ABSTRACT
It has been 43 years since Bangladesh emerged from a bloody War of Independence. Yet, the wounds of war are raw, the trauma fresh, thanks to a post-independence justice system that forgot about war crimes committed by Pakistani soldiers and their local allies, members of Al-Badr, Al-Shams, and other rajakars. The years following the war saw the rise of military dictatorships that periodically thwarted efforts to bring even known war criminals to justice. By the time democracy was reinstituted, there appeared to be a ‘historical amnesia’, using Bina D’Costa’s (2010) term, regarding the brutalities of war. Whether it was amnesia, a suppression of trauma, or simply resignation, the Shahbag movement opened the floodgates and revealed once again, on a mass scale and with all its contradictions, what the nation as a whole had repressed for four decades. While the Shahbag movement created a space for people whose voices had been shut out, its secular orientation also provoked radical Islamists who turned to violence to express their opposition. Shahbag exposed the dilemma of seeking justice for war crimes decades after the war ended, in a context where retributive justice became the primary demand because of decades of repressed trauma and denied justice.
