December 16, 2004 ☼ Foreign Affairs
Thoughts from two Bangladeshi bloggers as they celebrate Victory Day.
The values of the liberation war were secularism, democracy, liberal outlook and modernism and no religious bias. But after independence, governments of every hue have been in power and failed to uphold the values of the liberation war. They also reinstated the anti-liberation parties like Jamaat-e-Islami and others who were indicted as collaborators of Pakistan forces. The biggest mistake of the peace-loving nation was to forgive those traitors, who now threaten to put a knife on our back. This is why we always go back to 1971 to remember our heroic deeds so that we can fight for keeping ourselves in the path laid by the values. [Rezwan]
Thus, if you are to celebrate our liberation then first liberate yourself from the idea that you are liberated. Yes, you pronounce it loud and you pronounce it clearly that we are not liberated yes, yet. When we see our television screen filled with alien media how can you claim that we are culturally liberated? When our finance ministers can not plan their budgets without foreign aids and loans how can we claim to be economically liberated? When our constitution embed communalism and subscribe to half a century old religious division how can we claim that we are politically liberated? In record we might claim to be a sovereign state, but dear as a nation we are not. Then why celebrate our liberation? Just to cheat ourselves with empty pride of a red green flag?
You can do that, but we who are in our early youth, we will not celebrate our liberation unless those promised goals that was written with blood on this landscape are achieved. Yes we don’t care how failed this state is, how corrupted you are leaving the society for us and how miserable policies that needed to be changed, we will not give up unless those goals are being achieved, we will not celebrate our liberation, unless that space is being reinserted between People’s Republic of Bangla and Desh. [Imtiaz]
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