Myanmar visit to improve relations: General Aziz

Bangladesh Army chief of staff General Aziz Ahmed will be in Myanmar on a four-day official visit next week for improving bilateral relations.

‘I am going to Myanmar to improve bilateral relations,’ General Aziz said after a meeting with foreign minister AK Abdul Momen at the foreign ministry on Wednesday.

Military to military cooperation and other bilateral issues would also be discussed during the visit, he said without elaboration.

Neither the foreign minister nor the army chief disclosed what they had discussed during their meeting for about one hour.

General Aziz will hold talks with his counterpart Myanmar’s vice-senior-general and Army chief Soe Win, among other programmes, during the visit from December 9 to 12, excluding the travel time, according to Bangladesh embassy sources in Yangon.

Spouse of Aziz Ahmed and six senior officers of the Bangladesh Army are likely to accompany him during the tour. 

The visit will take place when the two nextdoor neighbours have been at loggerheads over peaceful and sustainable repatriation of forcibly displaced some 1.2 million Rohingyas of Myanmar over last two years.

More than 7 lakh Rohingyas, mostly women, children and aged people, entered Bangladesh after fleeing unbridled murder, arson and rape during ‘security operations’ by the Myanmar military in Rakhine, what the United Nations denounced as ethnic cleansing and genocide, beginning from August 25, 2017.

The UNHCR and the governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh failed in their two attempts for sending the first batch of Rohingya people under bilateral mechanisms as nobody agreed to go back with reference to the absence of environment for going back to Rakhine.

The on-going Rohingya influx took the number of undocumented Myanmar nationals and registered refugees in Bangladesh to about 1.2 million according to estimates by UN agencies and the Bangladesh authorities.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net