The Time magazine has listed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as one of the 12 top women leaders of the world. She has been placed seventh on the list.
The top 12 women leaders are:
1) Yingluck Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand
2) Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany
3) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president of Argentina
4) Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil
5) Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia
6) Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia
7) Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh
8) Johanna Sigurdardottir, prime minister of Iceland
9) Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica,
10) Tarja Halonen, president of Finland
11) Dalia Grybauskaite, president of Lithuania
12) Kamla Persad-Bissessar, prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
The Time magazine said Sheikh Hasina, the leader of Awami League, has a history of surviving. In 1975, assassins killed her father (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), mother, three brothers and some other members of her family.
Hasina, then 28, happened to be abroad at the time. She later survived a grenade attack that killed more than 20 people, dodging the bullets that sprayed her car as she fled, the magazine said in a statement.
Hasina was first elected the country’s prime minister in 1996. But in 2001 parliamentary polls, Transparency International named Bangladesh as the most corrupt country in the world, and Hasina’s party suffered a defeat.
That was not the end of her, though. Through the December 2008 election, Awami League came to power again and the consummate survivor found herself prime minister for the second term, the statement added.
-With UNB/The Daily Star input
