Recently, Professor Yunus attended the Global Baku Forum and was awarded the prestigious Tree of Peace Award. This same award was bestowed upon Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2014—an award she proudly accepted.
One would think that having this award given to a Bangladeshi for the second time in ten years would be a cause for national celebration. Of course, among some, it was. But government ministers began criticizing this new form of recognition for their countryman from the outset. Their first response was to say that it was given to Professor Yunus due to “lobbyists” advocating for him. In the process, they impugned the integrity of the judges—the same group that deemed the Prime Minister worthy of the award not long ago. This tired tactic of saying that any recognition that Professor Yunus receives is due to “lobbying” begs the question: if there were some elite lobbying firm working for Professor Yunus, wouldn’t the government have figured out which one was on the case and have named it publicly by now?
In fact, through his positive work over decades, Professor Yunus has amassed a vast reservoir of goodwill among people and organizations around the world. The Protect Yunus Campaign is a loose network of these people that works to respond to his persecution. There is no “lobbying firm” involved, and even if there was, what would be wrong with that? Governments, companies, nonprofits and prominent individuals use public relations and lobbying firms all the time.
More recently, the education minister and foreign minister have raised the issue of the Yunus Centre claiming that UNESCO was associated with the Tree of Peace Award. This is what was communicated to the Yunus Centre by the people who requested that Professor Yunus agree to accept the award. It should be noted that Professor Yunus has already received hundreds of awards and honorary degrees, including the Nobel Peace Prize. He is not in need of any others, but he nonetheless agreed to accept this award.
It turns out that some of the information the Yunus Centre received about UNESCO’s affiliation with the award was not accurate. They promptly issued a clarification with complete documentation showing how closely UNESCO was involved in the prize, even if it was not technically a UNESCO prize per se. However, it is interesting to note that when the Prime Minister received the award in 2014, newspapers such as Prothom Alo English ran headlines in their articles about it that mentioned UNESCO and opened their reporting with words such as these: “Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday got recognition from the UNESCO…. UNESCO director general Irina Bokova presented a memento titled, ‘Peace Tree’, to the Prime Minister in recognition of her outstanding contribution to girls’ and women education.”
One would think that the Yunus Centre’s clarification would be the end of the controversy. But now the ministers are talking about legal action against the Yunus Centre for this unintentional and minor error (certainly when compared to the lies that the government has propagated in their campaign against Professor Yunus, a few of which you can read about here and here). This escalation is yet another case of the Bangladeshi government weaponizing the judicial system against citizens it deems to be insufficiently loyal. Perhaps this response was an effort to distract attention from the dramatic fall in the nation’s foreign reserves by US$533 million, which came to light last week.
In fact, the only party that could conceivably have standing to sue the Yunus Centre over this matter would be UNESCO, and we are not holding our breath for that to happen. They, like the U.N. in general, admire Professor Yunus and his service to humanity, as you can see here and elsewhere.
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