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SECOND DEMOCRACY SUMMIT
US excludes Bangladesh as India pledges support for AL
M Serajul Islam | Published: 00:00, Feb 24,2023DEREK Chollet, the Counsellor at the US state department and Washington’s latest visitor to Dhaka, has conveyed to Bangladesh that it would be excluded from the US-led Second Democracy Summit that will be held in March 27–29. The US official has also conveyed that the US sanctions on the Rapid Action Battalion and senior RAB officials for serious human rights violations imposed on December 10, 2021, which was also International Human Rights Day, would not be lifted soon.
Bangladesh was also excluded from president Biden’s 110-nation First Democracy Summit held in December 10–12, 2021, bracketing Bangladesh with pariah states such as North Korea and Myanmar that were also excluded.
There was justifiable criticism about the credentials of several countries that were invited to the First Democracy Summit like the Philippines, Mexico and Poland. Unfortunately though, no eyebrows were raised outside Bangladesh about its exclusion.
Little came out in the public domain about what Bangladesh did through the diplomatic channels to deal with its exclusion from the Democracy Summit and the sanctions that were seriously damaging to its credibility and national interests. Inexplicably, in public, Bangladesh questioned the credibility of the United States to speak on democracy and human rights because of serious violations of both in the United States. Bangladesh also played the Russian and the Chinese cards — the Russian, in particular — in between to convey to Washington that it had powerful friends to be forced to toe its line on democracy and human rights.
There appears to be a change in Bangladesh in recent weeks that playing the Russian card would endanger its economic and strategic interests. The point was brought home to Bangladesh by the officials from Washington who visited Bangladesh in recent months and weeks of which the visit of ambassador Donald Lu, assistant secretary for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the US state department, was the most significant.
Ambassador Lu has reshaped US policy for South Asia since he joined the Biden administration in September 2021.
These visits and official contacts between Washington and Dhaka resulted in Dhaka’s rethinking of using Russia to deal with the United States. Dhaka stopped a Russian ship that was carrying materials for the extremely important Rooppur nuclear plant that Russia is building from entering Bangladesh because it was a ship sanctioned by the United States and tried to enter Bangladesh by changing its name from Sparta 3 to Ursa Major. Dhaka subsequently embargoed 69 Russian ships from bringing imports to Bangladesh, refuelling, anchoring or using its waters as sea routes to conform to United States- and European Union-laid sanctions flagging in the process, a dramatic U-turn on its earlier intention to use Russia against the United States. The U-turn, no doubt, deeply angered Russia which openly entered into conflict with the United States through its embassy in Dhaka that accused the US ambassador to Bangladesh Peter Haas of violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by interfering in Bangladesh’s internal affairs.
Washington has, however, been consistent on democracy and human rights for conducting its bilateral relations with Bangladesh because these apparently are also the flagships of the Biden administration’s foreign and strategic policies worldwide. President Biden used democracy and human rights in his foreign and strategic policies and regained US leadership in world affairs that the four years of Trump had pushed to the edge. He used both to stop a Republican red tsunami in the 2022 US mid-term election. The Democrats increased their majority in the all-important Senate 51–49 and lost the majority in the House marginally against all pre-election predictions of a rout.
The US ambassador Peter Haas has been particularly active in focusing on human rights and democracy in the relations of the United States in Bangladesh since he arrived in Dhaka in March 2022. He has harped on both issues repeatedly and with such emphasis that he was accused by the Bangladesh foreign ministry of violating Article 41 (1) of the Vienna Convention of Diplomatic Relations which forbids diplomats from interfering in the domestic affairs of the host country. Ambassador Haas has repeatedly emphasised that Washington would like Bangladesh’s next general elections to be free and fair, with the participation of all parties and with the freedom of civil society and the media fully assured.
Derek Chollet has also conveyed the same messages that Washington has been conveying worldwide since president Biden became the 46th president of the United States in January 2021, thus underlining, first, that Washington’s messages on human rights and democracy in Bangladesh are also indispensable elements of the Biden administration’s foreign and strategic policies, and secondly, consistency and seriousness. Derek Chollet has also made it clear to his hosts in Dhaka that the erosion of democracy would limit US cooperation with countries like Bangladesh because it is the central theme of Biden’s foreign policy that president Biden underlined and emphasised emphatically once again in his State of the Union Address recently.
Derek Chollet’s visit also exposed the United States’ dramatically changed policies on South Asia, inadvertently perhaps. The Second Democracy Summit will have four co-hosts, unlike the First Summit which was held under US leadership in one plenary session. The Second Summit will have four co-hosts — Costa Rica from the Americas; Zambia from Africa; the Netherlands from Europe and South Korea from Asia and the Pacific.
The Second Democracy Summit will at first meet in one plenary session under the US leadership. The subsequent sessions will be held in the countries of the co-hosts with representatives from the government, civil society and the private sector. A US state department press release stated that ‘co-hosting the second Summit for Democracy with a regionally diverse group… reinforces the truth that a safer and fairer world grounded in democratic values is both a shared aspiration and a shared responsibility.’
The more important aspect of co-hosts for the Second Democracy Summit in the context of Washington’s South Asia policy and its relations with India and Bangladesh were, however, not stated in the state department’s press release but left implied. India is the world’s largest democracy. Yet, Washington chose South Korea as the regional co-host of the Second Democracy Summit from Asia and the Pacific and invited India the same way it invited Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan and the Maldives.
The Indian foreign secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra was also in Dhaka while Derek Chollet conveyed to Dhaka the messages. The Indian foreign secretary expressed no interest, however, in the Democracy Summit or the support of the United States, its allies and the United Nations on issues of democracy, human rights and the next election of Bangladesh. New Delhi appeared interested only in backing the Awami League’s return to power as if there were no other political parties in Bangladesh, being also oblivious that the Awami League has been in power since 2009 and that in the process, people of Bangladesh have lost their rights to vote to change a government democratically.
Ironically, it was India that sheltered 10 million Bangladeshi refugees in 1971 and sacrificed hundreds of its soldiers in fighting with the Bangladeshi freedom fighters to establish Bangladesh as an independent country based on democracy and human rights. It is incredible, therefore, that India appears to believe that its bilateral relations with Bangladesh can be successful only with the Awami League being in power and that democracy, human rights and free and fair elections were dispensable to keep the Awami League in power.
Washington, in the belief that it was the world’s oldest democracy, and India, the largest, placed full faith in India to look after its interests in South Asia after 9/11 with its one-prism policy. Washington has now realised that its one-prism South Asia policy has failed because India has, meanwhile, developed problems and conflicts with all its South Asian neighbours that have allowed China, its nemesis, to make massive inroads in all South Asian countries.
Washington, thus, appears ready to abandon its one-prism South Asian policy by dealing with all the South Asian countries bilaterally and not through India to contain China’s advances in South Asia. And, Washington appears to have further decided that democracy, human rights and free and fair elections are the best ways to keep the South Asian countries from going into the Chinese sphere of influence irretrievably which is why Washington has put all its emphasis on these issues on its bilateral relations with Bangladesh and where there seems to be the parting of ways between Washington and New Delhi vis-à-vis Bangladesh.
M Serajul Islam is a former career ambassador.
US excludes Bangladesh as India pledges support for AL
DEREK Chollet, the Counsellor at the US state department and Washington’s latest visitor to Dhaka, has conveyed to Bangladesh that it would be excluded from the US-led Second Democracy Summit that will be held in March 27–29. The US official has...
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