PNN – The president of Bangladesh announced on Tuesday night that Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus will head the country’s interim government.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, citing AFP, this decision was taken after Sheikh Hasina Wajid resigned as prime minister and left the country on Tuesday following nationwide protests in Bangladesh.
After a five-hour meeting with protesting student leaders, some business leaders, civil society members and army chiefs, Bangladesh President Muhammad Shahabuddin decided to appoint Yunus as the head of the interim government.
Shahabuddin also ordered the release of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina’s rival from house arrest. In 2018, Sheikh Hasina’s government accused Khaleda Zia of corruption and put her under house arrest.
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Expressing Pakistan’s hope for the normalization of the situation in Bangladesh
84-year-old Yunus and his bank named “Grameen” won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts to lift millions of people out of poverty and grant loans under 100 to poor rural people.
Bangladesh protests began on July 1; It escalated when student activists at Dhaka University, the country’s largest university, clashed heavily with police and government supporters.
The protests are rooted in a controversial job quota system that allocates up to 30 percent of government jobs to family members of Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war against Pakistan, known as “freedom fighters.”
76-year-old Sheikh Hasina came to work as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh in 2009 and won the elections for the fourth time in the elections last January. These disturbances were unprecedented during his presidency.
The resigned prime minister of Bangladesh had called the demonstrators “terrorists”, but as the number of people killed in these protests increased to more than 300 people, people stormed the prime minister’s palace and forced Sheikh Hasina to leave the country.
At least 100 people were killed in violent clashes between police and protesters in Bangladesh on Sunday. And so a peaceful student protest that began to oppose government employment quotas turned into a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience aimed at toppling the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.