The war on our minds

This is the day our oppressors took revenge on us for winning our inevitable freedom. This is the day they came with covered faces, bayonets and shot guns, searching for the brightest and the best,  snatching them away from the arms of their loved ones. This is the day, December 14, they snuffed out those precious lives as a conclusion to the mayhem they had started on March 25, leaving a nation robbed of its most enlightened souls. They were brilliant teachers, scientists, doctors, journalists, artists and cultural activists with an intense love for their motherland. The scorch and burn strategy of the Pakistani fascist regime extended to intellectually maiming a nation that had so defiantly humiliated them in war and ideology. And crippled we were to have lost so many of these men and women who, no doubt, would have taken this country to heights we shall never know about.

The Liberation Struggle was a fight to free ourselves from cultural domination, racial discrimination and economic inequality; this was the vision that our martyrs left for us along with an independent nation to call home. Creating a dichotomy between cultural and religious identity had been the basis of the repression on Bangalees who were considered by the Pakistani fascists as "lesser Muslims". The ideas of freethinking, pluralism, secularism and religious harmony that were so deeply ingrained in the Bangalee spirit were distorted to be interpreted as being anti-Islamic.

Strangely, after 44 years of our freedom, such distortions seem to be haunting us again. Secularism is being branded as anti-religion and freethinking as ungodly. The fact that throughout the history of the Bangalee people, freethinking, devotion to religion and the acceptance of all faiths have coexisted without conflict, has been conveniently forgotten. Again we are being slaughtered for what we think, for challenging the status quo, for believing in a different faith, for asserting our identity as peace-loving Bangladeshis. After more than four decades, we are again compelled to fight those who do not believe in our Liberation, who have the audacity to deny the unspeakable crimes of their cohorts and who threaten to obliterate our identity through terror and lies. This is the day that reminds us more than ever, that we still have another battle to win.