Are we finally bangladesh?

Shadhinota tumi Robi Ţhakurer ôjor kobita, obinashi ganShadhinota tumi Kazi Nozrul, jhakŗa chuler babri dolano môhan purushsrishţi-shukher ullashe kãpa ...
-Shamsur Rahman-

As a Bangladeshi born post-liberation war, I think it is my established right to know the history behind 1971’s genocide that what atrocious demeanor propelled a nation to shed 30 million lives and why we had to use progressive struggle to accomplish soverignity enough to speak our own mother tongue. Gratifying, we’d had the shortest fought war in the world, but also the most brutal. Today’s generation is far away from a quivering belief that the most unacceptable and inhuman crimes had been commited prior to three decades, and the most pivotal from them is perhaps how this nation has dimmed it’s voice when it came to punishing the culprits, some of them, sprouts of this soil. Untill and unless we raise our voices to justice, bidrohi songs and the age-refined tears of a widowed muktijoddha will haunt our squashed humanity.

Times are not like before, when a nation was opressed by a giant power and freedom of speech was constrained to few gallant intellectuals and journalists, who stood out from the maze with reasonable demands to only be shot in the heart beat. Our time has changed, we have changed- the moment when young versity students devised amongst themselves a plan to bring in ammunition for the country if needed for protests just after Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s blood-centrifuging speech and also as mothers piled up stones before sentiments and bid farewell to sons fighting for Shonar Bangla. However, this change is just an intermediate because our outlook, our perceptions and our sincerity has been marginalized. Now, it is an united initiative, a rekindling protest from a nation that just wants more than geography.

We are not preachers or advocates of law, but as veterans are informed that every government, for the last 40 years has been providing a promise of trying the war criminals. It was in the last years, that this new government has progressed on it as more eye-witnesses, documentation and instituions are coming forward to penetrate to the roots of the war crimes. Our tired voices reach a pitch, because more women are stepping up, with support from their family and talking to NGO activists and war researchers about the haywire that confronted them. Along our muktijoddhas who fought on the frontier, these women are also our heroes. It just feels a little easier when they tell their stories, so that the nation is reminded of their immense sacrifice. In no way can their shame, their sufferings be undoed, but what better way to salute them, then by trying the criminals.

A question might arise that why try the criminals after 40 years. The answer is more debatable than the question itself. A person who bears crime is as responsible as the one inducing it. So it does not matter how years might have passed, but a crime should not go unpunished, because there are still muktijoddhas, their families and every one of us patriots, who do not forsee a nation’s development without avenging for the innocent deaths and malice. When they clasped pistols from baits, had they given it a second thought? Could they not also run away to a safer, calmer exile? So, should we?
And because we don’t want to, we are finally Bangladesh.