U.S. President Joe Biden met with Bangladesh’s interim chief Muhammad Yunus on the sidelines of the annual UN summit in New York. | Photograph credit score: Reuters
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday (25 September 2024) met with Bangladesh’s interim chief Muhammad Yunus on the sidelines of the annual UN summit, in a present of help after an rebellion toppled the nation’s autocratic authorities.
Mr Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, later obtained excessive reward from former President Invoice Clinton, who hailed their 40-year friendship and the worldwide influence of Bangladesh’s pioneering microfinance lending.
The 84-year-old economist was appointed the nation’s “Chief Adviser” in August following the bloody student-led motion that ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has since fled the nation.
Biden supplied “continued U.S. help as Bangladesh implements its new reform agenda,” in response to a White Home assertion.
The U.S.-Bangladesh relationship “is rooted in shared democratic values and robust people-to-people ties,” he mentioned.
In line with a press release offered by Bangladeshi officers, Yunus briefed Biden on how college students “stood up in opposition to the tyranny of the earlier authorities and gave their lives to create this chance to rebuild Bangladesh,” and mentioned his interim authorities would want U.S. assist to rebuild the nation.
Mr. Yunus additionally offered Mr. Biden with a guide of work made by the scholars.
Learn additionally: Bangladesh military chief affords timeline for democracy, seeks elections in 18 months
Lengthy friendship
Yunus was later invited to talk on the annual assembly of the Clinton World Initiative, the place former President Clinton mentioned: “Few individuals on this planet have carried out as a lot (as Yunus) to alter the lives of abnormal individuals who would by no means have had entry to credit score.”
Their friendship dates again to the Nineteen Eighties, when Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, invited Yunus to go to him and share with him his method to assuaging poverty by way of small loans, which had efficiently empowered impoverished Bangladeshi girls who lacked entry to conventional banking companies.
“You’re the solely outdated man I do know who was elected to his excessive workplace by the youth of your nation,” Clinton joked of Yunus’s rise to interim chief. “That’s as a result of you have got managed to do what all of us should do: we should all keep within the enterprise of the long run.”
Mr Yunus, in flip, thanked Clinton for believing in him in his early days and for supporting him regardless of criticism he obtained on the time for selling the concepts of a Bangladeshi economist in the USA.
He additionally paid tribute to Bangladesh’s younger revolutionaries, saying: “They’re those who’re creating the brand new model of Bangladesh; allow us to want them each success.”
Hasina’s authorities has been accused of widespread human rights abuses, together with mass detention and extrajudicial killing of political rivals.
Greater than 450 individuals died within the weeks of violence main as much as his ouster.
Since her departure into exile in neighbouring India, cupboard ministers and different senior members of Hasina’s social gathering have been arrested, and her authorities appointees have been purged from the courts and the central financial institution.
Journalists thought of sympathetic to his regime have additionally been arrested.
Though the USA had usually maintained a cooperative relationship with Hasina, an Indian ally and companion on points corresponding to combating Islamist extremism, Washington had criticized her authorities’s democratic backsliding.
Printed – September 25, 2024 11:45 am IST