Syed Badrul Ahsan, Editor-in-Charge, The Asian Age : The on-again off-again summitry that has had the world glued to what happens in Pyongyang and Washington is not exactly the best way to shape or understand global affairs. President Donald Trump, a man not adept in leading from the front in foreign affairs, now finds himself somewhat in the pit after unilaterally calling off the summit he had planned with the young and brash Kim Jong-un of North Korea. He would like to retrace his steps back to what he has pushed aside in such cavalier fashion. Ironically, it is Kim who surprises the world with his seeming earnestness for a meeting with the American leader. One just has to wait to find out what other surprises are there in store for the world.
Out of all this chaos around a Washington-Pyongyang dialogue, or non-dialogue, it is the reputation of South Korean President Moon Jae-in which has scaled the heights. He has demonstrated the necessary seriousness, coupled with an equally necessary informality, which so often has underpinned diplomacy in modern times. If anyone deserves the Nobel for Peace in these times, it is without question South Korea’s visionary leader. He has injected new energy into diplomacy, has demonstrated a degree of intellectual sobriety that one rarely comes by in these fraught times.
Diplomacy is often a matter of looking back at precedent. President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev ended up having an acrimonious meeting in Vienna in 1961, but that did not prevent Washington and Moscow from carrying on with their links down the years, right till the 1970s when Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev inaugurated the SALT era. In Bangladesh’s instance, the years immediately after liberation were surely the most critical in terms of dealing with other nations, especially neighboring countries. One might keep complaining about the way Dhaka was forced to let the 195 Pakistani military officers charged with war crimes in Bangladesh go free less than three years after December 1971.
Realistically speaking, though, could Bangladesh have come by anything better out of the tripartite deal it initialled with India and Pakistan in April 1974? The difference between war and diplomacy is that in the former you must defeat the enemy; in the latter you have to create conditions which will keep the combatants feeling like winners. It was thus that India freed itself of all Pakistani prisoners of war, Pakistan got all its imprisoned soldiers back and Bangladesh had all its stranded citizens return home from Pakistan.
Not all negotiations are successful, though. That again is only natural. But, again, while abortive negotiations may lead to a pause in communication, they do not close the doors to the future. The talks between Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Dhaka in June 1974 yielded no results on the issues of the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh and Bangladesh’s claim on the assets and liabilities of pre-1971 Pakistan. Both men parted company in grim manner.
But look back to a few months earlier, when certain leading voices in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) convinced Bhutto that for Bangladesh to be part of the OIC summit in Lahore in February 1974, Pakistan would need to recognize it as an independent state. Islamabad acceded to the demand and Bangabandhu travelled to Lahore. Multilateral diplomacy had worked most satisfyingly.
There are times when bilateral negotiations slide to near collapse but are then saved through last-minute efforts on the part of the principal negotiators. One could cite here Tashkent 1966, when Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko scrambled, along with Ayub Khan and Lal Bahadur Shastri, to patch together a deal that the Pakistani and Indian leaders could take back home. It was late at night when Pakistan’s president and India’s prime minister inked the Tashkent Declaration. Five and a half years later, the Simla talks between Indira Gandhi and Z.A. Bhutto would have been scuttled had the two leaders, one on one, not been desperate about reaching a last-minute deal.
Negotiations where the agenda include a sharing of common river waters, boundary demarcation and trade are always complex affairs and therefore need to be conducted with finesse and aplomb. There are few guarantees that they will succeed; there is always the probability of a collapse at the last minute. But carrying on is of the essence. Ayub Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru were in a position to piece together, courtesy the World Bank’s Eugene Black, the Indus Basin treaty in 1960. Bangabandhu and Indira Gandhi negotiated a satisfactory deal in 1974. In the late 1990s, Sheikh Hasina and H.D. Deve Gowda successfully reached a deal on the Ganges waters.
Modern diplomacy is sometimes drama played out before an entire world. Richard Nixon journeyed to Beijing in February 1972. It was a week which truly changed the world. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat made a nocturnal journey to Jerusalem in November 1977, to be welcomed by old enemies, Israel’s Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. Peace did not come to the region, but the configurations of diplomacy changed irreversibly.
Perhaps the men who have a free run of power in Washington these days will learn a thing or two from all this history? Who knows?