The Nobel Peace laureate tapped to lead an interim government in Bangladesh called for calm and boarded a flight on Wednesday to return home, a day before his new government is expected to be sworn in to replace ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Muhammad Yunus, 84, was picked by President Mohammed Shahabuddin to lead the new interim government, a key demand of student demonstrators whose uprising drove Hasina to flee to India on Monday.
“Let us make the best use of our new victory,” he said in a statement to Reuters before departing Paris, where he had been receiving medical treatment while out on bail from criminal cases brought under Hasina. “I fervently appeal to everybody to stay calm. Please refrain from all kinds of violence.”
Outside the airport, he told reporters: “I’m looking forward to going back home and see what’s happening there and how we can organise ourselves to get out of the trouble that we’re in.”
“I’ll go and talk to them. I’m just fresh in this whole area,” said Yunus, an economist who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for founding a bank that pioneered fighting poverty with small loans to ordinary people.
President Shahabuddin said the rest of the interim government needed to be finalised soon to overcome the crisis and pave the way for elections. Nahid Islam, a key student leader, said he expected the members to be chosen by late Wednesday.
Army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said that he was hopeful the interim government would be sworn in by late Thursday and that the situation in the country was improving and was expected to become normal in the next 3-4 days.
He also said that military leaders had held discussions with student leaders, political parties, and the president and that he was confident that Yunus would be able to take the country towards a democratic process.
Ahead of the arrival of Yunus, a court overturned his conviction in a labour case in which he was handed a six-month jail sentence in January. Yunus had called his prosecution political, part of a campaign by Hasina to quash dissent.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), buoyed by its chief Khaleda Zia’s release from house arrest on Tuesday, drew hundreds of people to a rally in Dhaka and demanded elections within three months.
(Reuters)
