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Delivering his maiden address at the General Debate of the 79th UN General Assembly session, Yunus said he stands in “this Parliament of nations, thanks to an epochal transformation that Bangladesh witnessed this July and August”.
“We believe this evolution that the world witnessed in Bangladesh in the span of a few weeks may inspire many across communities and countries to stand for freedom and justice. I would call upon the international community to engage with the new Bangladesh anew that aims to realise freedom and democracy beyond letters for everyone,” the Chief Adviser said in his over 35-minute address.
Yunus asserted that his government shall adhere to all international, regional and bilateral instruments that Bangladesh is party to. The country, he said, will continue to remain an active proponent of multilateralism with the UN at the core.
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The 84-year-old Nobel laureate was sworn-in as head of Bangladesh’s interim government in August after weeks-long protests that turned violent and culminated in the resignation of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who has since fled to India.
Addressing world leaders from the podium of the UN General Assembly hall, Yunus said the power of the ordinary people, “in particular, our youth, presented to our nation an opportunity to overhaul many of our systems and institutions”.
He said the uprising led by the students and youth was initially aimed at ending discrimination. “Progressively, the movement evolved into a people’s movement. The world eventually saw how people at large stood against autocracy, oppression, discrimination, injustice and corruption, both on the streets and online,” Yunus said.
He said Bangladesh’s people, “particularly youth, gained us independence from an autocratic and undemocratic regime with an exceptional resolve and capability. That collective resolve should define Bangladesh of the future and place our nation as a responsible state in the comity of the nations”.
Yunus said the “people’s movement” left an estimated over “800 martyrs” in the hands of the autocratic regime.
He said Bangladesh was born because of her people’s profound belief in liberalism, pluralism and secularism. “Decades later, our generation Z is making us revisit and reimagine the very values that our people stood for back in 1971, as our people also did in 1952 to defend our mother language, Bangla,” he said, referring to the 1971 Liberation war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.
Underlining that his government aims at ensuring good governance across all sectors, Yunus said the country’s youth and people have entrusted him and his colleagues in the Council with enormous responsibilities to “reconstruct a decaying state apparatus”.
He said as he took office, to his “utter shock and dismay”, he discovered how “endemic corruption” impacted a functional democracy. “How key institutions were ruthlessly politicised, how public coffers were reduced to rubble, how oligarchs took over business, how chosen few concentrated wealth in their hands and amassed and laundered wealth out of Bangladesh.” Noting that justice, ethics and morality, almost at every level, reached a low, Yunus said under such circumstances, “we were asked to rebuild Bangladesh and reestablish the country that our people aspire to see, to correct the ills of the past” and also to build a competitive and agile economy and a just society.
During his visit to New York for the high-level UNGA week, Yunus has held bilateral discussions with key leaders including US President Joe Biden, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Nepalese Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli.
He also met Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and World Bank President Ajay Banga on the sidelines of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had met with Bangladesh’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Md Touhid Hossain in New York on Monday and the conversation focussed on the bilateral ties between India and Bangladesh.