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Badiuzzaman’s piece on the foreign minister and the envoys has the facts correct but not the conclusions (New Age, July 5). This minister has been dealing with the envoys this way for a long time; trying to embarrass them in the press forgetting that diplomacy is an art that is best handled out of public glare.
   The writer has been soft on the envoys, which is rather misplaced. Just because their governments dole out aid to the government does not give these envoys any right under diplomatic practice or decency to speak to the press about Bangladesh, its government and its politics the way they have been doing. In any other country, a few of them would have been given marching order as persona non grata, but quietly if attempts to silence them through diplomatic negotiation had failed.
   In our case, from the very beginning, the two sides have played this in the press. I accept Badiuzzman’s view that they envoys have been given this opportunity by the press and media who have gone to them but even then, I feel that they should have been guided by the diplomatic norms and refused to be led to give their reaction seriously critical of the host government openly and may I say very undiplomatically.
   As for the foreign minister and his ministry, they have solicited their way to the press and that is deplorable. Any competent foreign minister leading an equally competent foreign ministry would have sorted the matter behind the scene and not allowed matters to come to such a pass where words like ‘poking nose’, ‘trade union’, etc have been labeled by the foreign minister against the envoys in public.
   Part of the reason for the conflict that Badiuzzaman has missed out in his piece has been due to the fact that the genuine concerns of the envoys over issues like terrorism; poor governance (an issue directly linked to aid that we receive from governments these envoys represent) were shoved by the government by denial and the foreign ministry was forced to follow the lead of the powers that be, the prime minister in this specific case. What the foreign ministry did that was wrong was that instead of advising the prime minister to take the concerns of the envoys seriously, it aggravated matters by completing the process of denial, coming short of calling these diplomats liars and cheats. The foreign minister ‘boldly’ took up this cause and there lies the main reason why matters have become so openly hostile between the foreign ministry and the envoys. The foreign minister cared about one thing and just one thing alone. Lacking the intellectual competence to talk a way out of this crisis, he chose to pour oil into the fire by holding his last press conference where he poured venom at the envoys who were not his audience but the prime minister. The foreign minister, being the competent businessmen that Badiuzzaman points out in his piece, used his business sense ahead of his diplomatic sense which he has little anyway. He knew the envoys would not keep him in his job but the prime minister will and his business sense further told him that the more he abused the envoys, the better his chances with his boss.
   Rashed Ahmed
   Gulshan, Dhaka

The US Independence Day on July 4 is also an occasion to debunk some myths about America.  Americans say that their founding fathers fought a War of Independence against Britain because they thought ‘taxation without representation is tyranny.’ This is absolutely incorrect.
   The Stamp Duty of 1765, to defray some costs that Britian incurred for colonial defense, was never collected and later revoked and all 13 colonies had their own local legislatures.
   It may be recalled when on April 12, 1770, the British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, some Americans, who called themselves Sons of Liberty, were not happy. In most urban areas of America, obscure political hacks such as Sam Adams of Boston had achieved public renown for the first time in their lives by denouncing the threat of British tyranny from the moment of the Stamp act. No new dish of outrage from Britain meant lean days or bad home-cooking. The stature of politicians whose popularity depended upon British tyranny diminished inexorably.
   Then in 1773, Parliament passed a bill with American implications. In the course of regulating the affairs of the East India Company, the House of Commons made some provisions that made British tea cheaper and therefore, competitive with that smuggled into the colonies from Holland. Sam Adams and others interpreted cheap tea as the means to seduce the Sons of Liberty into subjugation.
   They saw in it a British design to undermine American liberty. Adams and his followers decided to ‘venture upon a desperate remedy’ to prevent the tea from being landed. On Dec. 16, 1773, 150 Sons of Liberty disguised as Indians boarded three ships in Boston harbour and ‘in a very little time,’ according to Sam Adams, ‘every one of the teas was immersed in the bay, without the least injury to private property.’
   Of course, the East India Company regarded their tea as private property of some value. In fact, by their accounting, 10,000 pound worth of private property had been wantonly and publicly destroyed, leading to a chain of events which ultimately triggered a full scale war. However, if Britain ignored Sam Adams and his ‘Boston Tea Party’ and did not impose martial law in Boston, Adams and his followers would have again lost their standing and like Canada, America would have evolved peacefully as an independent nation within the Commonwealth. Still I have no objection to Americans celebrating their Independence Day as long as they don’t forget the real history. Happy Birthday America.
   Mahmood Elahi
   Ottawa, Canada