Ambassador Osman Siddique was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Fiji with concurrent accreditations to the Kingdom of Tonga, the Republic of Nauru and the Government of Tuvalu from 1999-2001 by President Clinton. He was the first Ambassador from South Asia to serve as Ambassador and Chief of Mission. He was also the first Muslim Ambassador in the history of the United States to serve in that position.
He got his MBA from Indiana University in Bloomington in the early seventies and after a brief stint with a fortune 500 company became a prolific entrepreneur. Based in Washington DC, he became an ardent student of American politics under the tutelage of the ‘Lion of the Senate’ the late Senator Ted Kennedy. He has since been active in presidential election campaigns starting in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s first bid for the presidency. Upon his return from his ambassadorial assignment he joined the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008/2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Campaigning for Senator Kerry in 2004 he spent considerable time in Michigan and the other Midwest states along with Congressman Mike Honda and Governor Gary Locke. One of his memorable campaign stops was the township of Hamtramck in Michigan which boasted a sizable Bangladeshi-American community of roughly 20 percent of the entire population with a Muslim majority council headed by a Bangladeshi-American mayor. He was very warmly received and welcomed there.
In 1996 he was a member of the United States election observer team headed by the National Democratic Institute to the Bangladesh parliamentary elections. In 2000 President Bill Clinton invited Ambassador Siddique to be a member of his cabinet delegation on his historic state visit to India and Bangladesh. He was a senior advisor and Ambassador Emeritus to ‘South Asians for Biden’, member of ‘Ambassadors for Biden’ group, and has actively participated in entities working for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign.