Ground Realities
Of foreign policy, of scholar diplomats
IT is as good a time as any, once more, to raise the issue of where Bangladesh's diplomacy is going. Or you could ask if there is any diplomacy at work, if there is a foreign policy that we can truly call our own. Something there is about the structure of our diplomacy that is deeply worrying. One would have thought that the tranche of reforms the caretaker government took upon itself to pursue and implement would include a very fundamental need to recast the modalities upon which the country has been interacting with nations around the world.
That certainly has not happened, except for the periodic statements, all in timeless, clichéd manner, of the accolades Bangladesh has been earning over certain issues on the global stage. It does not take much intelligence to understand that patronising comments are all too often mistaken for, or passed off as, instances of the successes being achieved by our foreign policy mandarins.
Just how much of a bind we are in concerning diplomacy should be gauged rather easily through a study of the plight of our workers in Malaysia. Hardly a week goes by when large numbers of these workers are not deported back home, while some even more unfortunate ones find themselves in prisons in Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere.
Of course, it is the recruiting agents and the employing firms that are to be blamed for the misery of these people. But when you consider the role of the nation's high commission in Kuala Lumpur, you have all the reasons to ask if the men sent there by the Foreign Office are at all doing a good job. Obviously they are not.
You only have to hear everything that the workers, those trapped in Malaysia as also those who have found themselves back home, have been saying about the insensitivity of the high commission to their plight. And, pray, whatever happened to the inquiry undertaken by the government into the scandal, last year, of the high commission's allegedly playing a role in a beating up of Bengali workers on its premises in Kuala Lumpur?
Media reports of late have spoken of the officials at whom fingers have been pointed over the despicable incident still holding on to their jobs. The Foreign Office should explain its position on the issue.
Bangladesh's foreign policy has over the years dwindled into something less than the dynamic. Innovation has hardly ever been a component of it. It has moved along on the premise that a reaction to every action that occurs somewhere around the world is enough to project an image of participation in global affairs.
Well, that is not good enough as policy. It is not policy. We do not have a position on Iraq; we have said nothing on the Iranian nuclear enrichment programme vis-à-vis Washington that can persuade people into believing that we do have perspectives to offer on the situation.
We have been eerily silent on the matter of human rights in Myanmar. It is the old anodyne slogan of friendship for all and malice toward none that has lingered, to our overall embarrassment. Our links with India have largely stayed tenuous. With Pakistan, we have been careful about not insisting on a resolution of the old issues, the future of the Biharis and the settlement of the assets and liabilities question of pre-1971 Pakistan, with the result that Islamabad has been kept happy.
No one in the Foreign Office has yet informed the country what action it took when the high commission in Pretoria was made the target of burglary, more than once, in the last one year or so.
While all these matters have cast a shadow on the nation's diplomacy, questions have also arisen about the quality of the diplomats, from ambassadors and high commissioners to counsellors, who serve at various points across the globe.
Diplomats well-known for their grasp of international issues, as also for their ability to speak for Bangladesh in the world's significant spots, were sent by the four-party BNP-led government into exile to places where they had little to offer.
A good number of these individuals of accomplishment are still in exile, with little chance that they will be permitted to utilise their intellectual abilities in capitals where Bangladesh needs to raise its profile significantly.
It does not make the nation happy that our diplomats, a goodly number of them, have traditionally treated their stay at the missions abroad as a long holiday away from home, indeed have not had the opportunity or did not quite use the opportunity to establish and buttress links with the governments of the countries they had been posted in.
The soul is not cheered by sightings of our ambassadors in Washington spending time in the company of expatriate Bengalis coming together at so many diasporic associations in places like Los Angeles and New York.
Neither has it given us joy knowing that our high commissioners in London have passed the entirety of their terms of duty being guests of honour at receptions organised by the expatriate Bengali community throughout the United Kingdom.
Our envoys are not seen on television networks in the West, which is proof once again of the poor standards upon which the press wings at our missions have generally worked. But perhaps the worst that happens to our diplomacy is the propensity of many of our senior diplomats to begin planning, even as they serve at the missions abroad, a life in the West once they retire from service.
Take a count, and you will find a fairly good number of Bangladesh's former diplomats, many of whom retired as ambassadors or high commissioners or deputy high commissioners, settled comfortably in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries these days.
And all these men initiated the process of settlement, through coming by Green Cards and other measures, while in service. If that is the way a Bengali diplomat treats the country that raised him to the heights, it goes to demonstrate the sheer helplessness of the Foreign Office, indeed of the government as a whole, in exercising authority in getting these men to come back home once they have stepped into the twilight.
Ambassadors ordered to report back home or proceed to a new station have refused to comply with instructions. These men give Bangladesh a bad name. But what have our governments, this one and those that preceded it, done to correct conditions?
For years on end, officials and employees at the various levels at Bangladesh's diplomatic missions have declined to go home once their term of duty has come to an end. Their successors too have committed similar misdeeds. Men who have served as ministers (press) have stayed on in foreign land even after their contracts were cancelled in Dhaka. Have our governments informed the governments in host countries about the need to have these men detected and sent back home?
It is the people of Bangladesh who are put to shame by men who swiftly and unabashedly demonstrate, once they are no more a part of the missions they had earlier been sent to, that the homeland does not matter anymore.
There is a whole case for a reshaping of foreign policy. There are strong arguments for placing good, efficient and articulate men and women at embassies and high commissions abroad. And sometimes it will be a huge pleasure for the people of Bangladesh to come by images of scholar diplomats sent out to speak for the country on foreign shores.
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