B’desh to erect barbed-wire fence along border with India, Myanmar

Jessore (Bangladesh), September 25

With India looking to completely seal the Indo-Bangla border in Assam soon, a top Bangladeshi security commander has said his country has decided to erect a barbed-wire fence along the border with India and Myanmar.

Director-General of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), Bangladesh’s border guarding force, Major General Aziz Ahmed told a visiting group of Indian journalists here that his government has already approved a project to have a 282 km road along the border it shares with India and Myanmar.

While India borders Bangladesh from three sides (4,096 km), it shares a small 271 km border with Myamnar on its eastern flank.

“Our government, in principle, has agreed to have barbed wire fencing along the borders with India as well as Myanmar.

In principle, it has also been decided to have link roads all along the border like India is having which facilitates BSF activities and those of the Myanmarese border guarding forces,” the BGB chief said while speaking via video-link at the headquarter of BGB’s south-west region here from his office in Peelkhana in Dhaka.

He said it was “unfortunate” that these “two basic needs” of having a barbed wire fence and roads has not been developed on the Bangladeshi side till now. Ahmed said these projects are under “active consideration” of his government.

Ahmed made the remarks while replying to a question where he was asked what was Bangladesh’s response to the India which had recently said that the Indo-Bangla border in Assam will be fully sealed by June, 2017 and later all along.

“You would understand that all these things require huge amounts of money...but the government has already approved a project for 282 km where roads along with barbed wire fence will be erected and possibly that will start from the Myanmarese side,” Ahmed said.

He said as India has already raised fence along 79 per cent of the Indo-Bangla border, it “indirectly helps” his country in checking cross-border crimes.

The DG stated that in a large number of cases where BSF approaches them for construction of fencing along the border, they give a “prompt consent” except in few instances where the construction is very close to the zero line and there are issues involved.

“After all, Indian fencing helps us too,” he reiterated.

The top commander said the two border guarding forces are also working to create a database of habitual offenders active along the Indo-Bangla frontier as he accepted that this was a “weak” point in ensuring effective border security and trans- border movement of terrorists and criminals was a “serious concern” for them. — PTI