A man from Bangladesh who has left behind many friends in Karachi

Karachi
AR Shamsud Doha, a former foreign minister of Bangladesh, passed away on Saturday March 3, 2012. He was 83 years old. He had been living in Lebanon for some years and has been laid to rest there.
Born in Murshidabad in 1929, he schooled at St Xaviers and St Pauls before graduating from Kolkata University in 1948. He was a prominent athlete, a captain of the Kolkata University’s athletics team and was due to represent All India at the 1948 London Olympics but could not due to the Partition.
During the 1950s he joined the Pakistan Army after graduating as a Sword of Honour Cadet from the Military Academy and served the army with distinction till his retirement in 1968.
In the general elections of 1970, he contested from Rawalpindi on an Awami League ticket. At the time, he founded a weekly newspaper, Inter-Wing. He was arrested and jailed by the Yahya Khan government on three occasions for his views on the politics of the time.
After Bangladesh’s creation, Mr Doha served with distinction as Bangladesh’s Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Iran and the United Kingdom, before becoming the country’s minister for information and then the foreign minister in 1982. He played a leading role in organising the Islamic Foreign Ministers Conference in Dhaka in 1983. During his tenure as ambassador and foreign minister, he was a key member of several delegations to the Non-Aligned Conferences and to a number of Commonwealth and Organization of Islamic Conference meetings.
He was a close friend of many leading personalities in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the USA. He has left behind many relatives and close friends in Karachi where he lived for several years.
He has been conferred the Yugoslavia Order of the Flag and the South Korean Order of Diplomatic Service Merit. After leaving office, Mr Doha founded Dialogue Publications, a Dhaka-based weekly newspaper and media house.
He was the eldest son of late AHM Shamsud Doha, a former

inspector general of police and minister for food, agriculture and works in the central Pakistan government of the 1950s and 1960s.
Shamsud Doha has left behind two sons — Shahid Doha and Naseer Doha — and five grandchildren who live, work and study in Bangladesh and the United Kingdom.