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Martyred Intellectuals Day

We will redeem the old promise

Syed Badrul Ahsan
In the cold, sad winter of 1971, the collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army picked up and then picked off scores of our illustrious citizens in the naive belief that the sorry end of these eminent men and women would cripple the new nation of Bangladesh at birth. Forty two years on, the ageing men who helped the enemy, through abducting and then murdering our academics, doctors, journalists and others on the eve of the arrival of liberty, thus giving a fresh, tortuous twist to our pain, find themselves facing the demands of justice.
And that is where hoperisesanew inthis tortured land. Where the local quislings of the Pakistan occupation army should have answered for their sins and for their crimes soon after the emergence of the People's Republic of Bangladesh in December 1971, we have observed in this land a subverting of the noble secular principles upon which freedom was founded all those years ago. Where the men of the Vichy regime in France paid a price for their political apostasy after the Second World War, where former Nazis and murderous soldiers of imperial Japan have systematically been spotted and hauled up before the law through Nuremberg and Tokyo, where villains in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and Liberia have faced the music for their acts against people they have racially and politically despised, the killers of 1971 in Bangladesh have for long remained out of the reach of the law.
But that period of darkness seems about to lift. The execution of a notorious collaborator of the Pakistani junta the other day has just given the lie to the notion that the old oppressors of the Bengali nation can never be made to pay for their criminality. Justice and the law have a way of catching up with evil, despite the long passage of time that may elapse between the commission of a crime and a penalization of that crime. Bangladesh's particular tragedy has been its inability to prevent the rise of the forces of counter-revolution in the disturbed times following the trauma of August-November 1975. That was the reality, till now. And till the other day, this nation remained unsure as to whether it could at all have the old collaborators have their comeuppance. Now that the process of justice has begun, now that a purge of enemies across the national landscape is well under way, we know what we need to do to reassure ourselves the future remains in ourgrasp, in our sights.
And that future is necessarily tied to our past, to the stories of the many who went out of our lives when the enemy, dark and hooded and reveling in shaky, false bravado, took them away from their wives and husbands and parents and children and pushed them to death that was as gory as it was premature. On the graveyard of a
communal state these sinister men, unbeknownst to them, would arise a republic sanctified by the blood of our intellectuals, of three million of our compatriots. And the republic, despite the machinations of evil men, has endured.
To our martyred intellectuals, indeed to every Bengali whose life was snuffed out by the Pakistan army, by its Jamaat and al-Badr and al-Sham s mercenaries, the message goes out that the task of a restoration of decency resting on the spirit of 1971 has begun once more. And we mean to go the whole long distance, to persuade ourselves that this time round, we will not falter.
To the souls of our martyrs, we say — as dawn breaks in all its insistence — that it is time to refashion the old dream of a democratic, secular and egalitarian society they nurtured in their lifetime.
We mean to redeem the old promise, in this