Two Mondays ago, 12 U.S. Senators from both major political parties called for justice for Professor Muhammad Yunus in a strongly worded letter to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Last Monday, 247 global leaders including 127 Nobel laureates wrote their own letter demanding that the persecution stop and proposing a pathway to independently examining the meritless charges against Dr. Yunus.
The responses from the Bangladeshi government have centered on two critiques of the letters.
The first was that the Bangladeshi legal system is independent from politics and is trustworthy, therefore arguing that the “political vendettas” referred to in the Senators’ letter were no factor in the January 1 verdict against Professor Yunus and his three co-defendants.
The second was that the labor law case was brought against Professor Yunus by aggrieved employees of Grameen Telecom, rather than by the government. In that case, the government’s only role was to let the judicial process take its course between two private parties.
Let us examine these in turn, drawing not on the analysis of foreigners, but rather on those of respected experts in Bangladesh.
On the first point, let’s listen to Professor Rehman Sobhan, one of the leading public intellectuals in Bangladesh’s history, the founder of the Centre for Policy Dialogue, and the former Director General of the Bangladesh Institute for Development Studies. He wrote a compelling analysis of the legal harassment of Professor Yunus in the Dhaka Tribune and the Daily Star, which was also picked up in India.
Titled “For Whom the Bell Tolls?”, it demolishes the idea that the labor law case against Professor Yunus has any merit. He cites the degradation of the state’s competence and independence under the current Prime Minister as the only reason the case could have proceeded so far. He writes bitingly, “The [labor law] case of Professor Yunus is symptomatic of this erosion in the credibility of our institutions [in Bangladesh]. The triviality and narrowness of the case against Yunus would not have made it to first base in any well-functioning judicial system.” Please read his depressing yet highly cogent critique of the argument that the conviction is trustworthy because of the supposed independence and competence of the Bangladeshi legal system.
Now let us turn to the idea that the litigants in the labor law case are Grameen Telecom’s employees and Grameen Telecom’s 4 convicted board members. (We will ignore for the moment that even if it were true that the employees were a party to the case, the defendant should be the company itself–not 4 of its board members–and that it should be a civil rather than criminal case, according to Bangladeshi law.) In response to the claim that the employees brought the case, Shayan S. Khan, the editor of the venerable Dhaka Courier—a highly respected, 40-year-old weekly newsmagazine in Bangladesh—updated an earlier article and wrote forcefully that the true litigants were the Bangladesh government on the one hand, and Grameen Telecom and its board members on the other.
In his article, titled “So Who Filed the Case Against Professor Yunus?”, he concludes the following after his painstakingly researched and reported analysis: “Yet, as far as the workers’ involvement in the government’s case goes, we have seen enough to conclude that not only did they not file the case, but they hardly played any part in it at all.”
But one thing is sure: the government will continue to repeat these debunked claims in the days ahead, just as they have argued that some unnamed lobbying firm spent $2 million to place a pro-Yunus ad in the Washington Post last March (a claim that was proven false here).
Yet with people like Professor Sobhan and Shayan Khan reporting the truth, we at the Protect Yunus Campaign are confident that the Bangladeshi people will see through these lies and understand what is actually happening: a travesty of justice.