What do Turkey and Bangladesh do about weapons
What does the security memorandum signed by Turkey and Bangladesh provide? The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
On 8 January, Bangladesh and Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation on security, counter-terrorism and the fight against drug trafficking.
Turkey first recognized Bangladesh as a sovereign nation state on February 22, 1974 at the summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Bangladesh is Turkey's fourth largest arms buyer. In the first four months of 2021, Bangladesh imported $ 60 million worth of weapons from Turkey. This indicates the importance of Bangladesh to Turkey, and indeed Ankara attaches particular importance to Bangladesh on its Asian foreign policy agenda.
Turkey's Asia Anew Initiative (ANI), launched on 5 August 2019, aims to diversify its diplomatic relations with Asian countries, giving greater weight to cooperation and coordination through institutional mechanisms. The security agreement can be seen as an effort by Ankara not only to specifically strengthen relations with Bangladesh, but also to successfully implement the ANI.
Economically, this security agreement has huge implications for Turkey. Bangladesh has allocated $ 4.45 billion to its military budget in fiscal year 2021-22. The size of this budget indicates the size of the market and the arms demands for the Bangladeshi armed forces and Turkey has successfully entered this market again. There is no doubt therefore that this agreement does nothing but increase Turkish power production and increase profits in the military industry. This is a further element that demonstrates how Turkey is far from being a dead dog as many analysts have been repeating for years now.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/bangladesh-turchia-memorandum-sicurezza/ on Thu, 13 Jan 2022 07:08:08 +0000.