Bangladesh today virtually ruled out imposing a dawn-to-dusk curfew on its side of the porous border as done by India to check illegal cross-border movement at night even as border guarding forces of the two countries agreed on expanding ground-level cooperation to ensure peace.
“I personally...or the stand point of Bangladesh is (that) within the international boundary of each country, each citizen has the right to move and you must understand that (curfew by BSF) is a temporary measure...that cannot reslove the issue...a long standing issue. We don’t believe in curfew, rather we believe in sanitising the border areas’ population so that they are aware of the consequences of crossing the border without any documents. We don’t believe in curfew or any other restriction within the territorial boundary of Bangaldesh,” Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) DG Major General Anwar Hussain told reporters after the border-level conference between the two forces.
Maj Gen Hussain, who led a 22-member delegation, also said both the forces have worked out some “out-of-the-box” solutions to ensure safety and security along the frontier.
“In the last four days, we tried to work out the practical modalities about how we are going to execute the decision taken at Home Ministers-level. We discussed in a very pragmatic way to deal with situation in the border area...we have reached certain agreements to be implemented at the ground level,” the BGB DG said.