Earlier this month, youth-heavy protests drove Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina to flee after 15 years in power. What began as protests over jobs quotas came to represent broad-based economic and political angst.
Now, “the streets of this country of 170 million people are run by students,” Mujib Mashal and Saif Hasnat report for The New York Times. “A car carrying New York Times journalists was stopped by a boy who looked no older than 12. He asked to see a driver’s license. In another corner of the city where some of the worst violence had taken place, Salman Khan, 17, and two other students manned a roundabout, occasionally pulling aside the fanciest of cars. What exactly were they looking for? ‘Black money, black money,’ Mr. Khan said, explaining that many of Ms. Hasina’s senior officials were on the run.”
“Students have not only manned roads,” Krutika Pathi and Shonal Ganguly write for The Diplomat, “two who led the charge against Hasina are settling into the interim government” as ministers.
The task ahead is monumental, observers agree. Led since 2009 by Hasina and her Awami League, Bangladesh’s economy is in shambles. At Project Syndicate, M. Niaz Asadullah noted in June as protests percolated: “Bangladesh needs to absorb millions of unemployed and underemployed young people into the labor market. Currently, more than one-third of university graduates remain unemployed within a year or two of graduation. Worse, roughly 40% of Bangladeshi youth—twice the global average—are not in education, employment, or training.”
Bangladesh’s political system is also viewed dimly: The Economist writes that the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, “suffers from many of the problems the [Awami League] does, including dynastic power politics, cronyism and its own record of oppression when in power.” The new ministers and the protesters want to reform the whole system before a vote is held, Pathi and Ganguly write for The Diplomat, but the transitional government seems to lack a mandate for that.
… Guided by an 84-Year-Old Nobel Laureate
Guiding this youthful surge for change is a much more seasoned figure: the 84-year-old Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. Known as the “banker to the poor,” Yunus helped pioneer microfinance, a way of helping low-income people become entrepreneurs. The military installed him as chief adviser—in other words, leader—of a quickly established interim government soon after Hasina’s flight.
“[C]lad in a simple kurta and vest,” Yunus flew in from Paris to assume “what can objectively be described as the job from hell,” John Reed writes for the Financial Times. He has appealed for calm amid recrimination against the old order. For Yunus, returning to fill this role “is surely sweet vindication,” the FT’s Reed writes. “Hasina’s government had pursued a legal vendetta against him and his operations, slandering him as a ‘bloodsucker’ of the poor,” and a court sentenced him in absentia. Yunus has compared this sea change “to ‘a second liberation’, referring to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971,” Reed writes.