Bangladesh a secular democratic country
Says US state dept official
A high official of the US State Department said Bangladesh is now a secular democracy of increasing regional stature and strategic importance to the United States.
“Today, Bangladesh is a secular democracy, with a vibrant civil society and a history of religious and ethnic tolerance,” said US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Robert O Blake. He was addressing the San Diego World Affairs Council in California on September 30.
Blake was speaking on US policy in South Asia and highlighting some of the lesser-known success stories coming out of South Asia.
He said the national elections that brought Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to power in January 2009 was hailed as the freest and fairest in the nation's history.
Just as encouraging, he said Hasina's government put high priority on improving relations with its neighbors, particularly India.
“Her government has also taken a strong stand against terrorism, arresting and capturing key leaders of a number of small extremist groups, including the JMB, which masterminded a series of coordinated bomb blasts throughout the country in 2005,” Blake added.
The United Nations held a Summit in New York last week to measure the progress developing countries are making to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.
Blake listed out Bangladesh's success in reducing child mortality, the number of chronically food insecure people, from 40 to 27 million, and gender inequality in schools and in the labour force.
Many of these successes were in part due to the $5 billion that the US and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) invested in Bangladesh over the past four decades, he observed.
“Bangladesh is now the world's third-largest exporter of ready-made garments. I will be willing to bet that the clothes that a number of you are wearing today were made by some of the millions of Bangladeshi garment workers, majority of whom are women,” said Blake.
He said Bangladesh can be proud of its vibrant civil society,with outstanding global citizens as Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Another Bangladeshi, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founded the world's largest non-governmental organisation Brac, employing more than 100,000 people, while operating schools, providing basic health care and offering microcredit to the poor.
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