Dr Yunus: The liability of our pride

Report of Norwegian Newspaper Aftenposten on Grameen Phone
exploitation of workers
Grameen Phone, the milk-cow of Dr. Yunus, is in fact bilking it’s poor workers. The documentary, made by Danish journalist Tom Heinemann and to be aired on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) Thursday evening, reveals shocking working conditions at the firms supplying Grameen Phone. Employees were shown working with hazardous chemicals and heavy metals virtually without any safety protection. This recent finding of labour scandal of Grameen Phone and Telenor consortium has cast a shadow on already controversial image of Dr Yunus.

Nobel Prize, particularly in peace has often been tainted with political intrigues which can be likened, in the context of Bangladesh, with the action plan of DUDAK. DUDAK is using it’s anti-graft campaign as a strategy to achieve it’s goal to decouple politics from public. Nobel Peace Prize, often seems to have a political agenda behind it’s peaceful façade. It gets mired in further controversies when an economist, instead of getting recognition for his giant contribution in economics, gets a peace prize.

Henry Kissinger has been indicted for war crime and bloody political conspiracies in Vietnam, Cyprus, Cambodia, Chile, East Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was the architect of ‘Operation Condor’ which unleashed killing, execution, disappearance and torture of hundreds of thousands of left political activists and intellectuals throughout Latin America in 70s. He received Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. Menachem Begin, in 1945 had dead or alive bounty of ₤10,000 on his head by British Imperial Administration in Palestine, won Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 with Anwar Sadat of Egypt for Camp David Peace treaty. The peace treaty has ever been collecting dust in the shelf of White House. Nobel Prize in Peace, literally, gave him the license of heinous crime to invade Lebanon and to slaughter hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

These are the few examples to expose the nobility and novelty of the Peace Prize. Dr. Yunus has joined the hall of fame of the global capitalist elites for turning poverty into a lucrative commodity for capital. To unmask his other face, take a snapshot of his recent choreography on our political stage when the curtain dropped to a mysterious end. But truly that is not the end. He is still lurking in the murky water of our post one-eleven politics. Remember, when DU campus exploded against present regime and then military sledge hammer came down ruthlessly on the teachers and students of DU, in frugally worded single sentence, our guardian angel expressed his reaction – ‘everything is going fine.’ During his recent visit to USA, Dr Yunus gave a keynote speech in front of the august audience of Commonwealth Club of California. Next day, he was speaking to a selected gathering of glamour-struck, myopic gold-fish Bangali community in USA. Please listen to these two speeches, if you can, which will help you diagnose the diabolic bipolarity of our Nobel Laureate Dr. Yunus.