Muhammad Yunus: Bangladesh's 'banker to the poor'
Muhammad Yunus will helm Bangladesh's interim government after the ouster of premier Sheikh Hasina, who had hounded him in speeches and through the courts.
The 84-year-old, known as the "banker to the poorest of the poor", was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work loaning small cash sums to rural women, allowing them to invest in farm tools or business equipment and boost their earnings.
Grameen Bank, the microfinance lender he founded, was lauded for helping unleash breakneck economic growth in Bangladesh and its work has since been copied by scores of developing countries.
«Human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty,» Yunus said during his Nobel lecture, daring his audience to imagine a world where deprivation was confined to history museums.
But his public profile in Bangladesh earned him the hostility of Hasina, who once accused him of «sucking blood» from the poor.
Hasina's 15-year tenure was characterised by a growing intolerance of dissent before her hurried resignation and departure from Bangladesh on Monday and Yunus's popularity had marked him as a potential rival.
Yunus announced plans in 2007 to set up his own «Citizen Power» party to end Bangladesh's confrontational political culture, which has been punctuated by instability and periods of military rule.
He abandoned those ambitions within months but the enmity aroused by his challenge to the ruling elite has persisted.
Yunus was hit with more than 100 criminal cases and a smear campaign by a state-led
