The Awami League will be welcome to contest elections once those responsible for killings and abuses are held accountable, Chief Adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus has told TIME magazine.
Everyone would receive a fair trial, Yunus said in an interview with the American magazine published on Thursday.
“They are as free as anybody else to participate,” the chief adviser said about the party ousted from power amid a mass uprising. “We’ll fight them on political grounds.”
The Awami League during its long tenure had created “this environment of total oppression, denial of everything, killing at random, disappearance of people, destroying every single institution,” Yunus said, calling it a fascist regime.
According to the magazine, Yunus said he would be seeking Awami League President Sheikh Hasina’s extradition from India, following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the ousted prime minister by the International Crimes Tribunal in October.
“Not only is she being hosted by India, the worst part is that she’s talking, which causes a lot of problems for us,” Yunus told TIME.
“It makes people very unhappy to hear that voice. So this is something that we have to resolve.”
Amid demands from various quarters for a timeline and roadmap to elections, Yunus said he would not be rushed.
“I don’t have a date,” he said. “First we have to fix the rails so that the train goes in the right direction.”
The chief adviser also discussed the recent US presidential election victory of Donald Trump and its potential impact on the relationship between Bangladesh and the United States.
Yunus said he was confident that he could find common ground with Trump despite their differing worldviews.
“Trump is a businessman; we are in business,” he told TIME. “We are not asking for free money to help us out of some crisis; we want a business partner.”
Yunus is also determined to recapture some of the reported billions of dollars that the Awami League has siphoned out of the country. He says that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has offered to share the bloc’s mechanisms for rooting out corruption in aspirant members. “Every country that we talk to has offered support to get the money back,” says Yunus. “They have done it before in other situations.”
Yunus also said he was resolute in his efforts to recover some of the billions of dollars allegedly siphoned out of the country by the Awami League.
He mentioned that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had offered to share the EU’s mechanisms for combating corruption among aspiring member states.
“Every country that we talk to has offered support to get the money back,” said Yunus. “They have done it before in other situations.”
