US, Russia keep trading salvos over Bangladesh

After Twitter barbs, Moscow chimes in with official criticism over the latest activities of the US ambassador in Dhaka’s latest activities

Russia has criticised the recent visit by the US ambassador in Dhaka to the family of an alleged victim of enforced disappearance, and equated it as a “violation of the basic principles of non-interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state”.

“This incident is an expected result of the activity of the American diplomat, who, under the pretext of caring about the rights of the citizens of Bangladesh was persistently trying to influence the domestic processes in the country,” said Maria Zakharova, the chief spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“As of late, his colleagues from the British and German diplomatic missions have been engaged in the same cause and have allowed themselves to openly give recommendations to the local authorities regarding transparency and inclusiveness in the parliamentary elections scheduled for next year,” she said during a regular briefing on Dec 22.

The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Dhaka released the summary of the briefing on Sunday.

“We believe that such actions that violate the basic principles of non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states are unacceptable,”  Zakharova said.

This is the latest development in an ongoing war of words, memes, and insinuating hashtags issued by both sides on Twitter since the US Embassy in Dhaka last week said it raised security concerns with the highest levels of the Bangladesh government and the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington after the US Ambassador, Peter Haas, faced a demonstration by the families of servicemen who disappeared under BNP founder Ziaur Rahman’s regime.

US Embassy spokesperson said security concerns forced the ambassador to cut short his prescheduled meeting on Dec 14 with Maayer Daak or A Mother’s Call, an organisation of families of people who have disappeared in recent years under the Awami League government.

Witnesses said the demonstrators, under the banner of Maayer Kanna, or the Tears of a Mother, tried to hand Haas a memorandum, seeking Washington’s support in investigating the disappearance of their loved ones and the punishment of those behind their deaths by hanging following verdicts of kangaroo courts during military strongman Zia’s rule.

HOW THE EMBASSIES’ TWITTER FEUD BLEW OUT OF PROPORTION

On Dec 20, the Russian embassy in Dhaka released a statement on its Twitter account, saying The Russian Federation was “invariably committed” to its principled stance on non-interfering in domestic affairs of third countries.

“States like Bangladesh, which shape their foreign and internal policy to serve their own national interests instead of following the lead of external powers, take the similar approach. We fully support the aspiration of these countries to independently determine the ways of their further development and constitute a system not subject to neocolonial methods,” reads the statement.

In response, the US embassy in Dhaka the very next day shared the news report of the Russian statement, via a tweet on its official Twitter handle with the hashtag #standwithukraine along with the flag of the country, with a question whether the non-interference policy applied to Ukraine or not.

Within a few hours, the Russian embassy’s Twitter handle released a meme, which showed birds sitting on four different poles on top of each other keep defecating, and except for the top one, which was highlighted as an American, the rest were receiving dirt from the rest.

The birds on the second row were listed as British, while the birds on the third row were listed from the European Union and the birds on the fourth row from Ukraine.