Swiss Newspaper’s Report: Anti-liberation forces seize control of unelected Yunus govt

The Jammat-e-Islami and other anti-liberation forces have seized control of the transitional government under Muhammad Yunus, aiming to ban the Awami League and revoke the 1972 secular constitution, effectively reverting Bangladesh to its pre-independence state. In her recent article, Charlotte Jacquemart, a prominent Swiss journalist, highlights these developments.

Charlotte Jacquemart is a journalist, author, and moderator. She has been with NZZ am Sonntag, a Swiss German-language weekly newspaper, since 2004. She has a strong connection to Bangladesh, having worked as an intern for the Daily Star in 2004. She has written extensively about Bangladesh and its challenges, including the Rana Plaza disaster. She recently visited Bangladesh and wrote a report about her experiences there. The following is an extract from her report published on 4 January 2025 in the popular Swiss German-language weekly newspaper SonntagsZeitung.

Bangladesh is actually a welcoming country—green, lush, with people who like to laugh and chat. But if you walk through the streets of the capital Dhaka, you will mostly see gloomy faces; women have become rarer and mostly veiled. Riots are becoming more frequent. Protests break out almost daily, bringing the city to a standstill. Bearded men run around with sticks, hitting others. They call themselves a "mob."

Under the secular Awami League, radical Islamic parties and groups were banned and in some cases even persecuted. But after the August coup, Islamist groups seized the opportunity—together with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus—and took power. On the surface, the coup was presented as a "student revolution": the students were protesting against the privileges of war veterans.

An unelected interim government under Yunus has been in power in Dhaka for around five months now, and parliament has been dissolved. Islamist parties are allowed to operate again. "Advisers," mostly young men, are in control of the levers of power. Their aim is to ban the Awami League and abolish the secular constitution of 1972.

The change of government has hit secular and liberal intellectuals the hardest. Not only members of the Awami League are being persecuted, arrested, charged, and their accounts frozen, but also journalists who are close to the ideology of the former ruling party. Colleagues who dare to speak openly about it have become rare. But you can find them: For example, Mustak, whose award-winning journalism career ended overnight after 35 years when Yunus took office. The meeting with him takes place in the embassy district of Gulshan, where there are fewer protests. Mustak stares at a list of names that he has brought with him. "More than 1,000 journalists have lost their jobs since Yunus took office in August," he says.

But why is an 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner making common cause with Islamists? The answer is given by the head of a press NGO, whose name cannot be mentioned, on the other side of Dhaka. "Because Yunus personally benefits from it: His first official act was to replace many judges. They overturned all past rulings against him. Yunus also no longer has to pay a large fine for tax evasion."

And he continued: "For the Islamists, however, he is the perfect figurehead. The West does not question him as a Nobel Peace Prize winner; they look the other way," says the activist. Yunus will want to stay in power as long as possible and delay elections. "He is where he always wanted to be: at the head of the nation." In fact, the Nobel Peace Prize winner has never made a secret of his political ambitions.

During her visit to Dhaka, Charlotte Jacquemart also met with a few journalists from the Daily Star, many of whom inquired about job opportunities in Europe as Bangladesh has increasingly become dangerous for them. She wrote:

The last visit is to the "Daily Star," the largest English-language daily newspaper in Bangladesh. In the cafeteria, several colleagues are immediately seated at the table. The younger ones have just one question: whether there are jobs for them in Europe. "We are ducking down at the moment, not saying anything on social media. But in the long run, that's not a life," says one. A journalist pulls out her phone and shows a video in which she is attacked by a mob in the street while filming protests. The phone is knocked out of her hand, and stones fly. "This has become my everyday life," she says.

The editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, Mafuz Anam, is one of the few who still dares to call for the protection of press freedom, which is guaranteed by the country's constitution, in his columns. But Anam does not want to speak publicly. Understandable: In front of the editorial office, demonstrators are demanding that the editor-in-chief be hanged. On the same day, Islamists slaughtered a cow in front of the offices of the Bengali sister newspaper "Prothom Alo." They are demanding that both newspapers be closed.