Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen today hoped that there will be no impact on Bangladeshis joining peacekeeping missions as the United Nations (UN) takes peacekeepers after much considerations.
“Their (UN) spokesperson said the UN always takes people with scrutiny. They’ve long been taking (Bangladeshis),” he told reporters while responding to a question regarding the letter sent by 12 human rights organisations to UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix.
In the letter dated November 8, the organisations said the United Nations Department of Peace Operations should ban Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) from UN deployment.
After attending another function in the city, Dr Momen said, “When the UN takes peacekeepers, they take them after scrutiny. So, we aren’t worried that much about this.”
Earlier, Momen, president of Bangabandhu Foundation, paid homage to Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on the occasion of the 21st founding anniversary of the Foundation.
Dr Momen said various organisations at home, their friends abroad and their lobbyists have long been spreading propaganda against Bangladesh and based on that propaganda, the 12 international human rights bodies wrote a letter to the UN in November last year.
“UN received the letter. They acknowledged that they received the letter,” said the foreign minister, adding that the UN did not do anything based on the letter.
He said an international organisation is not necessarily a credible organisation, and one of the organisations that spoke against Rab once said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“Based on that, the US really thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rest is known to you,” Momen said.
He said not a single weapon of mass destruction was found in Iraq. “I would like to tell the US government to recall the past, how a major international human rights organisation misguided them.”
For this, the Foreign Minister said, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell had to say, “I’m sorry.”
Dr Momen said everyone in the country knows Rab has been working in a very efficient way with honesty and they earned wider acceptability.
He, however, said the government will take action if there is any deviation of the law and there has already been punishment in a few cases.