Under Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh saw a tense period where the recourse to justice was curtailed, the banking sector crippled, and foreign investment virtually evaporated. As the country tries to build a brighter future, the authoritarian nature of Yunus’s interim administration – its series of endless legal witch hunts and laser-focus on political retribution – echoes on with questions building over the ‘reformer’ image Yunus worked to foster.
Rocketed to power off the back of a student-led revolution, Muhammad Yunus promised accountability and access to justice. Instead, he turned his sights on a series of political scores needing to be settled, using his temporary power to establish a firm, authoritarian rule.
Incredibly, Yunus himself knew what it felt like to be the victim of witch hunt, having become embroiled in a dispute with Sheikh Hasina whilst she was in power. He could have taken the opportunity to set a new path for Bangladesh; one where the courts no longer operated as a space of political persecution. Instead, he doubled down and drew on popular resentment for the Hasina administration to foster a culture of political retribution while leveraging the judicial system to target his enemies.
During his tenure, Human Rights Watch repeatedly raised the alarm about the number of political opponents that were being held in indefinite detention. His administration also pursued the death penalty for all those it associated with the former regime, discarding due processes in favour of stacking benches with unqualified judges who were likely to return harsher verdicts. Undeterred, the contradictions grew. Here was a founding member of Nelson Mandela’s Council of Elders, locking up vast numbers of political opponents and doing nothing to protect journalists.
Yunus also spearheaded a smear campaign against almost a dozen of the country’s leading business groups, dissolving boards and installing favored (and corrupt) advisers, the result has left the country’s economy in dire straits and the current government attempting to salvage the wreckage. Through a series of endless legal witch hunts and targeted campaigns, Yunus saddled the eleven business groups with hundreds of criminal and commercial charges, while doing precious little to support the wider economy. The attacks scared off would-be investors, concerned they may earn the ire of Yunus’s government and have left the economy with a rolling investment crisis.
To maximise this campaign’s impact, Yunus leveraged a court system which requires people to appear in-person before the court or face harsher, in-absentia sentences. In drumming up hundreds of legal claims Yunus effectively nullified the business groups from any effective response by making it virtually impossible for them to meet the claims in court. To ensure this would be as difficult as possible, Yunus strategically empowered the students who brought down Hasina, bringing them into his fold.
By withholding any repercussions for the attacks on Hasina’s residence or the fires started at government buildings during the uprising, Yunus tacitly permitted a general sense of lawlessness and attacks on perceived enemies of the state to spread. Former ministers, on their way to essentially sham trials, would be mobbed – including one minister who was assaulted by lawyers – by crowds calling for their execution. One former Justice even had to undergo surgery as a result of the violent injuries he suffered following a mob attack. Lawyers have even reported that they were prevented from carrying out their work if it involved representing people with ties to the former regime. In all, the government’s permissiveness of vigilante justice, combined with a targeted campaign of lawfare against its perceived enemies undermined any hope for fair trials and it is little wonder businesses remain reticent to engage with Bangladesh.
Despite a rhetoric of justice and accountability, Yunus’ actions proved these were never truly on the table. In order for the country to move forward, Bangladesh needs a pathway to reconciliation, which cannot coexist with the legal witch hunts instigated by Muhammad Yunus. The new government needs to change course if it wants to bring the country on the path to a prosperous and fairer future.