Bangladesh new interim leader Muhammad Yunus heads home, government to be sworn in Thursday
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.
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.
President Shahabuddin also announced the appointment of a new police chief, Mohammad Mainul Islam, to replace Chowdhury Abdullah Al Mamun as part of a shake-up of the security top brass that also included a new head of the technical intelligence monitoring agency and changes among senior army officials.
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.
Bangladesh’s newly appointed police chief on Wednesday offered an apology for the conduct of officers during deadly protests and vowed an “impartial” probe into the killings.
“We are committed to conduct a fair and impartial investigation into every recent killing of students, common people and the police”, Inspector General of Police Md Mainul Islam told reporters, a day after he was appointed following the ouster of the prime minister.
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.
Zia, 78, a former prime minister and Hasina’s arch rival, addressed the rally by video link, as did her exiled eldest son Tarique Rahman, who was introduced as the country’s next prime minister. Both called on their followers not to seek revenge.
“No destruction, revenge or vengeance,” Zia said from her hospital bed. Her son said: “National elections should be held soon and power should be handed over to a government elected by the people at the earliest.”
Zia had feuded and alternated power with Hasina since the early 1990s. She and Rahman were convicted of graft in 2018, in what they called a trumped-up case.
Hasina’s resignation triggered jubilation across the country, and crowds stormed and ransacked her official residence unopposed after she fled, ending a 15-year second stint in office.
The daughter of state founder Mujibur Rahman, Hasina survived the assassination of her father and most of his family in 1975. She ran Bangladesh for 20 of the last 30 years.
Public anger against Hasina was also in part due to economic distress. Bangladesh’s US$450 billion economy expanded under Hasina as the mainstay garments sector grew. But costly imports, high inflation, youth unemployment and shrinking reserves in recent years pushed it to seek a US$4.7 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
“The protests … have exacerbated downside risks to economic growth, fiscal performance, and external metrics,” ratings agency S&P said in a note on Wednesday. “The damage to credit metrics may be contained if the sociopolitical situation normalises soon and Bangladesh forms a new government.”
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‘Our country has been liberated’: Bangladeshis celebrate as prime minister resigns and flees
Though calm has mainly returned, there were still signs of lingering unrest.
Protests broke out at on Wednesday the headquarters of the Bangladesh Bank in Dhaka on Wednesday when hundreds of officials from the central bank forced four of its deputy governors to resign over alleged corruption, two sources at the bank said.
The bank did not immediately comment.
India, target of anger from some Bangladeshis for taking in Hasina, evacuated all non-essential staff and their families from its embassy and four consulates in the country, two Indian government sources said.
Most schools and university campuses in Dhaka and other cities reopened after having been shut for weeks. Garments factories that had been shut for days also began opening on Wednesday.
The movement that toppled Hasina rose out of demonstrations against public sector job quotas for families of veterans of the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan, seen by critics as a means to reserve jobs for allies of her Awami League party.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse