The historic 7th March speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman has been translated in all the six - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish - official languages of the United Nations.
The UN’s educational, scientific and cultural agency, UNESCO, included the speech in the Memory of the World International Register, a list of world’s important documentary heritage, in 2017.
The speech delivered by the Father of the Nation in 1971 “effectively declared” the independence of Bangladesh, according to UNESCO.
It was extempore and there was no written script. However, the speech survived in the audio as well as AV versions.
The permanent mission of Bangladesh at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Friday launched a book titled “The Historic 7th March Speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman: A World Documentary Heritage” with the translated versions of the speech.
Ambassadors from Australia, UK, France, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Spain, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Kuwait, Russia, and China unveiled the book along with Bangladesh Ambassador at the event held at the UNESCO headquarter. Those countries speak the six official languages of the UN.
The Father of the Nation delivered the speech at a time when the Pakistani military rulers refused to transfer power to him, despite his party Awami League’s overwhelming majority in the National Assembly of Pakistan in the general election held in 1970.
According to the UNESCO, the speech constitutes “a faithful documentation of how the failure of post-colonial nation-states to develop inclusive, democratic society alienates their population belonging to different ethnic, cultural, linguistic or religious groups.”
