Momen terms Amnesty International’s statement motivated

Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen has claimed the UK-based rights group Amnesty International’s statement on the Bangladesh peacekeeping forces was motivated.

The minister made the remark replying to queries from newsmen while distributing the prime minister’s Eid gifts to poor people in Khadimnagar in Sylhet on Tuesday.

Abdul Momen said about 186,000 peacekeepers of Bangladesh have already helped in establishing peace in various countries across the world.

Now, several organisations are giving fabricated information and they are not telling there motive, he added, which is to suppress Bangladesh.

The foreign minister said the United Nations never took anyone in the peacekeeping operations without verification and Bangladesh always becomes successful in it.

Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday, 23 June that United Nations under secretary General Jean Pierre Lacroix must prioritise a review of human rights violations by the security forces in Bangladesh during his visit to the country and ensure that perpetrators of human rights violations in the country do not get deployed on UN peacekeeping missions.

The human rights track record of Bangladeshi law enforcement officers should be the main focus of Lacroix’s visit to ensure that peacekeeping forces do not have a history of human rights violations in their home countries, the statement added.

Some domestic and foreign powers work with ulterior motive to suppress the countries that march towards progress, the foreign minister said adding Libya, Iraq and Syria were very peaceful and developed nations in these regions, now those countries have been destroyed.

Mentioning Bangladesh takes ‘little money’ from foreigners now, Abdul Momen said, “Foreigners want Bangladesh go to them and receive assistance from them so that that they can control the country at their will. There are such many forces, and for this reason, some people support them mistakenly. Don’t make this mistake. If you do so, history will remember.”

There may be complaints on the activities of the government, but it is not right to go against the country and destroy it, Momen added.