Bangladesh to maintain strong ties with Saudi Arabia

Nizam Ahmed Bangladesh will continue to maintain strong diplomatic and economic relations with Saudi Arabia, despite recent execution of its eight expatriate workers in Riaydh, foreign ministry officials said on Saturday. The eight male workers were beheaded publicly following a court verdict in Riyadh on October 7 for killing an Egyptian national some four years ago. Their three other accomplices convicted for the same murder were flogged and sentenced to different prison terms under the Quranic Sharia law. Bangladesh, an impoverished South Asian country depends largely on Saudi Arabia in terms of its manpower exports and flow of inward remittances, officials and traders said. Some nearly 2.5 million Bangladeshi expatriate workers are engaged in the Kingdom, from where they send home the bigger portion of the country's nearly $12 billion remittance a year, said officials of the ministry of expatriates' welfare and overseas employment. Some seven million Bangladeshi expatriate workers are engaged in different foreign countries, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, from where some 30,000 workers have returned to Bangladesh over the past months in the wake of political unrest, the officials said. Following the return of thousands of workers the flow of inward remittances fell by over 23 per cent last month, a recent FE report said. The report said Bangladeshi nationals working abroad sent US$843.32 million in September last. The amount was less by $258.47 million than the remittance earnings in the previous month. In August 2011, the remittances stood at $1101.79 million, according to the central bank statistics released early this week. The remittances rose by 6.0 per cent to $11.6 billion in the Fiscal Year 2010-11 to June, the central bank statistics said. "Bangladesh cannot afford to strain relations with Saudi Arabia under any circumstances," a senior official of the foreign ministry told the FE. Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Mohammad Mijarul Quayes told a news conference on Saturday that the Bangladeshis had been executed following legal procedure and the execution was neither illegal nor illogical. "We must accept Saudi laws. Death penalty is also an acceptable punishment in Bangladesh judicial system," said the foreign secretary. Saudi Arabian embassy in Dhaka was irked after some rights groups staged public demonstrations against the execution in Dhaka over the past week. Rights group Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK), a legal aid and human rights organization, also criticized the government for not informing families of the executed men about the execution. ASK also said the executions carried out under Saudi laws, would cause grave sufferings to the families of the executed men. The Saudi ambassador in Bangladesh, Abdullah N Al Bussairy, in a recent news conference in Dhaka said the execution was warranted as the family of the murdered Egyptian declined to accept blood money from the convicted people. Though Bangladesh, predominantly a Muslim country, follows modern laws, it never officially and publicly criticized or opposed Quranic Sharia law, the basis of Saudi judicial system.