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Published : 18 Nov 2016, 04:12 AM
Muhith, who has raised several times Bangladesh’s demand for compensation from Pakistan for the loss of lives and properties Pakistan’s occupation army caused during the Liberation War, has remarked that Pakistan could be given 'some relief due a poor nation'.
"There is no need to comment on the matter. If we do, it will mean giving further importance to a stupid, idiotic move which is audacious as well," Muhith said in reply to media queries on Pakistan's latest claim at his office on Thursday.
A report published in the Pakistani daily Express Tribune on Tuesday said the country was about to ask Bangladesh to repay the money it claimed was its due before Bangladesh earned independence.
The current value of the outstanding amount is 9.21 billion Pakistani rupees (Tk 7 billion) after asset valuation, according to the State Bank of Pakistan.
Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed on Wednesday dismissed Pakistan's claim as 'absurd' and said it was a strategy to evade the payment of money it owed Bangladesh.
On being asked whether Bangladesh would ask Pakistan to repay the money, Muhith on Thursday said, "We always raise our demand whenever we speak to them. It is an enormous claim. We have properly documented four alternative claims. But they don't have any document, nothing."
"It's just idiotic," he added.
The finance minister, however, could not specify the amount Pakistan owed Bangladesh.
"It can be $5 billion. But we have offered them some relief. We told them: 'We know you are a poor country, so you don't have the ability to pay the entire amount. We shall be generous; pay in instalments, etcetera.'," he said.
"We even said this when we were in a poor shape. But now they are nothing. Their per capita income is high, but it will be below ours very soon. There is no logic in comparing ourselves to them."
"We are well off without them," he added.
After coming to power in 1996, the Awami League government asked Pakistan to pay the money it owed Bangladesh from pre-1971 times.
The Awami League raised the issue at several international discussions when it returned to power in 2009.
According to media reports, Pakistan owes Bangladesh Tk 330 billion in current prices.
Bangladesh's media also reported back in 1992, ahead of then prime minister Khaleda Zia's official visit to Pakistan, that the government had raised the same demand in 1974.
In the course of the negotiations in Delhi in April 1974 on a tripartite agreement between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh regarding a resolution of issues arising out of Bangladesh’s War of Liberation, the Pakistani delegation led by Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Aziz Ahmed assured Bangladesh Foreign Minister Kamal Hossain, who led the Bangladesh team, that the issue of assets and liabilities would be resolved.
In June of the year, Pakistani prime minister ZA Bhutto led an 80-member delegation to Dhaka. Over two days of talks with prime minister Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his team, the Pakistani delegation refused, contrary to its promises, to be drawn into any discussion on a sharing of assets and liabilities by the two countries. The negotiations went nowhere and the Bhutto visit ended without any joint communiqué being issued.
Diplomatic relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan were established in 1976, when General Ziaur Rahman was clearly the strongman in the regime headed by a titular President AM Sayem. The assets and liabilities question was clearly put on the back burner. It would be a policy maintained by the Ershad regime.
The details of Dhaka's claims were included in the official brief for then prime minister Khaleda Zia as she prepared for her visit to Pakistan in 1992.
Incumbent Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali, then an additional foreign secretary, played an important part in the preparation of the brief.
