Banker to the Poor (4 page)

Until midnight we monitored every single radio station on Zillur's giant shortwave radio. Between news items we ate delicious food supplied by Zillur's American wife, Joanne, and speculated on what might have happened to Sheikh Mujib.
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Finally, the news came that he had been arrested at Chittagong railway station while he was fleeing from the army (he was actually arrested at his house in Dhaka). We were in tears on hearing the news. All our fantasies of Sheikh Mujib leading the nation to victory were dashed. What would the Pakistani army do with him? Bring him back to Dhaka and execute him by firing squad? Hang him? Torture him to death?

I left for Washington, D.C., in the early hours of March 28, arriving at Enayet Karim's beautiful house in the late afternoon. Mrs. Karim, who was also a native of Chittagong, welcomed me warmly. It was a busy day. The telephone never stopped ringing. Some calls were local, others from far-flung Pakistani embassies or from Bengali officials searching for policy guidelines. Thrown into the midst of this excitement, I felt like part of an already-independent Bangladesh. There was no trace of Pakistan in the minds of those in the Karim household.

While enjoying this intoxicating scene, I noticed a serious-looking man busy writing. He was Mr. S. A. Karim, the deputy permanent representative of Pakistan at the United Nations, who had arrived from New York that morning. Eventually, he wanted to read aloud what he had written. Everyone gathered around him. He had just finished drafting an appeal to all heads of governments to put pressure on Pakistan to stop the genocide in Bangladesh.

I did not want the demonstration to be a poor show and kept trying to find out who was in charge of the next day's activities on the Hill. What preparations were being made? Was somebody preparing posters to hold up in front of the TV cameras? Nobody in Enayet Karim's house seemed to know. I thought I should take some initiative. I went to a department store and bought stacks of colored paper, paint, and brushes. Immediately I set to work making festoons, a skill I had acquired while a student at Chittagong College.

Shamsul Bari arrived. He was teaching Bangla at the University of Chicago. I had known him from a distance during our university days in Dhaka. The War of Liberation brought us close. We worked together during the entire period of the war.

By evening more people had assembled at Enayet Karim's house. Some worried about their families in Bangladesh; others wanted more information about the situation in Dhaka and what needed to be done. The night was spent analyzing the situation and deciding on the strategy for the following day: First, delivering an appeal to all embassies and heads of government, and second, organizing the demonstration on Capitol Hill. Mrs. Karim treated us as if we were her dearest friends, feeding us steaming plates of food while alternately cursing the Pakistani army and reciting Tagore poems.

The next morning, March 29, I woke up to shouting. I threw on some clothes and ran down to the anteroom, where a short, skinny person with a beard was lecturing Karim in a loud voice. The small room was packed with five or six people.

The tiny man was behaving very rudely. He kept accusing Karim and the other embassy officials of being traitors. The rest of the people in the room wore buttons printed with "BANGLADESH" in bold letters.

These visitors had driven from Harvard and other institutions in Boston to join the demonstration on Capitol Hill, and they were furious when they discovered that Bengali embassy officials had decided not to participate. The tiny man—Dr. Mohiuddin Alamgir, a fresh Ph.D. from Harvard, who became one of my closest friends—spared no harsh words in attacking Karim. I tried to defend my host, explaining that embassy officials had contacts with the high officials in the U.S. State Department who could brief them on the real situation. It was a good strategy to keep our high positions in the government so that the Pakistanis would not freely wield the power of the government against the Bengalis in East Pakistan.

Alamgir disagreed. This was only "sweet talk" by cowards who did not want to join the cause of liberation but protect their cushy lifestyle. The meeting ended in a stalemate. Only on August 4 did Bengali diplomats of the Pakistan embassy finally defect and join the Bangladesh government-in-exile.

That afternoon we all gathered at the steps of the U.S. Congress to demonstrate. Bengalis came from distant places. Washington, New York, and Detroit had the biggest contingents. I was particularly surprised to see so many Detroit factory workers who were from Sylhet District in Bangladesh.

Nobody knew quite what to do or where to go. We could not begin because we did not have official permission to demonstrate. We were still wondering how to organize ourselves when Shamsul Bari showed up with the necessary permission. I shouted at the top of my voice: "Here is our leader. Let's now line up behind him and start our demonstration."

It worked like magic. The demonstration on the steps of Capitol Hill was a grand affair. We were noticed by U.S. legislators. Congressional aides took time to be briefed on the situation and our demands. The news media were especially active; television cameras covered the rally and took on-the-spot interviews.

That evening, we all met at the residence of another official of the embassy, Mr. A. M. A. Muhith, the economic counselor. There was a heated debate over the coordination of Bengali activities in the United States and the immediate transfer of allegiance by Bengali diplomats. The shouting with which my day had begun was repeated with more intensity at this grand assembly—why were not Bengali diplomats leaving the Pakistan embassy right away? We left after dinner, knowing that we had to find a way to coordinate the activities of all Bengalis in the United States and convinced that the Bengali diplomats could no longer provide the necessary leadership. I began to doubt whether diplomats should stay on with Pakistan.

On March 30, Shamsul Bari and I were given the responsibility of visiting all the embassies, meeting the ambassadors or their representatives, explaining our cause, and requesting recognition of Bangladesh as an independent state. It was a very interesting experience. We visited many embassies in one day. Each one had its own style of receiving us, but there were many common questions: Whom do you represent? Do you have a U.S.-based organization? How can we "recognize" your country if you do not have a government? Is there any foreign government supporting you? What is the position of your diplomats in the United States? Are they supporting you? When are they going to come out in the open? What proportion of the population in "East Pakistan" wants an independent Bangladesh?

Only one question stumped us: "Do you have a government of your own?"

Bari and I decided that we had to have our own government immediately, but how does one go about establishing a government in Bangladesh while still in Washington? I had an idea: I could fly to Calcutta, find a few people to form a cabinet, and announce to the world that a Bangladesh government had been formed. In a snap, we would have both a country and a government. Bari liked the idea. We decided I would leave for Calcutta the next day.

I thought of another essential strategy—a radio station to broadcast programs for Bangladesh, so that the people inside Bangladesh knew what was going on and what they had to do. A radio transmitter, I thought, should be mounted on a vehicle. It should broadcast inside Bangladeshi territory and return to the Indian side of the border whenever chased by the Pakistani army. I had $6,000. This should cover the down payment for a transmitter.

We had some special requests for various embassies. At the Burmese embassy we asked Burma to keep its borders open to those fleeing from the Pakistani army. We would try to find funds to feed refugees from Bangladesh. At the Sri Lankan embassy we asked Sri Lanka to refuse landing rights to all Pakistani military and civilian flights between Bangladesh and Pakistan. Pakistan was known to carry army personnel, arms, and ammunition on civilian flights from Karachi to Dhaka. In the Indian embassy we were treated like highly placed diplomats. Officials there wanted to know about Bengali diplomats in the Pakistan embassy, about the whereabouts of our leaders, and whether we had established a U.S.-based organization. We asked India to open its border to refugees, provide free access to Calcutta for expatriate Bangladeshis, and relax rules surrounding Indian visas for Bengalis with Pakistani passports.

That night we had another exciting discussion about setting up a government. We slightly rearranged our earlier plan. It was decided that M. A. Hasan should leave immediately for Calcutta and Agartala to make initial contacts with the political leaders who had fled from Bangladesh. He would then send the signal for me to join him and form the new government.

That night Aga Hilali, the Pakistani ambassador, came on a courtesy visit to Enayet Karim. Several of us, who were eating dinner, were quickly pushed into an attic room with our food. We sat there for two hours without making a sound, so that the ambassador would not know that his Bengali colleague was harboring three antistate activists in his own house.

Hasan left for Calcutta and Agartala the next day as planned. From Calcutta, he sent a bitter message of disappointment in the leaders and advised me not to come. Soon after, the Mujibnagar government was formed. Bengalis in the United States and Canada concentrated on the campaign for Bangladeshi recognition, on stopping military aid to Pakistan, and on freeing Sheikh Mujib.

The Bangladesh League of America was established in New York under the leadership of Dr. Mohammad Alamgir, a physician, and in Chicago the Bangladesh Defense League was created by Dr. F. R. Khan, a Bengali-American architect who designed the Sears Tower in Chicago. Shamsul Bari became its secretary general. He published the first issue of the
Bangladesh Newsletter.
I took it over from him and published the newsletter regularly from my Nashville apartment at 500 Paragon Mills Road. My apartment became a communication center. The phone rang off the hook with calls from all over North America and the United Kingdom. All Bengalis wanted daily updates on the war.

Through the efforts of the Bengalis in Washington, the Bangladesh Information Center was also set up to do the lobbying in the House and the Senate. I took on the responsibility of running the information center for its initial period and then went on the road to organize teach-in workshops on university campuses all over the United States.

During the next nine months we drew a very clear picture of the future Bangladesh. We wanted to uphold democracy. We wanted to ensure the people's right to a free and fair election and to a life devoid of poverty. We dreamed of happiness and prosperity for all citizens and a nation that would stand with dignity among all other nations in the world.

On December 16, 1971, Bangladesh won its war of independence. The war had taken a heavy toll. Three million Bangladeshis had been killed and 10 million had left the country in search of safety in neighboring India. Millions more were the victims of rape and other atrocities committed by the Pakistani army. By the time the war was over, Bangladesh was a devastated country. The economy was shattered. Millions of people needed to be rehabilitated.

I knew that I had to return home and participate in the work of nation building. I thought I owed it to myself.

On my return to Bangladesh in 1972, I was offered a fancy title and appointed to the government's Planning Commission. My job was a bore. I had nothing to do all day but read newspapers. After repeated protests to the chief of the Planning Commission, Nurul Islam, I resigned to become head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University.

Chittagong University is located twenty miles east of the city of Chittagong on 1,900 acres of barren hills. Built in the mid-1960s from designs by a leading architect of Bangladesh, the university looks impressive. The buildings are constructed entirely of exposed red brick with open corridors and expansive rooms. But although pleasing to the eye, these modern buildings are not at all utilitarian. When I arrived, for instance, there was a huge office for the head of each department, but no office space for the rest of the teachers. One of the first things I did as head of Economics was to convert my office into a common room for my colleagues. Strangely enough, this made the staff uncomfortable. They expected the head of the department to have a big room, even if others did not have any place to sit.

It was a difficult time at the university. Teachers were refusing to grade examinations, accusing students of copying their answers from books and from each other. Many of the students were part of the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) and had just returned from war. They still carried their guns and threatened to harm the teachers if exam results were not announced soon.

At that time I lived with my parents in town. My father allowed me to use his car to commute to the campus every day. Along the way I drove through the village of Jobra, which stood between the highway and the campus. I noticed barren fields next to the village and asked a colleague, Professor H. I. Latifee, why they were not being cultivated for a winter crop. As he did not know, I proposed that we go talk to the villagers and find out the reason. It turned out that there was no water for irrigation.

I thought we should do something about the unused fields. It was a shame to let the land around a university campus remain barren. If a university is a repository for knowledge, then some of this knowledge should spill over to the neighboring community. A university must not be an island where academics reach out to higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of their findings.

Our campus housing faced a range of hills, and from my classroom I could see a stream of boys and girls, men and cattle, walking through the campus toward the hills every morning. They carried sharp knives and at sunset they returned with loads of twigs. It occurred to me that the university should convert these hills into fertile cropland. This would bring additional income to the university, employment to the villagers, and food to the country at large.

I also grew more and more curious about the village itself. I launched a project, with my students' help, to survey Jobra's economy. We wanted to find out how many of the families in the village owned cultivable land and what crops they grew. How did people without any land make a living? What skills did the villagers have? What impediments did they see to improving their lives? How many families could grow food to feed themselves for the whole year? How many could not? Who were the poor?

Analyses of the causes of poverty focus largely on why some countries are poor rather than on why certain segments of the population live below the poverty line. Socially conscious economists stress the absence of "entitlements" of the poor. What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-two years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the processes of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. As a result, poverty continues.

The 1974 famine dragged on and on, and the worse it became, the more agitated I grew. Unable to stand it any longer, I went to see the vice-chancellor of the university. A popular social commentator and novelist, Abul Fazal was considered by many to be the conscience of the nation. He greeted me politely.

"What can I do for you, Yunus?" he asked. A ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. Mosquitoes buzzed. His orderly brought tea.

"Many people are dying of starvation, yet everyone is afraid to talk about it," I responded.

Abul Fazal nodded. "What do you propose?"

"You are a respected man. I would ask you to make a statement to the press."

"Yes, but what?"

"A call to the nation and its leadership to end the famine. I am certain that all teachers on this campus will cosign their names to your letter if you take the lead. It would help mobilize national opinion."

"Yes." He sipped his tea. "Yunus," he said, "you write the statement, and I will sign it."

I smiled. "You are the writer. You will know what words to put in the statement."

"No, no, you do it, Yunus. You're passionate about this. You'll know what to say."

"But I am only an economics professor. And this document should become a rallying cry, a call to action."

The more I insisted that he was the perfect man to bring national attention to bear on the famine, the more Abul Fazal encouraged me to write the letter. He pushed his point so strongly that I had no alternative but to promise I would try. That evening I wrote out a statement. The next morning I brought the draft to the vice-chancellor and waited while he read it.

When he was finished, Abul Fazal reached for his pen and said, "Where do I sign?"

I was stunned. "But it is strongly worded. Maybe you want to change some things or suggest other ideas."

"No, no, no, it is excellent," he said. And with that he signed on the spot.

I had no choice. I signed the document as well, and I made copies of it and presented it to other faculty members. Some teachers raised objections to one word or another, but because the vice-chancellor had already signed, all of them eventually agreed to add their names to the declaration. We delivered it to the press that night, and the next day our statement was carried as a banner headline on the front pages of all the major newspapers.

Our statement started a chain reaction. Other universities and public bodies that had not spoken out against the famine took up our call. I began focusing all my efforts on farming. It was clear that Bangladesh, a territory of 35 million acres with a very dense population, needed to increase its food production. We had 21 million acres available for cultivation. In the rainy season we produced mainly rice and jute. By extending irrigation and improving water management during the dry winter season, we could increase our crops. Specialists estimated that the existing land yielded only 16 percent of our crop potential.

I decided I would experiment on the microlevel by helping the villagers of Jobra grow more food. But how would I go about it? Grow more in each crop cycle? Increase the number of crop plantings in each plot? I was not an agronomist. But I made it my business to study the low-yielding local variety of rice and more high-yielding varieties developed in the Philippines. At first the farmers were amused by my findings. But when they saw how very serious I was, they agreed to let me plant the high-yielding rice in their fields. My students and other university teachers joined the effort as volunteers. We explained to the village farmers the importance of spacing the seedlings at regular intervals and planting in a straight line to optimize crop yields. The local newspaper published photos of us, knee-deep in mud, showing local farmers how to use a string to plant rice in a straight line. Many readers were contemptuous of my hands-on approach.

Despite such skepticism, I kept trying to bring the academic world and the village together by championing a university project called the Chittagong University Rural Development Project (CURDP). Through the CURDP, I encouraged my students to go with me into the village and devise creative ways to improve day-to-day life there. By now I had almost completely abandoned classical book learning in favor of hands-on, person-to-person experience. Based on their experiences in the village, students could also choose a topic and write a research paper for course credit.

In the winter of 1975, I focused my attention on solving the problem of irrigation to raise an extra winter crop. I knew that during monsoon season almost every square meter of land was cultivated, including wasteland marshes, which produced rice and fish. Yet all these lands remained unused during winter. Why not add a winter crop? Every day I noticed an unused deep tubewell sitting idle in the middle of the uncultivated fields. It was the dry winter season, the season when the tubewell should have been irrigating the land for a new crop. But nothing was being done. The tubewell just sat there, brand new and unused.

When I asked why the tubewell was idle, I learned that the farmers were supposed to pay for the water but that they had fought with each other over the issue of money collection during the previous dry season. Since then they would have nothing to do with the deep tubewell.

This struck me as a terrible shame. In a country of famine, here was a 300-foot deep tubewell—a driven well—that could irrigate some sixty acres. I decided to make the tubewell work again.

It was not easy. Of all the modes of irrigation then available, deep tubewells were the most capital intensive. With their high operating costs, they proved highly inefficient and encouraged rampant corruption among those who dealt in fuel oil, lubricants, and spare parts. For the deep tubewell to operate efficiently, it needed an efficient water distribution system. In other words, it required a large number of small farmers to implement uniform crop decisions on their fragmented holdings. These farmers also needed instruction on fertilizer use, plant protection, and the repair and maintenance of the pumps. Unfortunately, although the government generously invested in modern irrigation technology, it did not provide the time, the resources, or the effort to resolve the people-centered problems such technology brought with it. Because of perennial management problems and technical breakdowns, the farmers were reluctant to reopen their tubewells. As a result, almost half the deep tubewells in Bangladesh had fallen out of use. The rusting machinery in abandoned pump houses was a testimony to yet another failure of misguided development.

In Jobra, I called a meeting of local farmers and sharecroppers. I proposed an experiment, in which we would all join a new type of agricultural cooperative called the Nabajug ("New Era") Three Share Farm. The landowners would contribute the use of their land during the dry season; the sharecroppers would contribute their labor; and I would contribute the cost of fuel to run the deep tubewell, the seeds for high-yield crops, the fertilizer, the insecticide, and the technical know-how. In exchange, each of the three parties (farmers, sharecroppers, and myself) would share one-third of the harvest.

At first the villagers were suspicious of my proposal. So much ill will and distrust had built up between the well operators and the farmers that they were not ready to listen to my plan. Some argued that paying me one-third of the harvest would be too much. Even with my offer to bear all losses, my proposal failed to interest them.

At a second meeting, one week later, I was able to convince them that they had nothing to lose. They would receive irrigation water, fertilizer, seeds, and insecticides without any up-front payment. They only had to agree to give me one-third of their harvest. The poor sharecroppers greeted my proposal with enthusiasm. The relatively well-off farmers reluctantly agreed to give it a try.

This was a difficult period for me. I would often lie awake at night, anxious lest anything go wrong. Every Tuesday evening I visited the farmers and held a formal meeting with the four student "block leaders" I had appointed as well as my thirteen-man advisory team. We discussed and reviewed the problems of fertilizer, irrigation, technology, storage, transport, and marketing.

The first year's efforts ended in success. The farmers were happy. They had not spent any cash and had gotten a high yield. I, however, lost 13,000 taka because some farmers gave me less than the one-third they had promised. But I was still thrilled. We had managed to grow a crop where no crop had ever grown before in the dry season. The fields had been full of the emerald green of standing rice. Nothing is quite as beautiful as farmers harvesting their rice. The sight warmed my heart.

But I still had misgivings. The success of our three-share experiment had highlighted a problem I had not focused on before. Once the rice was harvested, labor was needed to separate the rice from the dry straw. This mindless, boring work was offered to the cheapest day laborers: destitute women who would otherwise be reduced to begging. For hours on end these poor women would separate the rice with their feet, holding themselves upright by gripping the tiny ledges on the wall in front of them. All day, some twenty-five to thirty women would perform this continuous twisting motion, wrapping the rice straws around their feet to separate the paddy. In the early morning they would race to work, competing for the most comfortable position against the wall. What a terrible life—to earn forty cents investing the weight of your body and the tiresome motion of your bare feet for ten hours a day! These women, many of them widowed, divorced, or abandoned with children to feed, were too poor even to be sharecroppers. They were landless and assetless and without any hope. They were the poorest of the poor. It was clear to me that the wealthier the farmer, the more he earned from my Three Share Farm experiment, and the poorer the worker, the smaller was her share. "Why should we be happy with your Three Share Farm?" one woman said to me. "After a few weeks of threshing, we are out of work, and we have nothing to show for ourselves." She was right. For the same work, a woman could earn at least four times more if she had the financial resources to buy the rice paddy and process it herself.