By Karlos Bermann [Photo above: Protesters in Dhaka, Bangladesh celebrate the downfall of Sheikh Hasina, August 5, 2024 (AP/Rajib Dhar)]
An interim government for Bangladesh was sworn in on the night of August 8, following the return to the country by Muhammad Yunus, the former managing director of the Bangladesh Grameen Bank and a perennial favorite of the world’s capitalist elites. The 84-year-old Yunus is now “Chief Advisor” to the new provisional Bangladesh government. The announcement came from General Waker-Uz-Zaman, head of the Bangladeshi army. Zaman described Yunus’ role as equivalent to that of prime minister. He added that there will be an interim council of advisors, like a cabinet, with 15 members.
Since August 4, when 15-year Prime Minister and ruler Sheikh Hasina suddenly fled to India, various actors, local and international, had been scrambling to cobble together an interim government that could stem the chaos—verging on civil war—that has gripped the country in recent weeks. Hasina’s party, the Awami (People’s) League, is not represented on the new governing council.
Unrest over unemployment, the rising cost of living, and Hasina’s dictatorial rule had been growing. In recent years protests against the lack of job opportunities for youth has crystalized around opposition to the ruling Awami League quota system for government jobs. The quotas favored the party faithful. Ostensibly the system was designed to benefit the families of those who fought in the war for independence, which the Awami League had led. Bangladesh gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971. But with a worsening economic outlook and some 32 million youth unemployed, that rationale had worn paper thin.
The Awami League is a bourgeois-comprador party that from time to time described itself as “socialist” or “social-democratic,” although its frequent gyrations in policy and pronouncements show that it has no clear ideology. In that regard when in power it often resembled the Bonapartist regimes of Third World countries that seek to walk a tightrope between the urban and rural masses on the one hand, and domestic and international capital on the other. During Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule it more and more cozied up to the regime of neoliberalist international finance capital.
In late July Hasina tried to repress the mass student and worker protests, employing not only the police and army, but also the Awami League’s militant youth wing. When hundreds of protesters were killed the South Asian nation exploded. According to the Times of India, “more than 20” Awami League and government officials and their family members also met their death in revenge killings. Unable to control the rioting that ensued, the army and police forces began to disintegrate. Hasina saw the writing on the wall and hastily packed her bags.
Highly Regarded by the US Imperialists
Muhammed Yunus [Photo above at Paris airport on his way back to Bangladesh to head an interim government, August 7, 2024 (AP/Michel Euler)] has long been a favorite of US imperialism. In the 1960s he got his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University under a Fulbright scholarship.
In 2006, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for developing the concept of microcredit at the Grameen (Village) Bank. Microcredit is the making of small loans to potential entrepreneurs at the bottom of the social ladder who do not have access to other credit sources. The practice was supposed to eradicate poverty in the Third World. Former US President Clinton is said to have been instrumental in seeing that Yunus got the award. In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine chose Yunus for its “FP 100” selection of the world’s most influential elite. Three years later, Fortune magazine named him one of the “12 greatest entrepreneurs of the current era.”
During the first decade of this century the US government—the executive and legislative branches that recently feted the monster Netanyahu—awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with the Congressional Gold Medal. He also appeared on several US television shows—including The Simpsons!
So far as imperialism and its local agents were concerned Yunus was the ideal choice to “cool things off” and get the students and workers off the streets while the repressive forces are reorganized. His distance from Bangladeshi politics, combined with his proven loyalty to the global capitalist economic system and his international celebrity must have made him seem unbeatable to the imperialist power brokers.
Known as an exponent of “green capitalism” and “clean government,” Yunus cuts a sort of Mr. Rogers figure. He has not been associated with either the Awami League or its ruling class rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Those are the two parties that have alternated in power since independence, with occasional breaks for military dictatorship. In 2007 Yunus did talk about founding a new political party, to be called “Citizens’ Power,” but dropped the idea after a meeting with the then prime minister, Fakhruddin Ahmed.
The Bangladeshi Student Movement
Since even before the war of liberation where the former East Pakistan gained its independence and became Bangladesh, students have been at the forefront of economic and social struggles. They have traditionally been organized—insofar as they were organized at all—into loose coalitions of student groups or ad-hoc action committees spanning the spectrum from nationalist to Islamic to social democratic/reformist, to Stalinist and other nominally Marxist tendencies. Sometimes, when conditions brought the movement to a boil, masses of workers and peasants have joined the student mobilizations.
That is what happened just before the independence war. At that time worker and peasant mobilizations involving general strikes and land seizures had brought about a revolutionary situation throughout Pakistan, West and East. But mass Soviet- and Chinese-aligned Stalinist parties led the uprising to defeat, the former pitching for a two-stage revolution with the bourgeoisie, the latter for rural guerrilla warfare.
For the moment, the Bangladeshi student leaders are welcoming Muhammad Yunus’ return to the country as its new leader. Yunus, in turn, has called on them to demobilize and make way for “the peaceful rebuilding of the country.” Two leaders of Students Against Discrimination, the coalition leading the recent protests, have been given seats on the 15-member governing council.
We cannot predict when this honeymoon may end. But it will, and when it does the students’ and workers’ lack of political clarity and political program will put them at a loss. Bangladesh’s problems cannot and will not be solved by international capitalism, “green” or otherwise. Only a socialist revolution can do that by expropriating the bankers, the comprador bourgeoisie, and the rural landlords, putting in place a workers’ and peasants’ government.
Lacking leadership with a clear revolutionary program, the student and worker mobilizations that drove Sheikh Hasina from power in Bangladesh will come to nothing. As with so many popular explosions in the world—most recently in Haiti—without the leadership of a revolutionary socialist vanguard party they will result only in a change of faces at the top.
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