Diplomacy and enlightened self-interest
FOREIGN Minister Dipu Moni has re-emphasised the traditional basics of Bangladesh's foreign policy, those the new government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will carry forward as a matter of continuity. It was Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who first took the cue from Abraham Lincoln, back in 1972, to enlighten us on the principle that Bangladesh's diplomacy would work on. This country, said he, believed in friendship with all and malice towards none.
The spirit of pacifism was well taken; and it was this spirit which successive governments, those foisted on us through coups d' etat as well those we elected to power, sought to maintain. Now that Dr. Moni has reasserted the old theme, we cannot say we are unhappy.
And yet the time has now perhaps arrived when diplomacy for Bangladesh needs to go through certain readjustments. These readjustments can be considered from a couple of perspectives.
In the first place, there is the overall restructuring of the Bangladesh diplomatic establishment that has now become necessary. And it has because of the slow but sure decline in the quality of the nation's foreign service over the years.
A priority for the new foreign minister, as also for the new minister of state for foreign affairs, is to transform the Foreign Office into a zone of excellence that will be able to present Bangladesh's case effectually, in that intellectual sense of the meaning, before the rest of the world. That, of course, calls for a recruitment of officers armed with a clear and thorough grasp of history and contemporary global realities.
That said, it is equally important that diplomacy be prevented from becoming the exclusive preserve of the Foreign Service. Elitism generally strips away at promise and, worse, leaves those caught in its web inhabiting a world divorced from the ground realities at home.
Since the emergence of Bangladesh, elitism has by and large eaten away at the vitals of foreign policy and has all too often reduced our diplomacy into a club of careerists characterised by snobbery.
That is reason why, in important capitals of the globe, those dispatched as ambassadors or high commissioners and holding other senior positions should be men and women of impeccable intellectual reputation and possessed of a high sense of history, Bangladesh's as well as that of the world outside its frontiers. And these men and women need not be from the Foreign Service. They can be spotted in academia and elsewhere. It is a thought the foreign minister can let her mind dwell on.
But let there be a caveat here. Diplomats brought in from outside the specific parameters of the Foreign Office should be individuals whose record of service to the country has never been in question, whose faith in the core principles of the nation's war of liberation has never wavered, who have a clear, unambiguous understanding of international relations.
At the same time, and naturally, these individuals should be of a liberal outlook, are able to listen to the other person's point of view and are morally powerful enough to refuse to kowtow to politicians when they do not agree with policy.
And for the politicians in power, the overarching thought must be one of sending on diplomatic assignments only those men and women who are keen and suave enough to present their nation in all its brilliance and in all its stark realities to people abroad.
And let these diplomats not be treated with condescension; and let no one who lobbies or has lobbied in the past for a job abroad be appointed to important, sensitive capitals, indeed to any capital. Those who have gained positions through lobbying have left diplomacy hemorrhaging.
In the second place (and that is the second perspective relating to a reshaping of Bangladesh's foreign policy), friendship with all and malice toward none is surely a given. And yet there is today a critical need for a foreign policy that will have at core the principle of enlightened national self-interest. The old questions of assets and liabilities; stranded Pakistanis, as also a determination and delimitation of national maritime boundaries, clearly ought to be approached from such an angle.
Diplomacy cannot any more rest on old, anodyne slogans. And while it is true that in an era of so-called globalisation, it has become rather difficult for small states to stake out positions that diverge from those of developed societies, it is also true that sometimes nations such as Bangladesh must draw their own inferences and conclusions over issues of the kind at play today in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the Middle East.
Additionally, a special focus of our foreign policy from here on should be one of keeping in healthy touch with governments in whose countries our migrant workers happen to be employed. Past failures on the part of Bangladesh's diplomatic machinery to establish such contact or adopt a firm stance every time Bengali workers fell prey to wrongdoing in Malaysia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were humiliating for the country.
Let Dipu Moni reflect on all this. And, by the way, she ought to be wary of the superannuated diplomats who are today rather keen on proffering advice to the new government. Some of these men have in the past made us unhappy with their work, with their shifting loyalties, with their genuflections.
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