DHAKA — Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus returned home to strife-torn Bangladesh on Thursday, to lead a new interim government after weeks of tumultuous student protests forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee to neighboring India.
The South Asian nation’s only Nobel laureate and a harsh critic of Hasina, Yunus, 84, arrived in Dhaka following medical treatment in Paris, after protesters backed him for the role in a government tasked with holding elections for a new leader.
“The country has the possibility of becoming a very beautiful nation,” the economist told reporters at the airport, where he was greeted by senior military officers and student leaders.
The student protesters had saved the country and that freedom had to be protected, he said, adding: “Whatever path our students show us, we will move ahead with that.”
“We had ended those possibilities, now again we have to rise up. To the government officials here and defense chiefs — we are a family, we should move ahead together.”
Yunus was set to be sworn in as chief of a team of advisers on Thursday night local time, at the official residence of President Mohammed Shahabuddin.
Hasina’s Awami League party does not figure in the interim government after she resigned on Monday, following weeks of violence that killed about 300 people and injured thousands.
In a Facebook post, her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy said the party had not given up, however, and was ready to hold talks with opponents and the interim government.
“I had said my family will no longer be involved in politics but the way our party leaders and workers are being attacked, we cannot give up,” he said on Wednesday.
Yunus, known as the “banker to the poor,” received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for founding a bank that pioneered the fight on poverty through small loans to needy borrowers.
Hasina’s dramatic exit from the country she ruled for 20 of the last 30 years, winning a fourth straight term in January, set off jubilation and violence as crowds stormed and ransacked her official residence unopposed.
She is sheltering at an air base near New Delhi, the Indian capital, a development that Yunus said raised anger at India among some Bangladeshis.
The student-led movement that ousted Hasina grew out of protests against quotas in government jobs that spiraled in July, provoking a violent crackdown that drew global criticism, though the government denied using excessive force.
The protests were fueled also by harsh economic conditions and political repression in the country, born after a war of liberation from Pakistan in 1971.
The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) boycotted two national elections after the arrest of its leaders, while the Covid-19 pandemic damaged the $450 billion economy after years of strong growth, leading to high inflation, unemployment and shrinking reserves.
It pushed the Hasina government to seek a $4.7 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Hasina’s archrival and BNP leader Khaleda Zia, 78, called for calm and an end to violence in a video address from her hospital bed to hundreds of supporters at a rally on Wednesday after her release from house arrest.
“No destruction, revenge or vengeance,” she said as the BNP demanded elections in three months.