Muhammad Yunus At The Helm In Bangladesh — Is There A US Deep State Connection?

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took oath as interim Prime Minister of Bangladesh on 8 August, after long-time prime minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to flee her country.

Yunus is a banker who founded the Bangladesh Grameen Bank and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microfinance. He pioneered giving small loans to the poor to help them escape poverty.

His work in microfinance is widely acknowledged and has been adopted by many countries around the world.

He was born in Chittagong in 1940 and studied at Dhaka University. He completed his PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in economics from Vanderbilt University in the United States (US).

Reportedly, he returned to Bangladesh in 1972, after the 1971 liberation war, and began teaching economics at Chittagong University. He soon started lending money to those in need out of his own pocket when Bangladesh suffered from a famine in 1974.

This initial lending laid the foundation for the Grameen Bank, which he founded in 1983, with the bank reportedly lending $6 billion towards microenterprises, with a special focus on women.

Although much-celebrated in the global community, especially in Western academic and government circles, he has a checkered history with Hasina and has been a long-time critic of the Awami League government's policies.

He has been accused of links with the US deep state. Wikileaks cables revealed that, in 2007, Yunus sought the then US ambassador's help to impress upon Bangladesh's caretaker government to change a law that gave it authority over his Grameen Bank.

He was subsequently shunted out of his post as managing director of Grameen Bank in 2011, citing that he had crossed the retirement age, using this law.

Yunus was slapped with multiple cases, including a defamation suit, a food safety case, and a tax fraud case, which he and his supporters claimed to be vendetta politics, a charge Hasina repeatedly denied. He was also sentenced to six months in prison for labour law violations.

He is also believed to have been interested in joining politics, as revealed by Wikileaks cables, and was said to be reviewing multiple options.

He is, therefore, suspected to be very close to the US government.

After his oath-taking ceremony, a statement released by the US said that the US government hoped that the new interim government in Bangladesh would chart a new democratic future for the people of the country.

How Yunus will be able to restore peace and protect minorities like Hindus and Christians against sustained coordinated attacks by Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamist radicals from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party remains to be seen.