

The group Students Against Discrimination also confirmed his return, telling CNN in a text message: “We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Yunus has agreed to take up this challenge to save Bangladesh as requested by our students.”

According to his profile on the Nobel Prize website, Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a port city in southeastern Bangladesh.

He studied at the University of Dhaka, after which he received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship and enrolled at Vanderbilt University in the United States, where he obtained a doctorate in economics.

In 1972, a year after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, he returned to teach at the University of Chittagong.

But disaster soon came. In 1974, the country was hit by a severe famine that killed an estimated 1.5 million people.

“I found it difficult to teach elegant economic theories in a university lecture hall in the face of the terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty,” Yunus said in his 2006 Nobel lecture after receiving the prize.

“I wanted to do something immediate to help the people around me, even if it was just one person, and help them get through the next day with more ease,” he said.

He began making small loans to the poorest people in his community, founding Grameen Bank in 1983, which became a world leader in alleviating poverty through microlending.

The bank expanded rapidly, opening various branches and similar operating models around the world.

Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for providing a total of approximately $6 billion in housing, student and micro-enterprise loans, with a particular focus on supporting Bangladeshi women.

He is also the founder of the Yunus Centre, a Dhaka-based think tank that helps develop new social enterprises.

Some critics are skeptical of Yunus and Grameen Bank, saying the high interest rates of some microlending institutions have led to the impoverishment of borrowers while lenders have made large profits on small loans.

Yunus rejected these claims, telling CNN earlier this year that Grameen Bank is not about making money but rather helping the poor and supporting small businesses.

Over the years, Yunus has repeatedly clashed with former Prime Minister Hasina, who, according to Reuters, accused him of “sucking the blood of the poor.”

Yunus briefly proposed forming a new political party in 2007 ahead of parliamentary elections – a move that Hasina condemned at the time, saying political newcomers were “a dangerous element… should be viewed with suspicion”, Reuters reported.

Yunus ultimately did not take action to form a party.

In 2011, Bangladesh’s government-controlled central bank removed Yunus as managing director of Grameen Bank, saying he had exceeded mandatory retirement age.

In the following years, Yunus was embroiled in numerous court cases which his supporters said were the result of unjust persecution by the authorities.

These include a defamation lawsuit, a food safety case and allegations of tax irregularities, which he has denied.

In January, a Bangladeshi court sentenced Yunus to six months in prison for violating labor laws – the banker again denied any wrongdoing.

In June, he was charged with embezzlement in a separate case.

Hasina’s government has insisted its actions against Yunus were not politically motivated, but the banker disagreed. It is unclear what will happen to those lawsuits now that Hasina is no longer in power.

In February, while appealing his bail sentence, Yunus told CNN that the corruption charges against him were unfounded and called them harassment.

“I am not involved in politics, there is no evidence that I am involved in politics,” Yunus said at the time, warning that Bangladesh was becoming a “self-destructive civilization.”

In a separate interview with Reuters in June, he said Bangladesh had become a “one-party” state in which the ruling party suppresses all political competition.

In an interview with CNN after Hasina resigned on Monday, before his appointment as interim leader, Yunus said he wanted the military to hand over control of the country to a civilian government. He lashed out at Hasina, saying she had “tortured us, made this country unfit for human life.”

“People are celebrating in the streets and millions of people across Bangladesh are celebrating as if it was our liberation day,” he said.

Addressing the protest movement in Bangladesh, he added: “You have done very well.”

However, experts say Yunus faces a long and complicated road ahead as the government needs to carry out reforms.

His first challenge will be to restore law and order after the deadly protests of recent weeks and “address the trust deficit that exists in society” between people and the state, said Mubashar Hasan, who researches Asian authoritarianism at the University of Oslo.

This, he added, includes deep public distrust of the Bangladesh police, the judiciary and other state institutions.

Another urgent task will be to hold free and fair elections – the lack of such elections was one reason Bangladesh was plunged into protests.

Yunus will also have to deal with the fallout from the past month, as Hasina’s government brutally cracked down on protesters, killing about 300 people, according to local media and news agencies. Critics and rights groups have accused authorities of using excessive force, a charge the government denied at the time.

Now the interim leader will likely face pressure to “start creating some judicial procedures that will address the gross human rights violations that have occurred in the last few weeks and in the last decade,” Hasan said.

Niloy Biswas, a professor of international relations at the University of Dhaka, echoed that point, saying the government’s new leaders must “initiate investigations to ensure justice for the hundreds of innocent people who lost their lives.”

“The students who led the movement are making a strong demand for this,” he told CNN on Wednesday. “The caretaker government will need to pay attention to this to ensure that the large student body maintains its support for the government’s leadership.”

As the caretaker government moves forward, reforming Bangladesh’s economy will be a key task – one in which Yunus’s economic background can play a role. Those reforms will be “vital” in fighting corruption and helping the nation develop, Biswas said.

But it could also face resistance within the government – ​​including from those who supported Hasina, potentially including those in the judiciary and law enforcement, Hasan said.