The third edition of the three-day ‘Bay of Bengal Conversation’ begins at a hotel in Dhaka today with diplomats, academics, researchers, policymakers and journalists from home and abroad going to attend the geopolitical talks.
Chief adviser to the interim government Muhammad Yunus is expected to inaugurate the annual conference organised by the Centre for Governance Studies, an independent think tank.
The conference will convene 200 speakers and 800 participants from a total of 80 nations, representing diverse voices across various sectors and geographies, according to the CGS. Â
CGS executive director Zillur Rahman at a pre-event press conference in the city said that the chief adviser to the interim government, Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, would be the inaugural speaker while Bolivian former president Jorge Fernando Quiroga RamÃrez, Malaysian former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and foreign affairs adviser Md Touhid Hossain would address the inaugural session as speakers, among others.
He said that, this year, they had not invited any politicians from either the Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party or the Jatiya Party or the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami as speakers to avoid any controversies.
He, however, said that the politicians were rather welcomed to register their names as participants in the BOBC 2024 with the theme ‘A Fractured World’.
He alleged that the CGS had ‘bitter experiences’ in holding such an event in Dhaka city and did not get any cooperation required from the government agencies during the previous regime of Sheikh Hasina.
Zillur narrated how intelligence agencies and former ministers of the ousted government of the Awami League, particularly Hasan Mahmud, who served as information minister and later as foreign minister, and Md Shahriar Alam, former state minister for foreign affairs, tried to foil the international conference hosted by the CGS.
Foreign guests and diplomats stationed in Dhaka were also discouraged from attending the event, he said and added that local sponsors were also harassed while most of the media outlets except five to seven newspapers were forced to refrain from covering the event in the past year.
Zillur, however, said that the CGS had received full cooperation from the foreign ministry and the home ministry in the issuance of visas as security clearances of the participants in the changed political scenario.
Responding to a question, he said that none of the ‘student coordinators’ were invited as speakers as they did not think that it was necessary to invite representatives from the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement that spearheaded the July-August mass uprising that ousted the Sheikh Hasina regime on August 5 to the event. Â
But anyone interested could register their names on their own to join the geopolitical talks, he added.
The annual geopolitical conference this year features a dive into contemporary issues divided into five key thematic pillars of conversation—freedom of the press and the rising spread of misinformation, green energy and climate change, global trade and the world economic outlook, the landscape of global conflict and geopolitics, and the state of the world’s human rights.