Home ›› 21 Mar 2022 ›› Front
Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen on Sunday said Bangladesh has high expectations from the Biden Administration in terms of building a “comprehensive partnership” as the two countries want to do more to take the relations to the next level.
“This is what we’ve told our US colleagues today. Bangladesh will remain keen in this regard, with the view to work closely with the US in our journey together towards peace and prosperity,” he told reporters at a joint briefing at state guesthouse Padma after the 8th Partnership Dialogue between the two countries.
US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who led the US side, said they have already a “very strong” 50 years of partnership and the two countries can do even more together.
She said they can do more in the area of growing business and trade, in terms of technology infrastructure, the resilience of two economies, and in the area of security.
Nuland said they are really pleased to be back in town to “energise and deepen” their already very strong partnership and termed Sunday’s discussion just the “appetiser” on a “very big feast” that they are going to have this year with several engagements.
Masud said this year’s Partnership Dialogue is especially significant for two reasons - firstly, the two countries will be soon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations.
And secondly, he said, the Covid-19 pandemic barred them from holding the regular dialogue mechanisms in the last two years.
The foreign secretary said Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen will be holding a bilateral meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on April 4 in Washington.
The two countries are planning to have high-level economic dialogue, security dialogue, and separate defence dialogue apart from other engagements.
On Sunday, the two sides held a “fruitful” discussion on the whole gamut of the bilateral relations between the two countries, encompassing political, economic and security domains.
The two countries also discussed the areas of “excellent mutual cooperation” like the Rohingya issue, Covid-19 vaccine support, US development assistance, capacity building in the security sector. The Bangladesh side expressed its willingness to cooperate with each other in UN Peacekeeping operations and expressed willingness to continue bilateral collaboration in security and defence domains.
“This is an area on which we would have a further detailed discussion in the upcoming security and defence dialogues,” said the Foreign Secretary.
Bangladesh at the dialogue pressed for withdrawal of US sanctions on Rapid Action Battalion and seven of its current and former officers, but Washington was still non-committal in its response describing it as a “complicated and difficult” issue.
Victoria Nuland told a joint press briefing that sanctions are a complicated and difficult issue, though some progress were made over the last three months.
“I think this has obviously been a complicated and difficult issue. Here, we did discuss it today. We’ve seen progress in the last three months…,” she said.
Momen said they have raised “deep concern” about the recent US Treasury sanctions imposed on RAB and related individuals and the Bangladesh side explained how this might affect the efforts of the government to combat terrorism and transnational crimes.
“We’ve given them a non-paper dossier on the latest on RAB and its performance, also some of our initiatives. They’ll take it back and look at it,” said the foreign secretary.
In the area of economic cooperation including trade and investment, he said, we look forward to having further discourse in the upcoming high-level economic partnership consultation in early June and possibly the next round of TICFA this year.
