Dhaka:

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus led a solemn tribute to Bangladesh’s fallen independence heroes in the first act of his interim government on Friday, after a student-led uprising forced predecessor Sheikh Hasina into exile.

A day after returning home from Europe and vowing to “uphold, support and protect the constitution” as he was sworn into office, 84-year-old Yunus began the tough challenge of returning the country to democracy.

Hasina, 76, accused of widespread human rights abuses including the jailing of her political opponents, fled by helicopter to neighbouring India on Monday as protesters flooded Dhaka’s streets in a dramatic end to her 15-year rule.

The military announced her resignation and then agreed to student demands that Yunus — who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering microfinancing work — lead an interim government.

Yunus, who has taken the title of “chief advisor” to a caretaker administration, comprised of fellow civilians bar one retired brigadier-general, has said he wants to hold elections “within a few months”.

When polls might take place is not clear.

Officials of Hasina’s former ruling party, the Awami League, have gone into hiding after revenge attacks saw some of their offices torched, while former opposition groups such as the key Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) are rebuilding after years of crushing repression.

‘Victory day’

The new administration faces a daunting task.

The veteran economist has called for the restoration of order in the South Asian nation after weeks of violence that left at least 455 people dead, calling on citizens to guard each other, including minorities who came under attack.

In driving rain, Yunus stood silently on Friday alongside student and civil society leaders in the new “advisory” cabinet tasked with steering democratic reforms.

Together the group laid a wreath in the red-and-green colours of the national flag at the main memorial commemorating the millions who died in Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.

Yunus suggested on his arrival on Thursday in Dhaka that Hasina’s ouster was as significant as the conflict that brought Bangladesh into being.

“Bangladesh has created a new victory day,” he told reporters. “Bangladesh has got a second independence.”

Several of Yunus’ advisers are loosely affiliated with the BNP, led by Hasina’s longtime rival and former premier Khaleda Zia, 78, newly released from years of house arrest.

They also include student leaders who started the protests.

Yunus wrote in The Economist this week that his country needed a new generation of leaders “who are not obsessed with settling scores, as too many of our previous governments were”.

However, Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy told the Times of India newspaper his mother still had hope of contesting for political office.

“She will go back to Bangladesh the moment the interim government decides to hold an election,” he said.

‘Law and order’

Hasina’s flight abroad has heightened rancour towards India, which played a decisive military role in securing Bangladesh’s independence but also backed Hasina to the hilt.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to offer his “best wishes” to Yunus on Thursday moments after he was sworn in, saying New Delhi was “committed” to working with neighbouring Dhaka.

India’s arch-rival Pakistan on Friday also said it hoped it could boost ties with Dhaka, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wishing Yunus “great success in guiding Bangladesh towards a harmonious and prosperous future”.

China said Friday it also welcomed the interim government, promising to work with the country “to promote exchange and cooperation”.

Farida Akhter, an adviser to the interim government, told AFP that the group would also visit a monument in Dhaka where the student protests started last month.

“We are paying our respects there, as the student movement began from there,” she said, before naming the top task on their to-do list.

“Our first priority is law and order”, she said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Dhaka:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus returned to Bangladesh Thursday to lead a caretaker government after a student-led uprising ended the 15-year rule of Sheikh Hasina.

Yunus touched down in Dhaka on a flight from Paris via Dubai shortly after 2:00 pm (0800 GMT) and could be sworn in as the country’s new leader as soon as Thursday evening to begin what the army chief has vowed will be a “beautiful democratic process”.

The prospect of Yunus, 84, standing alongside military leaders was almost unimaginable a week ago when security forces fired deadly rounds at protesters who took to the streets demanding that Hasina resign.

But the military turned on Hasina at the weekend and she was forced to flee to neighbouring India — as millions of Bangladeshis celebrated her demise.

The military then agreed to student demands that Yunus — who won the Nobel in 2006 for his pioneering microfinancing work — lead an interim government.

“I’m looking forward to going back home, see what’s happening and how we can organise ourselves to get out of the trouble we are in,” Yunus told reporters in Paris as he left for Dhaka.

‘Get ready’

The veteran academic had travelled abroad this year while on bail after being sentenced to six months in jail on a charge condemned as politically motivated, and which a Dhaka court on Wednesday acquitted him of.

Yunus was hit with more than 100 criminal cases and a smear campaign by a state-led Islamic agency that accused him of promoting homosexuality, with courts accused of rubber-stamping decisions by ousted Hasina’s government.

Army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said he backed Yunus and hoped he would be sworn in to lead the interim government on Thursday evening.

“I am certain that he will be able to take us through a beautiful democratic process,” Waker said.

Yunus said he wanted to hold elections “within a few” months.

‘Seismic moment’

Few other details about the planned government have been released, including the role of the military.

But Bangladeshis voiced hope as they joined a rally in Dhaka on Wednesday for the former opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP).

“I expect that a national government will be formed with everyone’s consent in a beautiful way,” Moynul Islam Pintu told AFP.

“I expect that the country is run in a nice way, and the police force is reformed so that they can’t harass people.”

Hasina, 76, who had been in power since 2009, quit on Monday as hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Dhaka.

Jubilant crowds later looted her palace.

Monday’s events were the culmination of more than a month of unrest, which began as protests against a plan for quotas in government jobs but morphed into an anti-Hasina movement.

Hasina, who was accused of rigging the January elections and widespread human rights abuses, deployed security forces to quash the protests.

At least 455 people were killed in the unrest, according to an AFP tally based on police, government officials and hospital doctors.

“The protests are a seismic moment in Bangladesh history,” said International Crisis Group analyst Thomas Kean.

“The country really had been at risk of becoming a one-party state, and through a peaceful street-based movement led by, Gen Z students in their 20s, they’ve managed to force her from power.”

Military move

The military’s switching of allegiance was the decisive factor in her demise.

It has since acceded to a range of other demands from the student leaders.

The president dissolved parliament on Tuesday, a key demand of the students and the BNP.

The head of the police force, which protesters have blamed for leading Hasina’s crackdown, was sacked on Tuesday.

The new chief, Mainul Islam, offered an apology on Wednesday for the conduct of officers and vowed a “fair and impartial investigation” into the killings of “students, common people and the police”.

Ex-prime minister and BNP chairperson Khaleda Zia, 78, was also released from years of house arrest, while some political prisoners were freed.

The military has demoted some generals seen as close to Hasina and sacked Ziaul Ahsan, a commander of the feared Rapid Action Battalion paramilitary force.

Police said mobs had launched revenge attacks on officers and Hasina’s allies, and also freed more than 500 inmates from a prison.

Protesters broke into parliament and torched TV stations. Others smashed statues of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence hero.

Since Tuesday, however, streets in the capital have been largely peaceful.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Dhaka:

Garment factories in Bangladesh, forecast to account for 90% of the country’s exports, reopened on Wednesday hoping to swiftly resume full operations after production was disrupted by violent protests that ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina this week.

Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on Monday after around 300 people were killed and thousands injured in a crackdown on student-led protests since July.

Garment and textile factories which supply major western brands such as H&M, Zara and Carrefour had been forced to shut under curfews.

“We lost a total of four days, it is too early to make an estimate of the loss. There was little physical damage to factories,” Miran Ali, vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), told Reuters.

“I am hopeful that in the next few days, we will see complete normalisation,” he said. “I’m confident our buyers will stand by our side.”

He added that H&M, which buys from about 1,000 factories in Bangladesh, had already said it would not seek discounts due to the delays. The world’s second largest fashion retailer told Reuters on Wednesday its suppliers’ factories were gradually reopening and it welcomed steps taken for greater stability in Bangladesh.

At a factory belonging to apparel maker Urmi Garments in Dhaka, the mainly female employees were back operating sewing machines.

“We are poor people depending on daily wages and overtime. If we sit back home, how can we run our families?” 38-year old Razia Begum, an employee at the factory, told Reuters.

Factory manager Emdadul Haq said the factory had lost 228,000 pieces of production worth $107,000. In all, Urmi, which counts H&M, Japan’s Uniqlo and Britain’s Marks and Spencer among its clients, had lost about $2.2 million across three units, he said.

Though factories were reopening, there could be some damage to trade. Hula Global, an Indian apparel producer that serves Western clients, said on Monday it would redirect production for the rest of this year from Bangladesh to India to avert risk.

Pankaj Tuteja, Mumbai-based head of operations at Dragon Sourcing, which helps firms find suppliers, told Reuters that while it expected big brands such as Zara and H&M to stick with Bangladesh, some firms that looked elsewhere could stay away.

“Once the client, then the factories, have invested so much time and money they will not just immediately run back, even when there’s political stability. That can have a long-term impact for Bangladesh,” Tuteja said.

But Bangladesh would remain attractive because of costs that are 15-25% lower than elsewhere, and 0% tariffs, Tuteja added.

The International Monetary Fund expects the ready-made garments industry will account for 90% of Bangladesh’s $55 billion annual exports in the financial year 2024.

Bangladesh was the third-largest exporter of clothing in the world last year, according to the World Trade Organization.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Bangladesh’s uncompromising ex-prime minister Khaleda Zia has been released from years of house arrest after her bitter enemy Sheikh Hasina was ousted as premier and fled as protesters broke into her palace.

The ferocious rivalry between the two women — born in blood and cemented in prison — has defined politics in the Muslim-majority nation for decades.

Zia, 78, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for graft in 2018 under Hasina’s rule.

Hasina, 76, was ousted on Monday after mass protests, with the army chief declaring the military would form an interim government.

Orders were then issued for the release of prisoners from the protests, as well as Zia.

Zia is chairperson of the key opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP). Party spokesman AKM Wahiduzzaman told AFP Tuesday that she “is now freed”.

She is in poor health, confined to a wheelchair with rheumatoid arthritis and struggling with diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver.

Decades-long feud

The enmity between Zia and Hasina is known popularly in Bangladesh as the “Battle of Begums”, with “begum” a Muslim honorific in South Asia for powerful women.

Their feud has its roots in the murder of Hasina’s father — the country’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — along with her mother, three brothers and several other relatives in a 1975 military coup.

Zia’s husband Ziaur Rahman was then the deputy army chief and effectively took control himself three months later.

He kickstarted economic recovery in poverty-stricken Bangladesh with privatisations but was killed in another military coup in 1981.

The BNP mantle fell to his widow, then a 35-year-old mother of two young sons who was dismissed by critics as a politically inexperienced housewife.

Zia led opposition to dictator Hussain Muhammad Ershad, boycotting sham elections in 1986 and mounting street protests.

She and Hasina joined forces to push Ershad out in a wave of protests in 1990 and then faced off in Bangladesh’s first free polls.

Zia won and led from 1991-96, and again in 2001-2006, as she and Hasina alternated in power.

Mutual dislike

Their mutual dislike was blamed for a January 2007 political crisis that prompted the military to impose emergency rule and set up a caretaker government. Both were detained for more than a year.

Hasina won elections in December 2008 by a landslide and led uninterrupted until she fled to India in a helicopter on Monday.

She had tightened her grip on power by detaining tens of thousands of BNP members. Hundreds also disappeared.

Zia was convicted and jailed in 2018 on graft charges her party rejected as politically motivated.

She was later released into house arrest on condition she neither took part in politics nor went abroad for medical treatment.

Son in exile

Zia’s first cabinet was hailed for liberalising Bangladesh’s economy in the early 1990s, sparking decades of growth.

However, her second term as the premier of an Islamist-allied coalition was marked by graft allegations against her government and sons.

There was also a series of Islamist attacks, one of which killed more than 20 people and almost claimed Hasina’s life.

The anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion police unit Zia created has been accused of hundreds of extrajudicial killings.

Her eldest son Tarique Rahman led the BNP from exile in London while she was in jail but he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison over his alleged role in a bomb attack on a Hasina rally in 2004.

The BNP says the charges were a politically motivated attempt to expel Zia’s dynasty from politics.

Zia won respect for her resolute attitude, although her inability to compromise left her unable to cut deals with important allies at home or abroad.

That defiance extended even to the death of her youngest son from a heart attack in Malaysia in 2015.

Hasina went to her home to offer sympathy and condolences but Zia did not open the door.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)