Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been picked to lead Bangladesh’s temporary government. This comes after the country’s former prime minister, Sheik Hasina, quit and left the country after weeks of violence.
The day Ms. Hasina left was called Bangladesh’s “second liberation day” by Mr. Yunus, who was a loud critic of her.
What do we know about the Nobel Prize winner who is 84 years old?
Banker For Poor People
The Muslim traders who raised Mr. Yunus had nine children. He was born in the city of Chittagong on the coast of Bangladesh. He went to the US on a Fulbright scholarship when he was 25 years old to study. He came back to Bangladesh in 1971, the same year that the country won its freedom from Pakistan in a brutal, bloody war.
When Mr. Yunus got back to Bangladesh, he was elected to lead the economics department at Chittagong University. He quickly became deeply active in fighting the famine that hit Bangladesh in the mid-1970s.
He spoke about poverty at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 2005. “I got involved in the issue not as a policymaker or a researcher,” he said. “I joined because I saw a lot of poverty around me.”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off of it…” As soon as possible, I wanted to help the people around me.
In this way, Mr. Yunus was one of the first people to use an idea called “microcredit.” This is when people who are too poor to borrow from a regular bank are given very small loans, which often help them start their own businesses.
Mr. Yunus started Grameen Bank in 1983. He calls it the “pioneer microcredit organization in the world,” and it has since grown to have more than nine million customers.
He said that microcredit was a “need of the people” in an interview with the BBC in 2002.
“No matter what you call it, those financial services have to come to them because it is not fair to deny half the world’s population financial services,” he said.
Even beggars were able to borrow money through Mr. Yunus’s plan because it worked so well.
The Nobel Prize website says that Mr. Yunus and Grameen Bank both won the Peace Prize in 2006 for their work to “create economic and social development from below.”
However, some experts have said that micro-financial institutions are not a good idea because they charge very high interest rates and use unfair ways to collect debts.
Charges And Efforts To Smear
But Mr. Yunus has been through a lot of trouble and opposition in Bangladesh, including from Ms. Hasina, the leader he is now going to replace.
When he said in 2007 that he was going to start his own party called “Citizen Power,” the former prime minister got angry.
It became famous when Ms. Hasina said that Mr. Yunus was “sucking blood from the poor.” In 2011, her government fired him as head of Grameen Bank. In 2013, he was the target of a state-backed smear campaign that said he was not Islamic and supported homosexuality because he signed a statement against Uganda’s laws that put gay people in jail.
People have also said that Mr. Yunus took money without permission from the government and, more recently, that he stole money from one of his company’s workers’ welfare funds.
In January of this year, he was given a six-month prison term for breaking labor law, which he denied. In June, he and 13 others were charged with embezzlement. He has been freed on bail, but he is now facing more than 100 cases of labor violations and graft charges.
All charges against Mr. Yunus have been rejected, and he has said that the attacks are political.
But these kinds of scandals haven’t hurt Mr. Yunus’s popularity with many of his followers, who say he is being targeted because of his bad relationship with Ms. Hasina.
Also Read: Bangladesh’s President’s Office Says the Parliament Has Been Dissolved
Asif Mahmud, a key leader of the Students Against Discrimination (SAD) group, shared an interesting picture on Facebook on Tuesday: a red tile with white text. Mr. Mahmud has used this style for dozens of posts about the protests and what happened afterward.
“We trust Dr. Yunus” was all that was written on this one.
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