Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus. Photo: Collected-
Metropolis Desk-
Forty global leaders expressed “deep concerns for…[the] well-being” of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus in an open letter to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, adding that it is “…painful to see Prof. Yunus, a man of impeccable integrity, and his life’s work unfairly attacked and repeatedly harassed and investigated by your government.” The letter also appeared as a full-page ad in the Washington Post on March 7, 2023.
Muhammad Yunus, one of seven people in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, has been under attack by Sheikh Hasina and her government off and on since 2010. “The attacks on Muhammad Yunus are exactly what you’d expect from an authoritarian government,” said Sam Daley-Harris, founder of Civic Courage and the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS which began working closely with Muhammad Yunus in 1987. “When a government controls all the levers of power, the media, the courts, and the parliament, it does whatever it can to stay in power.”
In 2022 Transparency International ranked Bangladesh in the bottom fifth, 147 out of 180 countries, in its corruption perception index. Sheikh Hasina accused Prof. Yunus of using his influence to have the World Bank cancel its loan for building the Padma Bridge, a 3.8-mile bridge that was opened in June 2022. A month before its opening, Sheikh Hasina was quoted in the Bangladesh press saying, “[Yunus] should be plunged into the Padma River twice. He should be just plunged in a bit and pulled out so he doesn’t die, and then pulled up onto the bridge. That perhaps will teach him a lesson.” Statements like that add to the concern for Muhammad Yunus’ safety in Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people in a landmass the size of the U.S. State of Illinois.
For its part, the World Bank said it rejected the loan due to “credible evidence corroborated by a variety of sources which points to a high-level corruption conspiracy among Bangladeshi government officials….” and others and added, “The World Bank cannot, should not, and will not turn a blind eye to evidence of corruption.”
Prof. Yunus began his journey to becoming the “banker to the poor” when he entered the village next to his campus in 1976 and found 42 destitute villagers who needed a grand total of $27, about 64 cents each, to be liberated from the exploitation of moneylenders. Yunus made sure the repayment schedules were convenient and grew Grameen Bank to 9 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom were women, and developed a model that was copied around the world. Professor Yunus shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Grameen Bank in 2006.
Five years later, Sheikh Hasina pushed for Professor Yunus’ removal as head of Grameen Bank citing a bank law that required the retirement of the managing directors of government banks by age 60. At the time, Prof. Yunus was 70 and the bank he led was 97% owned by the women who borrowed from it. It was never explained why this law, which many legal scholars believed did not apply to Professor Yunus,
had not been deemed applicable for the prior ten years under three different governments. A detailed history of the conflict can be found here: https://protectyunus.wordpress.com/background/
Signatories of the letter supporting Prof. Yunus include business leaders such as Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, artists including Bono and Peter Gabriel, government leaders including former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former US Vice President Al Gore, and activists such as Primatologist Jane Goodall and Sam Daley-Harris, the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. Civic Courage under Daley-Harris’ leadership organized the writing of the letter and securing the agreement of the other 39 signers as part of its mission to defend and advance citizen participation in social uplift.
The letter acknowledges Muhammad Yunus’ contributions to Bangladesh and to the world and calls on the Prime Minister to suspend her harassment and persecution of him. The text of the letter and list of signers can be found here: https://protectyunus.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/global-leaders-appeal-to-the-bangladeshi-prime-minister-regarding-the-treatment-of-professor-muhammad-yunus-in-an-open-letter/
Source: Civic Courage
