Ground Realities
Diplomacy, politics and closed windows
Time was when diplomats stayed frenetically busy extolling the virtues and values of their nations in the countries they were posted in. Diplomacy, if you remember, was once a truly high calling, one that established the dynamics of how nations were expected to interact with one another.
There was Thomas Jefferson and then there was Benjamin Franklin, both of whom excelled themselves in France as representatives of the just freed British colony that called itself the United States of America. And there remains the story of Talleyrand, the shrewd French diplomat negotiating his country out of the woods for years on end.
Our own modern-day diplomat Henry Kissinger brought him back in circulation, along with Castlereagh and Metternich, in the late 1950s. All three men have been points of reference in the historical diplomatic ensemble for the past four decades, perhaps more.
So there you have something to mull over. And while you do, you might want to reflect on how the principles of diplomacy appear to have taken a fresh new turn, especially when such diplomacy relates to third world nations unable to have their political classes come together in their broad national interests.
A few weeks ago, Kofi Annan travelled all the way to Nairobi to convince President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga that they needed to rein in their antagonism so that their followers could stop hacking one another to death and let Kenya move on to normality. Not many months ago, it was the United States that convinced General Pervez Musharraf that he would have to let Benazir Bhutto get back to Pakistan if politics was to recover something of a democratic sheen.
Not much later, the Saudis brushed aside Musharraf's objections to a return home by Nawaz Sharif, who triumphantly went back to Pakistan and today goes around spreading the word that the general must be impeached.
There are other instances of diplomatic intervention (or shall we call it intercession?) you come across these days. Look around you. The American Geeta Pasi has just been to see some of the leading lights in the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The degree of influence that an American diplomat wields in Bangladesh's politics is not hard to imagine.
Anybody who is somebody in a major political party of this country finds himself in a state of excitement once someone like Pasi (or, before her, Patricia Butenis) decides to drop by or, even better, chooses to send out gracious invitations to dinner at her diplomatic residence. That causes a good number of people -- and some of them are people you know -- to grumble loudly, to ask the rather impertinent question of why a foreign diplomat posted in the capital of this sovereign country must be going around speaking to and advising men and women who should be knowing of better ways of conducting politics.
Grumble all you want. The fact remains, though, that these diplomats, especially from the West, have transformed themselves into a class, despite themselves, owing to the manner in which our politicians have stepped up to their doors with their pleas and entreaties in defence of democracy and good governance in Bangladesh.
It is a question of self-esteem you deal with here. And that kind of self-esteem is what you spot in places like India, where democratic pluralism is so rooted in depth and substance that no foreigner will call forth the courage or the naivete, as the case may be, to advise politicians in the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party on how they should be dealing with one another in the interest of democracy.
It now follows that the degree of strength on which Indian democracy operates is non-existent in Bangladesh. Worse, there is yet hardly any hint of things getting any better, which is another way of saying that between now and the general elections, whenever they are held (and the deadline must not go beyond December of this year), the people who man the embassies of western nations here in Dhaka will remain busy sketching out packed schedules of meetings between Bengali politicians and the all-powerful diplomats of the world's dominant nations stationed in Dhaka.
Now, the truth is that you might be tempted, sorely, to cast long dirty looks at your politicians for having brought this country to this kind of an impasse, for impasse it is. But when you sit back, perhaps in the depths of the night, and reflect on the realities around you, you just could feel something of a ripple of sympathy rise up in you for many of these politicians.
No, we are not speaking here of the men and women who, under the cover of elective politics, pushed the nation to extremes of despair and desperation in the five years till October 2006. These are people who must be made to answer before the law for all their acts of commission and sins of omission, for everything nefarious they have caused to happen.
But there are other politicians whose relentless struggle for good government, for welfare-oriented politics, is on record. Of course, Dr. Kamal Hossain thinks the political classes, irrespective of party or alliance affiliations, all hold collective responsibility for the imposition of a state of emergency in January 2007. Is that truly the case? Or must we now remind ourselves of the malaise that began extending itself all across the land with the Iajuddin caretaker administration running the show?
No, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot, and we do not, judge all our politicians by the same yardstick. And while we believe it is unfortunate that politics did reach a point where an imposition of emergency became an absolute necessity, even an inevitability, we do not think that those who put up a brave struggle to send the Iajuddin caretaker outfit packing were in any way jeopardising the cause of democracy in this country.
They did what needed to be done. The resignation of four honest advisers in that crooked arrangement vindicates such a position.
And why do many among us now have this crescendo of sympathy for all these embattled politicians? Why are we not inclined to take issue with them over their linkages with western diplomats? The answers are not hard to come by. In the more than a year that has elapsed since the arrival of the existing caretaker arrangement, no windows have been opened that could permit the political classes and the government to smile at one another, to nod at one another.
Our advisers come forth with their opinions on politics when they are in the presence of the media. And our politicians have stumbled on the very legitimate thought that all those talk shows on television, interspersed with tea or post-prandial conversations with western diplomats, are some of the means by which they can pass on their ideas or their worries to the powers that be.
Anyone who suggests that such a means of communication between two important players on the current national stage is fine, or as it should be, is missing the point and forgetting history. In 1969, for all his imposition of martial law in Pakistan, General Yahya Khan went around meeting Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, indeed everyone who mattered in national politics at the time.
In Bangladesh today, it is now all those well-meaning foreigners like Geeta Pasi and Anwar Chowdhury who, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, have taken upon themselves the role of intermediaries between the politicians and the administration. They did not ask for such space. Must we now grumble?
Men with a sense of history, with clear perspectives on their heritage, do not grumble. They wait for that pristine dawn when men greater than they will arise in their midst, to remind them of Bangabandhu and Tajuddin Ahmed, to take the old, ancient path to collective self-esteem along the tradition set by these supermen as they led us to freedom.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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