A NATIONAL English daily reported on Tuesday that some 200 Bangladeshis are facing torture in Thai detention camps for several months. It is an appalling news that these detainees are not even being provided with enough food by the Thai authority or don’t have any access to legal supports or assistance from Bangladesh missions in Thailand. Judging from any humanitarian ground, we believe that the Thai authority should behave with the detainees in a humanitarian manner. On the other side, the Bangladesh government must repatriate them as soon as possible. If the government fails to perform its responsibility towards citizens who are in distress abroad, the economy will suffer a lot in the long run, as the expatriate Bangladeshis are the second major source of our foreign exchange earnings. The Bangladeshis were captured by the Thai authorities while going to Malaysia illegally, the report said. The government has an arrangement of sending workers to Malaysia at a cost of only Tk. 33000 under an official protocol signed between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur. The question peeps up in the public mind as to why a number of Bangladeshis are trying to go to Malaysia illegally through unauthorized channels. The government has the same arrangement with some Middle East countries though many Bangladeshis are also entering into the Middle East illegally without proper travel documents or work permits. The ground reality here is that the workers cannot go abroad – be that Malaysia or the Middle East – at a reasonable cost as the government claimed. Therefore, they are taking the illegal path. We slam such bureaucratic mismatches as their acts are set to spoil good initiatives such as the sending of workers abroad at low cost. We demand that the wrong doers who are exposing the remittance earning sources at threat be appropriately dealt with. It is necessary to determine how many illegal Bangladeshi expatriates are staying in jail or detention camps abroad and what their current status is. They go there for jobs, as the country cannot provide them with proper employment. Every citizen is entitled to get consular (cost free) service when detained (even with alleged criminal involvement) from Bangladesh missions abroad. Regrettably, in most cases, they do not get such consular supports. The country cannot desert her citizens under any/all circumstances. Hence, the MoFA, the HCs or the Missions abroad should provide them (citizens in trouble in foreign lands) consular support or legal aid to get out of the legal disputes they face as illegal detainees and also extend diplomatic support to repatriate them or help them to get travel documents regularized or updated. No government can ignore them because their combined and cumulative contribution (as wage earners) to the country’s economy is indeed great and virtually significant. Therefore, we expect the officials posted in the missions abroad to be more proactive and they must not sit idle guarding their comfortable chairs. Taking lessons from the Thai incident, the Bangladesh missions abroad should pay more attention to the utmost interest of our citizens. We urge the government to repatriate those distressed citizens soon who are suffering a lot in Thai detention camps and in other countries. The government should initiate serious diplomatic efforts with its Thai counterparts in this regard.
