Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman mapped the landscape of freedom in 1971. And the brave men and women who marched to the fields of war in response to his call are the heroes we celebrate as we move beyond the half century of our sovereignty as a nation.
We celebrate the freedom fighters, all those young men and women who streamed out of their hamlets and villages and towns in this land, to defend the honour of Bangladesh. They became the Mukti Bahini, the liberation army, soldiers who did not know how long the struggle would last, did not know if it would be months or years before victory came to our doorsteps. Many of these brave guerrillas sacrificed themselves on the battlefield. Many others came back home in triumph. Many have lived in penury for these 50 years, ignored and forgotten.
We celebrate them, for it was their courage which gave us the dignity to live in a free land. We celebrate them as we celebrate all the sector commanders who shaped battlefield strategy for them. These freedom fighters came in a diversity of roles -- artistes, civil servants, policemen, soldiers, journalists, teachers, workers, peasants, students -- and we stand with bowed heads before them.
And as we recall the tribulations our brave soldiers and our nation went through, we recall too the sagacity with which Tajuddin Ahmad guided us all through the wilderness of uncertainty a half century ago. He crossed the frontier, with Amir-Ul Islam, ideas of armed resistance playing in his imagination.
We celebrate Tajuddin and Islam and all the political leaders, wise followers of the Father of the Nation -- Syed Nazrul Islam, M Mansoor Ali, AHM Quamruzzaman, MAG Osmany -- whose role in the formation of the Mujibnagar government intensified our struggle for liberty. We celebrate those lawmakers elected to the national and provincial assemblies at the December 1970 elections, individuals who readily transformed themselves into our political bulwark against the enemy 50 years ago.
Our songs of praise are for Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, for Comrade Moni Singh, for Professor Muzaffar Ahmed, for every political leader and worker who upheld nation before party and made common cause against the perpetrators of genocide. Their names will shine in history forever, for future generations to imbibe lessons from.
As we move past our half century of freedom, we salute the patriotism of KM Shehabuddin and Amjadul Haq, the brave Bengali diplomats who turned their backs, in early April 1971, on Pakistan even before we had a government in place. They faced an uncertain future and yet they knew what they needed to do.
We remain indebted to all those diplomats who throughout the arduous months of the War of Liberation walked away from their jobs to link up with the Mujibnagar government and speak for Bangladesh in the councils of the world. We remain indebted to Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, whose courage in raising the banner for Bangladesh abroad remains a high point in our search for a destiny we could be comfortable with.
There are the young student and youth leaders we will not forget, ever, in this celebration of freedom. Abdul Aziz Bagmar, Abdur Razzak, Tofail Ahmed, Sheikh Fazlul Haq Moni, Sirajul Alam Khan, ASM Abdur Rab, Noor-e-Alam Siddiqui, Shahjahan Siraj, Abdul Kuddus Makhan, and their fellow soldiers were bearers of the lamp in those dark days.
We celebrate the exploits of Abdul Kader Siddiqui as he fought the enemy within occupied Bangladesh. We hold high in our esteem the brave men of the crack platoon which terrorized the enemy in the fledgling nation’s capital. We remember Altaf Mahmud, Rumi, Commander Moazzem Hossain for they fell in defense of the inviolability of freedom. We celebrate the heroism of all our intellectuals, all our civil and military officers who in the nine months of the struggle walked to the valley of death to ensure that the rest of us lived in freedom.
We sing the songs which our lyricists penned and our music makers put to melody on Shwadhin Bangla Betar, inspiring those of us who, in internal exile, knew that freedom was on the way.
Our gratitude is there, now and for all time, to Raju Ahmed and his Jollader Dorbar, to MR Akhtar Mukul for his Charampatra, to Jamil Chowdhury, to Waheedul Haque, to Abdul Jabbar and Apel Mahmud and Rathindranath Roy, to Mahmudur Rahman Benu and Shaheen Samad and Kabori Sarwar and Dalia Nausheen, to Abu Yusuf (Dr Habibur Rahman the geologist), Belal Mohammad, indeed to every program producer and every artiste who every day reinforced the message of freedom as our guerrillas fought in the marshes and in the villages.
To the Bengali diaspora around the world -- in Britain, in Europe, in the United States -- our gratitude is undying for the patriotic action they took in disseminating the message of our struggle, for at that distance from the homeland, their hearts bled for their countrymen. They wrote, they collected funds, they organized rallies, and so gave a global dimension to the armed struggle for liberty. We celebrate the economists Rehman Sobhan, Anisur Rahman, Nurul Islam, and Mosharraf Hossain. They were our collective voice abroad.
To Dr Kamal Hossain we remain eternally grateful, for in his imprisonment and despite all the pressure the Yahya Khan junta placed on him to repudiate Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a thousand miles away from home, he stayed resolute in defense of his leader and of the cause.
Our endless gratitude goes to Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman, the young patriot who died trying to pilot a plane out of Pakistan and to his suffering country. We do not forget the brave young Bengali officers of the Pakistan army who, heeding the call of patriotism, went over to Mujibnagar. Many were caught and placed on court martial, patriots for whom our respect remains undying.
We stand, in abiding respect, before those brave Bengali women who suffered through torture and humiliation at the hands of the occupation soldiers and their local collaborators, and yet would not kowtow before them or beg for mercy. They are the Birangonas for whom our respect borders on veneration. They are an indelible part of our history.
Our war 50 years ago was a struggle inclusive in its intensity and broad in its dimensions. It was a gigantic coalescing of ideas propelled toward a common goal. It was a phase when our political leadership rose to the occasion, when all of us -- irrespective of religious belief or class or creed -- informed ourselves that we were one Bengali nation coming together in sketching the rainbow of freedom across our skies, determined to reclaim our land from oppressors, and eventually seizing it from their sinister grasp.
In 1971, everyone waged war for freedom. To everyone, therefore, we raise our hands in salute. To everyone we say, “You made it possible.”
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
