Many of the several thousand demonstrators at Shahbag are too young to have had personal experience of the killings that marked the Pakistani Army’s brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to suppress the fledgling independence movement. But they are animated by an ideal – the profound conviction that complicity in mass murder should not go unpunished, and that justice is essential for Bangladeshi society’s four-decade-old wounds to heal fully.
示威是自发、无组织而混乱的，但示威者激情满满又相当平和。Shahbag的数千名示威者太年轻，并无关于巴基斯坦军队对尚在襁褓中的独立运动的不成功的残忍镇压的体验。但他们因一种理想——大屠杀的共犯不能逍遥法外，公正是抚平巴基斯坦四十年社会创伤的关键——而生机勃发。