Independence is a path, not an event: what we have gone through in 34 years

Independence is not an event, but a process.

Usually, after the declaration of independence, a war for independence begins, because empires do not let anyone go voluntarily (and when they do, the war for independence is started by neighbors, because they do not let them go).

Our war for independence turned out to be severely delayed. It is often said that we wasted the years we had to prepare for it. This is both true and false. If we had started preparing, the war would have started earlier. The war started later because we did not prepare – we practiced "multi-vectorism" and other ways to deceive ourselves and history.