Bangladesh President Mohamed Shahabuddin has appointed Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed Yunus as the new interim prime minister after the previous prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, left the country amid a wave of social protests that has already left more than 300 dead.
Yunus had previously expressed his willingness to lead a transition phase, at the request of the student movements. The president confirmed the appointment after a meeting with the coordinators of these movements, according to a presidential spokesman quoted by the newspaper ‘Dhaka Tribune’.
“When they contacted me on behalf of the students, I did not accept at first,” Yunus explained when announcing that he had accepted the invitation of the protesters, according to a source close to the Nobel Peace Prize winner quoted by the Bangladeshi newspaper ‘The Daily Star’.
“If students can sacrifice so much, if people in the country can sacrifice so much, then I also have some responsibility,” said Yunus, who is abroad for medical treatment but has also been invited by the Olympic Committee to attend the Paris Games.
Yunus, on parole after being sentenced in January to six months in jail for violating Bangladesh’s labour laws, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work at the helm of the Grameen Bank, whose interest-free microcredit programme lifted millions of people in Bangladesh out of poverty.
The economist faces the challenge of calming a social unrest that was initially directed against the quota system that reserves 30 per cent of public jobs for the children of veterans of the war of independence, but which ended up leading to an unprecedented challenge to Hasina, who fled to India.
