A letter to our burnt, beaten, and fallen children

Dear children,

I stand before you with my head bowed in shame, asking for forgiveness. In this land where death comes cheap, we couldn't even ensure your basic safety. We stole the green from your childhood and replaced it with fear. We, the grownups, normalised the roar of military aircraft flying overhead, even though we know that as long as weapons are manufactured, as long as war remains profitable, no child on this earth will truly be safe.

In this scorched land, we brought you into existence for our own sense of fulfilment, only to abandon you to an uncertain path. We failed to protect you. Rather, time and again, it was you who shielded us, covering up all our inadequacies and failures with your innocence and courage. We took away your playgrounds. We encroached the ponds and rivers, filling them with soulless towers of concrete. We confined your lives within cramped apartments measured in mere square feet. We tore apart all social bonds and then blamed you for the loneliness and despair that consumed you.

We thrust you into an education system rigged with inequality and toxic competition. Year after year, we treated you as guinea pigs for various experiments. We filled your textbooks with the venom of partisan histories. And we celebrated a fake culture of "bumper A-pluses" like they were golden harvests. This year, that illusion was shattered, as over six lakh of you failed your SSC exams.

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And then, within just four hours of the results being announced on July 10, at least nine of you took your own lives, crushed by the failure to meet expectations. Yes, there were questions raised about the results. But not nearly enough, not for long. Students' mental health? Barely a footnote. And then we discovered that practical exam scores weren't even submitted from various schools and madrasas in Chuadanga's Jibannagar, Chandpur's Faridganj, Gazipur's Sreepur, Jashore's Pulerhat, and so on. The system we grownups had built failed you completely.

Dear birds,

In 2018, when two high-school classmates died under the wheels of a bus, you took to the streets in rage and solidarity. You wrote with your small hands, "State reform in progress." Then, the police of fascist Hasina, along with her helmeted goons, descended on you and beat you off the roads. Your voices were silenced. And the roads stayed unsafe.

Six years later, Hasina declared war on you. You died from bullets bought by state funds, fired by state forces. You fled from place to place, carrying the bodies of friends, brothers, and sisters. Some of you lost hands, others legs. Some lost your eyesight. And in the end, Hasina fell.

But even as change came, those who rose to power on your spilled blood failed to understand you. The interim government and other forces that have since emerged in the corridors of power soon drifted back to old habits. The slogans changed, but the indifference remained. Before long, things began moving along the same tired tracks.

Dear blossoms,

We adults did little to heal the trauma you endured in 2024. Instead, before the wounds from bullets could even heal, a fighter jet from the sky crashed onto you. Your little lives were reduced to ashes, melted like wax in jet fuel fire. The same small shoulders that once carried the bullet-hit bodies of friends now bore their charred remains.

It was never supposed to be this way. Your skies should have been filled with birds, butterflies, dragonflies—not warplanes. Yes, questions are being raised about the logic of warplane drills over a densely populated city like Dhaka. But is there any part in the country where the same logic doesn't apply, where people don't live, or where nature doesn't exist? Writer-researcher Pavel Partha, in a recent article, revealed how an ancient Mandi village called Rajbari, in the Madhupur Sal Forest, was evicted to make way for an air force firing range. Should the wildlife and biodiversity in a reserved forest count for nothing?

Dear fireflies,

Even in death or on the edge of it, you weren't spared. While your burned bodies were being carried away, and your parents waited helplessly in hospital corridors, politicians and their entourages came in droves, offering nothing but tasteless theatrics. No one considered the risks of infection to burn victims or the disruptions to treatment. Along came the media, racing to broadcast the rawest grief of surviving parents and injured children, turning heartbreak into a spectacle.

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The spectacle of suffering

As the whole nation reeled in grief over the loss, the interim government displayed irresponsibility by making a late-night announcement about the postponement of HSC exams at three in the morning. Many students only learned about this after leaving for the exam later on Tuesday. On that state-designated day of mourning, clashes erupted near the Secretariat, nine kilometres from the Milestone campus where the plane had crashed. Two government advisers were trapped inside the campus buildings.

Meanwhile, others loudly engaged in a numbers game, arguing over the body counts, fuelling rumours of hidden corpses—as if the scale of this structural massacre could be measured by digits alone. The lack of empathy and sensibility on display everywhere was staggering. 

Dear precious ones,

We have no right to hold our heads high before you. We've given you little beyond sorrow and uncertainty. Your joy of seeing helicopters resembling dragonflies has turned into horror since last July-August, as bullets fired from these helicopters during the uprising claimed lives. Even children who went to the rooftops to watch the sky were not spared. This time, after the jet crash in Uttara's Milestone campus, a child there said he could no longer play with his favourite toy planes.

This is how we adults are taking everything away from you. You build your own worlds—fragile, dreamy places far from our greed, violence, and vengeance—and still we invade them. We have nothing left to offer you but fear.

Dear children, can you ever forgive us?

Mamunur Rashid is a senior reporter at The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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