Thursday, September 17, 2009

My Foregn Office Years, 1986-1990: The Fakhruddin Years

This is a part of a bi-weekly series which will also appear in The Daily Independent.

It was May, 1990. I cannot remember the date. The occasion is still fresh in my memory. The Ministry was according me a farewell on my posting as a Counsellor to our Mission in Washington. I had spent two months short of four years in the Ministry; the entire period as a Director, in the office of the Foreign Secretary. The length of the time I spent there is still a record. The other record of this unusually long stay at the post was the fact that I served five Foreign Secretaries in that period.

Anisul Islam Mahmood was the Foreign Minister then. He was chairing the farewell meeting. Foreign Secretary Abul Ahsan was also present. Anis is an old friend; we studied in Chittagong College and Dhaka University together and also taught in Dhaka University at the same time after passing out in 1969. In his speech, Anis joked a little, stating that when the file of my posting went to him, he thought he had one hard choice before him. He could keep his friend at the post a little longer but he did not do that because he thought that friendship apart, the Ministry needed Abul Ahsan more! With my "record" of seeing Foreign Secretaries out, he thought if he kept me, the Ministry would lose Abul Ahsan!

I enjoyed my stint at the Foreign Secretary's office. When I was posted there, I did not think I would enjoy it at all because of the tension and the hard work that went with the post. My posting to the office was also an unusual one. A couple of months before I arrived from my posting in New Delhi in July 1986, President Ershad had gone there on a bilateral visit. I was sitting in a corner at the Foreign Minister's suite at Rastrapati Bhavan where the Bangladesh delegation was lodged. Shafi Sami, then Director General for South Asia and later to become Foreign Secretary and Adviser in the Caretaker government introduced me to Foreign Minister Humayun Rashid Chowdhury and then suggested that I should be made Director (India) on my return to the Ministry. When my name registered with the Foreign Minister who was half asleep, he sat up, looked at me and the others in the room, and said that I would be his Private Secretary instead!

While in Calcutta where I was spending my six days' joining time on way to Dhaka, my friend Mohammed Ali in our Mission there informed me that it was decided that on return, I would be a Director in the Foreign Secretary's office. I was happy at the news because I did not want to serve in the Foreign Minister's office as a Private Secretary. I was also happy because Fakhruddin Ahmed was the Foreign Secretary. We at the Foreign Ministry all had extremely high opinion about him as a senior colleague and as a gentleman. Fakhruddin Ahmed had been a Foreign Secretary for a year in 1974-1975. When I arrived in the Ministry, I found my predecessor Akramul Qader, now our Ambassador to Washington, packed and ready to leave for New Delhi. He made me sit in the chair and gave me a few good tips and was gone !

Later when I got to know Fakhruddin Ahmed more, I thought it was my good luck to have landed in the job. Harun ur Rashid, then the Additional Foreign Secretary and my High Commissioner when I was posted in Canberra in 1980-83, told me an insider's story on how I landed in the office. Fakhruddin Ahmed's predecessor was Faruq Ahmed Chowdhury who, before he left, had completed most of the major postings at all levels, including postings of Ambassadors in important posts. Quite naturally, Fakhruddin Ahmed was upset but when he saw an order placing another colleague of mine, Shamim Ahmed who later retired as High Commissioner to Pakistan, as Director (FSO), and lost his well known cool. He tore the order and at Harun ur Rashid's suggestion, made me the Director (FSO).

The Foreign Ministry revolved around the Foreign Secretary in those days. He was the principal accounting officer. The Foreign Minister did not have the power to do anything without taking the Foreign Secretary on board. That position has now been reversed in favour of the Minister by an amendment of the Rules of Business. Those days, the Foreign Secretary was both the institutional head of the Ministry and head of the Foreign Service Cadre called the BCS (Foreign Affairs). Unfortunately, that was also the period when General Ershad was the President. He had a distorted notion of the Foreign Ministry and was more interested to find faults with it rather than encouraging it to be effective. Also, as a Foreign Minister, Humayun Rashid Chowdhury did not enjoy the confidence of the President. It was then a well known fact to everyone in the Ministry that Ershad made Humayun Rashid Chowdhury the Foreign Minister to make his brother-in-law AHG Mohiuddin happy. One open secret we all knew was the instruction the President gave to the Chief of Protocol AKM Faruq to ensure that the Foreign Minister made prior appointments through the CP to meet him. AHG, who worked with Humayun Rashid, adored the latter and for the right reasons. Before becoming the Foreign Minister, Humayun was fun to work with and a brilliant diplomat as well. As a Minister, he failed to motivate the officers of the Ministry positively and in fact during his tenure, he took many decisions that went directly against the interests of the cadre officers.

Humayun Rashid and Fakhruddin Ahmed were both erstwhile Pakistan Foreign Service Officers; Humayun Rashid belonged to the 1953 batch and Fakhruddin Ahmed, the 1954. We expected them to have perfect working relationship to stand up to the President's contempt for the service; a contempt whose full best advantage was taken by the erstwhile Civil Service of Pakistan that was committed to push the foreign service as much into the corner as possible. The Foreign Minister and the Foreign Secretary who sat across the corridor in the new Foreign Ministry building at Topkhana, popularly known to us then as the power corridor, seldom met each other unless the occasion was formal. The communication between the two was through notes written in the files or by verbal communication through an intermediary, usually through one of the two Additional Secretaries or through the Directors General. To his personal staff, the Foreign Minister often made uncomplimentary remarks about the Foreign Secretary. Such criticism of the Foreign Secretary behind his back made many of us sad because the Ministry at that time needed the two to be in very close relationship to deal with the onslaught from the President's office and other Ministries.

Fakhruddin Ahmed was a gentleman in the classical mould. He was soft spoken and treated everybody with dignity and respect. It was a pleasure to work for him. He never suffered from tension and never made anyone suffer tension either. In fact, my nearly one year stint with him was not a good preparation for the tense days that I faced later as Director (FSO) that was literally a roller coaster ride. Although I had very good working relations with Fakhruddin Ahmed's successors, Nazrul Islam, Mohamed Mohsin, AKH Morshed and Abul Ahsan, the heat and tension that work generated at the office of the Foreign Secretary was enough to tax my patience and abilities to the limit. In the end, as I look back, I feel happy that I was posted there, even though the stint was unusually long, and as the Ministry bade me farewell, I can still remember that there were tears in my eyes that day at the thought that I would be away for six years between two postings before returning to the place that we loved like our second home.

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