The withdrawal of sanctions imposed on the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) will take time as the United States has a certain process for these matters, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen has said.
“They (US) have a process, which needs to be completed,” he told reporters in Washington on Monday after talks with his US counterpart Antony Blinken.
According to him, the US administration has to get a clearance from several panels before lifting a sanction.
“It will take some time. It is not like a switch that can be turned on and off at any time,” said the foreign minister.
According to Momen, in Bangladesh, many things can be done “easily”, but that is not the case in the US.
“In our country, everything is done if the government says yes. It is not like that here. For instance, clearances from 23 committees are required to withdraw tariffs. The president cannot do anything before that,” he added
In December last year, the US Department of Treasury imposed sanctions on RAB and its seven former and current officials, including former RAB director general and incumbent police chief Benazir Ahmed, on charges of "grave" human rights abuses.
Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen summoned then-US ambassador to Bangladesh Earl R Miller the next day to convey Dhaka’s discontent with the move by Washington.
At Monday’s meeting, Momen outlined the progress made in the work of the elite force in the four months since then.
He said: “I explained to the meeting that RAB was created at a time when militancy was rampant in our country.
“There were 495 bombings in a day. A grenade attack on a rally of Sheikh Hasina took place, leaving 24 dead and 370 injured. There was panic all over the country.”
The foreign minister said he told the US side that RAB might have been excessive in its actions at times, but there is an inbuilt system to ensure accountability and many have been brought to book.
“I told them that your ambassador, Moriarty [James F Moriarty] once described RAB as the FBI of Bangladesh.”
On Blinken’s response, Momen told the media: “He said, ‘There is a process, and it has to be followed. But we need to see accountability’.
“I said we are taking every remedial action, to which he replied, ‘There has been no [extrajudicial] killing in the last four months.’ Moreover, no arrests have been made in DSA cases in those four months either. He said, ‘This is good’.”