Patricia Butenis
A reader, On e-mail
Ambassador Butenis is busy making farewell calls on government leaders, politicians and also attending farewell meetings. Her 18-month stint as US Ambassador has been very eventful marked by diplomatic controversy and she also achieved significant success in mitigating complex political problems in Bangladesh. I wonder how we look at her performance. At times she looked as if she was overshooting diplomatic norms to calm down political rivals, but eventually she succeeded which helped the people to accept her modalities of operation in a given circumstance. My purpose of witting this letter is to express my personal feeling about her approach to work. It might have appeared that she was crossing the diplomatic boundary while dealing with the internal matters of Bangladesh, yet I get a strange feeling that she was a source of hope and aspiration for us when everything looked gloomy in our political arena! To mention the other aspect, we do not know how much time she could find to contribute to the social and economic development of Bangladesh through any development assistance programme of the US government.
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