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“NEW DAWN” IN BANGLADESH? NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE MUHAMMAD YUNUS
SWORN IN AS PM AFTER STUDENT PROTESTS  
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August 9, 2024
Democracy Now
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_ Almost all of the successful political movements in independent
Bangladesh have been led by students. And, of course, then ordinary
citizens joined them. So it’s not surprising that the students led
this protest, but their inclusion is unprecedented. _

, Yunus thanked Bangladeshi youth for giving the country a
“rebirth” and vowed to work for the public good.

 

We go to Dhaka for an update as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad
Yunus is sworn in to lead Bangladesh’s caretaker government just
days after the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned
and fled the country amid a wave of student-led protests over
inequality and corruption. Yunus is known as the “banker to the
poor” and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work
developing microloans that helped lift millions out of poverty. Yunus
thanked Bangladeshi youth for giving the country a “rebirth” and
vowed to work for the public good.

“This is uncharted territory,” says Shahidul Alam, an acclaimed
Bangladeshi photojournalist, author and social activist, who has spent
decades documenting human rights abuses and political and social
movements in the country. Alam was jailed in 2018 for his criticism of
the government and spent 107 behind bars, during which time he says he
was tortured by the authorities. “This repression has taken such a
toll on so many people for so long, the nation is just hugely
relieved.”

We also speak with Nusrat Chowdhury, an associate professor of
anthropology at Amherst College and author of _Paradoxes of the
Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh_. She says it’s very
significant that student leaders are being brought into the new
government and says Yunus is a rare public figure in Bangladesh who
exists “beyond party politics” and has the chance to unify the
country.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus has been sworn in
as head of Bangladesh’s caretaker government just days after the
ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina following weeks of
student-led protests. Yunus, a longtime critic of Hasina, took the
oath during a ceremony at the presidential palace in the capital Dhaka
Thursday. Over a dozen other members of Yunus’s Cabinet were also
sworn in, including two students who led the mobilizations forcing
Hasina’s resignation: Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud. Adilur Rahman
Khan, a prominent Bangladeshi human rights advocate who documented
extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and police brutality and
was sentenced to two years in prison by Hasina’s government, will
also be an adviser to Yunus’s interim government while Bangladesh
prepares for new elections.

Muhammad Yunus is known as the “banker to the poor.” He was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work developing
microloans. On Thursday, Yunus spoke after landing in Dhaka and shared
a message for Bangladesh’s youth and students.

MUHAMMAD YUNUS: [translated] Using the means of revolution,
Bangladesh will create its new dawn of victory. Keeping this vision
ahead of us, we have to keep going ahead. I want to express my
gratitude and praise the youths who have made this possible. They have
protected this country and given it a rebirth. And we wish for this
new Bangladesh to progress with speed. We have to protect this freedom
— not just protect it, we have to ensure that it reaches every
single household; otherwise, the freedom will have no meaning.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. But we begin in
Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, with Shahidul Alam, an acclaimed
Bangladeshi photojournalist, author and social activist, who has
documented human rights abuses, political and social movements.

We welcome you to _Democracy Now!_ In 2018, Bangladeshi police
arrested Alam from his home over comments he made during an interview
with Al Jazeera critical of the government’s violent response to
nationwide student-led protests at the time. Alam was imprisoned for
107 days and reported being tortured by authorities. He was released
following a global campaign by humanitarian groups, media and
journalists. In 2018, Alam was included in a group of journalists
called “the guardians” that _Time_ magazine recognized as the
Person of the Year. On the eve of Thursday’s swearing-in, Alam
shared a photo of Muhammad Yunus on X from when they met before the
Nobel Peace Prize.

Shahidul Alam, welcome to _Democracy Now!_ It’s great to have you
with us. Can you talk about the significance of this moment and what
brought Bangladesh to this point where Muhammad Yunus, the man you
photographed many years ago, is now the head of the caretaker
government?

SHAHIDUL ALAM: It’s a phenomenal event. I mean, I’ve been
through 1971, our war of liberation. And being in the streets on the
5th with people jubilating was a greater thrill than that time, which
is difficult to imagine.

But it is a difficult process. I mean, this is uncharted territory,
the fact that the government is suddenly gone. And there was the few
days in between when there wasn’t a government. And that
potentially, and did, to an extent, lead to local violences. But
that’s been curbed, and we look forward to a new dawn ahead. I mean,
this repression has taken such a toll on so many people for so long,
the nation is just hugely relieved.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what happened, what led to the student-led
uprising, and why it was the students that took down the Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has now fled to India.

SHAHIDUL ALAM: It was a people’s movement, but triggered by the
students. And their initial protest was about an unfair policy
regarding government job allocations. And that, I feel, could have
been handled, could have been handled well. But it was the arrogance
of the tyrant that led to it. They wanted to meet the president. He
didn’t respond. She, in an interview, sneered at them, calling them
Razakars, which is a swear word here, because it talks about
— it’s about collaborators of the Pakistani Army, so,
essentially, something going against our war of liberation, our
freedom movement.

And the students were enraged. Initially, one of the demands was that
she apologize. But this prime minister, or the prime minister we had,
is not the apologizing type. Instead, she turned her armed goons on
them. They killed six people. When they wanted to bury these people,
have a funeral, including there was one young man, Abu Sayed, who had
been shot at point blank by the police in a video that went viral,
they instead turned really aggressive, and the police started killing.
And eventually, it just became a killing spree. So, that lit the fuse
completely, and then I don’t think there was any going back.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your own experience, Shahidul Alam,
being arrested under Sheikh Hasina’s government? What happened back
in 2018?

SHAHIDUL ALAM: I wasn’t arrested; I was picked up. Ironically, it
was on the very day, the 5th of August, 2018, when they picked me up,
that — and six years later, on the 5th of August, she fled. So
there’s an irony there.

But yeah, again, it was a student protest. I had been documenting it.
On the 4th of August, again, the armed goons, associated with the
government, attacked me, attacked my equipment. I was back in the
streets on the 5th. That day, I gave an interview to Al Jazeera. That
night, sitting here in this flat, I was uploading material when the
doorbell rang. I went to answer it, and suddenly these burly people
came in. They dragged me away, handcuffed me, blindfolded me, put me
in this microbus and took me away. Now, I live in Bangladesh. I know
what happens. So what I did was resist and scream as much as I could,
so I didn’t go away silently. That is one of the things that does
happen in Bangladesh, disappearances, and then people just don’t
appear again.

But that night, I was tortured. The following day, they offered me a
deal, saying if I agreed to stay quiet, I would be let go and there
would be nothing on record. When I turned that down, they got very
angry. I was taken to jail — to court. In court, I mentioned that I
had been tortured. And the court is required to investigate that. They
did not and put me into remand, which is a sort of euphemism in
Bangladesh for state-sponsored torture. I was there for six days, then
I went to jail. My bail attempts, five bail attempts, were refused. On
the sixth, there was just so much pressure from people in Bangladesh
and across the globe that they eventually let me go.

But even now, today, six years after the event, the trial has not
begun. The charge has not been placed. The law I was picked up under
has been repealed. Yet I appear in court every month. I am next due to
appear on the 14th of August.

AMY GOODMAN: And have you spoken with Sheikh Hasina since then, the
prime minister? And talk about her role in history, her father and
Sheikh Hasina herself.

SHAHIDUL ALAM: Well, her father led the movement. He was a principal
architect of the movement towards liberation, and he was very revered,
initially. And then things went wrong. He began to get autocratic
himself. He set up a private militia, called Rakkhi Bahini. He
disbanded all political parties and created a single-party state.
Except for four newspapers which were pro-government, all other
newspapers were banned. And there was huge repression at that time.
That was the first of the extrajudicial killings that we’ve had. He
was assassinated on the 15th of August, 1975.

And August is meant to be the month of mourning, officially called by
the government, because his daughter, until recently, had been the
prime minister. But the protesters have turned it around. I mean, July
was when I was documenting — or, at least the student protests
began six years ago. Again, July was when the quota movement began
this time, and they’ve called it the red month. And instead of
counting the days of August, they’ve extended July, and it’s now a
month of red. So that month of mourning has been turned into a month
of revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip of Muhammad Yunus, who
first joined
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Now!_ in 2008, not long after he won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for
pioneering a microloan program that helped hundreds of thousands of
impoverished Bangladeshis, mainly women. We also spoke
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him in 2017 about his book _A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics
of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions_.
The book came out the same time as an Oxfam report which found the
eight richest men in the world own more wealth than half the world’s
population, more than three-and-a-half billion people. I asked
Muhammad Yunus to talk about zero net carbon emissions and zero
poverty.

MUHAMMAD YUNUS: But the system which we have been practicing, the
capitalist system — I said capitalist system is not working towards
it. It’s a system which, as you mentioned, eight people owning more
wealth than the bottom 50% of the people. It’s a system which is
like a machine which is sucking up wealth from the bottom and
transporting it to the top. So the top is becoming a big mushroom of
wealth. And then, 99% of the people is like the stem from the mushroom
hanging there. And that stem is becoming thinner and thinner. The
portion of the wealth devoted to bottom 99 — or, the 99% — we
don’t say “bottom” anymore — becoming smaller and,
regrettably, the top becoming bigger and bigger.

So this is a ticking time bomb. Anytime it can explode —
politically, socially, economically and so on. We are not paying
attention to it. Wealth concentration was going on ever since we
introduced capitalist system, but this was not very visible. Today,
it’s becoming worse and worse. The speed of wealth concentration has
become speedier and speedier. Years back, there was — a couple of
years back, it was 32 people who owned half, the wealth of the bottom
50%, and now we have eight. Soon we will have five. Soon we will have
two, two people owning the whole entire world’s wealth together. So
those are the kind of things threatening.

When concentration of wealth takes place, it’s also the
concentration of power. Wealth and power go together. So you control
the government, you control the politics, you control the media, you
control businesses, everything. So that’s the kind of situation
coming. And all the people at the bottom, bottom 10%, 20%, 50%, they
will have tremendous anger against the way that’s being done and how
to express themselves that will create the destability in the society.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Muhammad Yunus taking on capitalism
on _Democracy Now!_ in 2017, now just sworn in as the interim head
of Bangladesh after a student-led uprising. In addition to Shahidul
Alam, we’re joined by Nusrat Chowdhury, associate professor of
anthropology at Amherst College, author of _Paradoxes of the Popular:
Crowd Politics in Bangladesh_.

Professor, you grew up in Bangladesh. You’re speaking to us, though,
from Northampton, Massachusetts. If you can comment on what Muhammad
Yunus was saying then, presumably what he believes today, and what
that could mean for the future not only of Bangladesh, but, as a world
leader, for the world?

NUSRAT CHOWDHURY: Thank you.

I think one of the things that made Yunus come back and take on this
position is the fact that the students really wanted him as the head
of the interim government. And one of the reasons for that is that
most people in Bangladesh are wary and weary of party politics. So,
one of the reasons why these particular student protests — and the
ones that have been successful in the past — succeeded, albeit at a
very steep cost, is because it didn’t start with any particular
political party affiliation. The students were very clear from the
beginning. They said that if you are a student, you can join us, but
don’t come here as a representative of any political party.

And in a place like Bangladesh, it’s difficult to find people who
have kind of wide acceptance, who enjoy wide acceptance and
recognition from all walks of life — from people of all walks of
life. And Muhammad Yunus still enjoys that recognition. He also has
— he’s globally recognized. He has international legitimacy. So,
he is one of those people.

I am not sure how much his economic vision actually plays a role in
this or will play a role in this. Muhammad Yunus, as you know, in his
earlier work, had talked about social capitalism. His own position has
changed. I’m not an economist. I’m not going to dwell on that. But
I think at this point it’s what he represents. Having — enjoying a
kind of recognition beyond party politics is what makes him an ideal
candidate for the interim government.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Chowdhury, the significance of not only
the student-led uprising, but now in Muhammad Yunus’s government,
they have included two students?

NUSRAT CHOWDHURY: Yes, that is unprecedented in the history of
Bangladesh, although almost all of the successful political movements
in independent Bangladesh have been led by students. And, of course,
then ordinary citizens joined them. So it’s not surprising that the
students led this protest, but their inclusion is unprecedented.

But it also symbolizes the fact that you cannot ignore students as the
youth, as young, as, you know, not really having the skills to
understand what’s going on politically, because I think it would be
a grave mistake right now for anybody, including the military in
Bangladesh, to disregard what the students were saying, because they
were able to accomplish something that even the veteran political
parties haven’t been able to in the last 15 years. They had
widespread support from ordinary citizens of Bangladesh. So, I think
it’s great that the students are included. It’s also strategic. I
don’t think you can actually have any kind of policies right now
without consulting with the students, who have shown so much maturity
and efficiency in actually bringing this uprising about.

AMY GOODMAN: And being very clear, even as Sheikh Hasina fled to
India and the military said they would, you know, caretake the
government until there was an election, they said no to the military
even temporarily, Professor.

NUSRAT CHOWDHURY: Yes, absolutely. There is very little faith.
Again, the military is broadly seen as nonpartisan, despite its
internal factions. But there is a history in this part of the world of
military coups. So, the students have been very clear from the very
beginning that they don’t want an interim government led by the
military. And the military right now would make a big mistake if their
own political ambitions come in the way. So, yes, they have been very
clear about having a civilian-led government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Shahidul Alam in Dhaka, what’s going to happen
next? You’ve got this caretaker government headed by the man who
pioneered microloans not only in Bangladesh but around the world,
Muhammad Yunus. How long does this caretaker government go on? And
will there be a role for someone like Khaleda Zia, who was freed just
after the prime minister fled? She was the opposition candidate.

SHAHIDUL ALAM: Well, Khaleda has been freed, but one of the things
that the students also talked about was that they did not want dynasty
politics. Khaleda Zia is the widow of General Ziaur, who was a former
president. Sheikh Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, who was the
founding president. But these families have gone on, and the parties
themselves have not been democratic. I think there is a great cry for
some other option right now.

What we have to see first is how this caretaker government manages
this situation. This is uncharted waters. Neither professor Yunus nor
any of the other people in his Cabinet have dealt with a situation
like this. But then, this Cabinet has students. This Cabinet has more
women than in any previous cabinet. It has human rights activists. It
has Indigenous people, so minorities are also represented. But there
are questions. There are questions in terms of the competence of some
of the people. There are questions about whether some people are there
because they’ve just been yes-men in the past and, you know,
nonthreatening. So, those are questions that will exist.

But for me, the hope is that the students have not stopped there. I
was walking down the streets today. There has been violence in the
streets, because this anger has led to seeking revenge. And the
students are managing the streets. The students have gone out in
patrols at night to ensure that the robbery and the thuggery does not
continue. And the students keep insisting that they want a government
which really belongs to the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Shahidul Alam, on a slightly different issue,
we’ve noticed in the streets, as the tens of thousands of students
and others protest, that there have been flags of Bangladesh and flags
of Palestine. You also have been an outspoken supporter of Palestinian
rights. As we move into a segment in the United States on the role
that Israel and Palestine will play in this election for the next
president of the United States, if you can talk about what’s
happening here, there?

SHAHIDUL ALAM: Well, I’ve just put on my keffiyeh, which is what I
usually wear. I hadn’t remembered to do it then. But last night at
the swearing-in ceremony, I was the only person from civil — well,
only nonstudent wearing a keffiyeh. One of the students was also
wearing a keffiyeh. And the Palestinian ambassador came and hugged us
both.

But, yes, at the time of the protests themselves, I remember a young
man atop a tree waving both a Bangladeshi flag and a Palestinian flag.
And this is something which is important for a different reason, as
well. While Bangladesh officially recognizes, you know, talks about
Palestine and its liberation, it has actually been trading with
Israel. It’s used Pegasus and other surveillance material. It’s
had training with Israel, and it has much more connections in terms of
its military and its training than it likes to reveal. And the
Bangladeshi public — the Bangladeshi Constitution, in fact, says
that it will be with all oppressed people across the globe. So, it’s
a natural affinity, but the Bangladeshi people in particular do have a
resonance with the Palestinian movement. And I think the students
being there will ensure that once we’ve sorted out the internal
things, we will be looking after Palestinian issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Shahidul Alam, we want to thank you so much for
being with us, Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist. He was
detained by the Bangladeshi authorities back in 2018, and he was held
for more than a hundred days, leading photojournalist in Bangladesh.
And Nusrat Chowdhury, we want to thank you for being with us,
professor of anthropology at Amherst College, author of _Paradoxes of
the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh_

_Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted
by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our
reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth
interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most
pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of
voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes
provocative perspective on global events._

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* Muhammad Yunus
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