Editorial
As we observe Victory Day . . .
We recall the past and look into the future
THIRTY eight years ago, it was an intensity of pride and a justified flow of emotions that brought to us the news that Bangladesh stood liberated, that the new nation we had struggled long and hard to build out of the destruction wrought by the enemy had finally arisen on the global map. It was a formidable enemy we defeated in 1971. No fewer than 93,000 of Pakistan's soldiers together with their civilian appendages had their comeuppance on 16 December 1971 as the victorious Mukti Bahini and the allied forces swept into the new nation's capital. Nothing could be more poignant than the historic image of the Pakistan occupation army, a force that had caused the death of three million Bengalis, had raped countless women and had burnt and pillaged in villages and towns across the land, surrendering before the very people it had sought to exterminate or colonise in the nine months of the war.
Our collective memories speak of the enthusiasm we felt at the arrival of victory. We recall today, nearly four decades into independent existence, the tortuous struggle we put up both in the course of the war and in the period immediately after liberation. We will not suggest that everything has gone all right since the coming of freedom. There have been the economic problems, gigantic ones, we have tried to tide over. Our politics has repeatedly been disturbed through the intervention of undemocratic and extra-constitutional forces. There is the perception in many among us that the idealism which led us to war has become frayed at the edges, that new times demand a new approach toward consolidating the gains brought to our doorsteps by the War of Liberation. And yet there is the truth before us: that whatever our mistakes have been and however deep our worries about our future, we have never wavered in our belief that democracy will always be the underpinning of our freedom, that an egalitarian society is what we will strive to build. Our endless struggle against authoritarian rule followed by our collective triumph in the battle to ensure the rise and onward march of democracy remain realities we have never looked away from. There are the priorities that we have remained steadfast to. That rule of law will be the basis of our social and political behaviour has never been in doubt. That secular democracy remains at the roots of our politics is a truth we have never lost sight of. That economic prosperity for all, irrespective of class, religious and other divides, is our goal is a thought we have not strayed from.
Thirty eight years after the formalisation of victory in December 1971, it is our onerous responsibility to fulfil the goals that propelled us into the War of Liberation. This morning, we recall with deep reverence the leadership provided by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Mujibnagar government. We salute the martyrs whose supreme sacrifices hastened the path to freedom. In a remembrance of their fortitude and through a recollection of the valiant struggle of our freedom fighters, it is for us today to shape a future that will uphold the spirit of 1971. This morning, we recall our past struggles. This morning, again, we will be taking a hard look into our future.
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