Lee Kuan Yu wrote in the chapter Inside the Commonwealth Club of his book From third world to first The Singapore Story 1965-2000 about his experience during Ottawa meeting of Commonwealth Countries in 1973 .
Another person I remember from the Ottawa meeting was Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the hero who had opposed Pakistan and led East Pakistan to independence as Bangladesh. He arrived in style at Ottawa in his own aircraft. When I landed, I saw a parked Boeing 707 with “Bangladesh” emblazoned on it. When I left, it was still standing on the same spot, idle for eight days, getting obsolescent without earning anything. As I left the hotel for the airport, two huge vans were being loaded with packages for the Bangladeshi aircraft. At the conference, Mujibur Rahman had made a pitch for aid to his country. Any public relations firm would have advised him not to leave his special aircraft standing for eight whole days on the parking apron. The fashion of the time was for leaders of the bigger Third World countries to travel in their own aircraft. All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser’s government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore’s Third World status for many years. However, by the mid-l 990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not co reclassify us as a “High Income Developing Country,” giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was the chair of the 2nd C’wealth Head of Govenment Conference held on 2 to 10 August 1973 .
Bangladesh and Bahama were integrated in the ornganisation after their libertaions. B’Desh enterded within 18 months of her independence.
On March 4, 1972, Biman spread its wings to international destinations with a weekly flight to London using a Boeing 707 chartered from British Caledonian.
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