On September 13, the trial of Professor Yunus and three other Grameen Telecom (GTC) board members will resume. It will be telling whether and how the court pursues the illegal tampering of evidence that the government committed while building a case against these uncompensated, volunteer directors of Grameen Telecom that emerged in the last session through the diligent cross-examination by GTC’s legal team.
In the meantime, Grameen Telecom released a detailed response (or “rejoinder”) to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on its website, which was published only in English. One of the many important points in this response is that GTC was actually more generous to its employees than the law required in many respects. A Bengali language version of the response can be found here.
A number of well-researched articles have been published about Professor Yunus’ persecution recently, including this Al Jazeera article and this one in the Daily Star. See also this passionate defense of Professor Yunus by Sharmeen Murshid of Brotee, which lasts only five minutes but speaks volumes about how civil society in Bangladesh is viewing this matter. Even if you don’t understand Bengali, you can probably catch the gist of what she is saying. Perhaps we can find a way to translate it into English — it’s powerful.