US President Joe Biden met Tuesday with Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus on the margins of the UN’s annual summit, in a show of support after an uprising toppled the country’s autocratic government.
Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, later received high praise from former president Bill Clinton, who hailed their 40-year-long friendship and the global impact of the Bangladeshi’s pioneering microfinance loans.
The 84-year-old economist was appointed as the country’s “chief advisor” in August following the bloody, student-led movement that ousted premier Sheikh Hasina, who has since fled the country.
Biden offered “continued US support as Bangladesh implements its new reform agenda,” a White House statement said.
The US-Bangladesh relationship “is rooted in shared democratic values and strong people-to-people ties,” it said.
According to a readout provided by Bangladeshi officials, Yunus briefed Biden on how the students “rose against the tyranny of the previous government and gave their lives to create this opportunity to rebuild Bangladesh,” and said his interim government would need US help to rebuild the nation.
Yunus also presented Biden with a book featuring paintings made by the students.
Yunus was later invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting, where former president Clinton said “few people on this planet have done as much to change the lives of ordinary people who would never have had access to credit.”
Their friendship dates back to the 1980s, when Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, invited Yunus to visit and share his approach to alleviating poverty through small loans, which had successfully empowered impoverished Bangladeshi women without access to traditional banking services.
“You’re the only old guy I know who was ever drafted for his eminent position by the young people of his country,” Clinton quipped about Yunus’s elevation to interim leader. “That’s because he has succeeded in doing what we all must do: we all have to stay in the future business.”
Yunus, in turn, thanked Clinton for believing in him in his early days, and for standing by him despite criticism at the time for promoting a Bangladeshi economist’s ideas in America.
He also paid tribute to Bangladeshi youthful revolutionaries, saying: “They are the ones creating the new version of Bangladesh let’s wish them every success.”
Hasina’s government was accused of widespread rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of political rivals.
More than 450 people were killed in the weeks of violence leading up to her removal.
Since her departure for exile in neighboring India, cabinet ministers and other senior members of Hasina’s party have been arrested, and her government’s appointees have been purged from courts and the central bank.
Journalists seen as close to her regime have also been detained.
While the United States had generally maintained a cooperative relationship with Hasina, an ally of India and a partner on issues like combating Islamist extremism, Washington had criticized her government’s democratic backsliding.
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