RAPE OF BENGAL

Birth of Bangladesh – Part IV

By Jayantha Somasundaram

(Continued from December 23)

“No people have had to pay as high a price in human life and suffering as the people of Bangladesh,” lamented Mujib in an interview in London soon after his release in early January 1972.

On December 16, 1971, the Pakistan Armed Forces surrendered and a ceasefire came into effect. Within days of the ceasefire Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in an attempt to heal the wounds of the brutal civil war proclaimed that Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers were heroines of the war of independence. His statement appeared in The New York Post which explained that “in traditional Bengali village society where women lead cloistered lives, rape victims often are ostracised.”

Soon after Indian troops, along with the Mukthi Bahini, had liberated Jessore, Joseph Fried of The New York Daily News reported, ‘A stream of victims and eyewitnesses tell how truckloads of Pakistani soldiers and their hireling Razakars swooped down on villages in the night, rounding up women by force. Some were raped on the spot. Others were carried off to military compounds. Some women were still there when Indian troops battled their way into Pakistani strongholds. Weeping survivors of villages razed because they were suspected of siding with the Bahini freedom fighters, told of how wives were raped before the eyes of their bound husbands who were then put to death.’

Since journalists had been barred from Bangladesh during the Civil War, few reports on the atrocities committed against Bengali women leaked out. But by January 1972 volunteers began assessing the scale of the tragedy. An Asian Relief Secretary from the World Council of Churches, Rev Kentaro Buma on his return from Bangladesh reported that more than 200,000 Bengali women had been raped, some estimated that the toll was nearer 400,000.

Susan Brownmiller in her 1975 seminal work on men, women and rape, titled ‘Against Our Will’, claimed that “girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy five had been assaulted…Eighty percent of the raped women were Moslems, reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and Christian women were not exempt….Despite a shared religious heritage Punjabi Pakistanis are taller, lighter-skinned and ‘rawboned’ compared to dark small boned Bengalis. This racial difference would provide added anguish to those Bengali women who found themselves pregnant after their physical ordeal.”

Berengera d’Aragon, a Photo Reporter for Black Star, explained that as the Pakistani regulars swept through the tiny hamlets of rural Bangladesh, a high incidence of forcible rape took place. The Razakars (pro-Pakistan Bengalis and Urdu-speakers in Bangladesh) who acted as mercenaries were even worse offenders. The Bahini also committed rape in the process of ‘liberation.’

Khadiga and Kamala

d’Aragon tells the story of 13-year-old Khadiga walking home from school when she, along with four others, was kidnapped by a gang of Pakistani soldiers and put in a military brothel at Mohammadpur, where she was held captive for six months till the end of the war. She was abused by two soldiers a day, others had to service seven to ten daily. “At first Khadiga said the soldiers tied a gag around her mouth to keep her from screaming. As months wore on and the captives’ spirit was broken, the soldiers devised a simple quid pro quo. They withheld the daily ration of food till the girls submitted to the full quota.”

d’ Aragon also wrote about Kamala Begum, a wealthy widow living in a Dacca suburb, who had packed her two daughters to the countryside for safety, confident that she was ‘too old’ to attract attention. But she was assaulted by two Pakistani soldiers and a Razakar in her home.

In the New York Times Magazine Aubrey Menen recorded the case of a 17-year-old Hindu bride living with her parents. “At ten one night a truckload of six soldiers burst into their home. Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed behind, one of them covering the family with his gun. They heard a barked order, the groom’s voice protesting, then silence until the bride screamed. In a few minutes one of the soldiers exited the room, his uniform in disarray, grinned to his companions and another soldier took his place.

“And so on until all six had raped the belle of the village. Then they hurriedly left. The father found his daughter lying on the string cot unconscious and bleeding. Her husband was crouched on the floor, kneeling over his vomit.”

Susan Brownmiller wrote that “the most serious crises was pregnancy…25,000 is the generally accepted figure…the bastard children with their fair Punjabi features would never be accepted into Bengali culture – and neither would their mothers.”

Unwanted babies

The stigma of rape in traditional Muslim societies and the appalling consequences were grotesquely displayed in Bangladesh where Mujibur’s plea on behalf of the victims, that the victims be reintegrated into society by their husbands and families taking them back, and by marriage for those who were single, to suitors from among Bahini combatants, fell on deaf ears.

Susan Brownmiller says that sadly “the marry-them-off campaign never got off the ground. Few prospective bridegrooms stepped forward, and those who did made it plain that they expected the government as the father figure to present them with handsome dowries.”

“The demands of the men have ranged from the latest model of Japanese car, painted red, to the publication of unpublished poems,” a government official bitterly complained.

Robert Trumbull in the New York Times quoted an Australian physician in Bangladesh who said that “almost every rape victim had a venereal disease.” The other horrific consequence was mass abortion. Planned Parenthood offered terminations in Dacca and seventeen provincial centres. Indigenous terminations were widespread. Dr. Geoffrey Davis of the International Abortion Research and Training Centre also reported that countless incidents of suicide and infanticide were recorded.

Overcoming their conservative aversion to abortion, Bengali women volunteers set up indigenous facilities on their own. Tahera Shafiq who headed the work was adamant. Rape was the wrong word, she said torture better described the experience of Bengali women.

Meanwhile Mother Theresa’s shelters opened their doors in Dacca to accept babies for adoption.

Was the rape of women in the East by Pakistan’s own army something inevitable, ad hoc, an unavoidable consequence of war? The renowned Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand asserts that the rapes were so systematic and pervasive that they had to be the result of conscious policy, a “planned attempt by the West Pakistanis to create a new race or at least to dilute Bengali nationalism.”

(Concluded)