Amina was a 16-year-old student in Dhaka when Pakistani army took her from her home. Noor Jahan was 14 and was playing when she was loaded in a loud military truck that had arrived at her family farmhouse. Razia Begum had stepped out of her house to look for her husband, Abu Sarkar, when she was trapped by the Pakistani soldiers and taken away.
What happened to these women after that would surpass any worst part of a horror movie. Millions of Bengali women were subjected to serial gangrapes and horrifying torture by Pakistan as a form of retaliation against a country that desired independence. Yet, Amina, Noor Jahan lived while many others like them could not. And sure, on December 16, 1971, the brave ladies were rescued from the horrifying abuse they had endured at the hands of Pakistani forces.
In a deliberate campaign of genocidal rape, Pakistani military personnel and the Razakars raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Hindu women made up the majority of the victims of rape by the Pakistani Army and its supporters. While some of these ladies continue to survive today, others committed suicide or perished in captivity. Muslim religious authorities such as imams then referred to the women as ‘war booty.’ Islamic party activists and leaders are also charged with engaging in rapes and carjackings of women.
The then ruling class in Pakistan held that Hindus were responsible for the uprising and that the war would end as soon as the Hindu problem was resolved. Violence against Hindus seems to have been a deliberate policy for Pakistanis. Muslim males in Pakistan thought that the nation’s ills could only be cured by torturing Hindu women. According to anecdotal evidence, Imams and Mullahs approved of the rapes carried out by the Pakistani Army and issued fatwas referring to the women as war booty.
During the conflict, a fatwa from West Pakistan stated that women seized from Bengali Hindus might be regarded as war loot. According to reports, such rapes resulted in hundreds of pregnancies, the delivery of war babies, abortions, infanticide, suicide, and racial discrimination against the victims.
The atrocities, which were acknowledged as one of the worst instances of war crimes ever, came to a stop with the surrender of the Pakistani military and the accompanying Razakar militias.
Noor Jahan and her sister was 14 when she was abducted
After 52 years, one of the victims named Noor Jahan describes that she was 14-years-old and was playing with her sister when the military truck arrived at their farmhouse and loaded the duo inside where they discovered several women sitting back to back with their hands tied. “They told us to look down and to remain silent. The truck continued through the small town, making several stops; each time loading more women and girls into the back as if they were cattle. All the women were sobbing silently, too afraid to make sounds,” says Jahan (65) to the Guardian.
The women were then stored in the military barracks and regularly raped by several Pakistani military soldiers in frequent intervals. “We lay there like corpses, side by side. There were 20, maybe 30, of us confined to one room. The only time we saw daylight was when the door creaked open and the soldiers marched in. Then the raping would begin,” Jahan recalls.
The then Pakistan’s military commander, Gen Tikka Khan had ordered the military men to rape the women and impregnate as many women as possible with ‘blood from the west’. Military-style rape camps similar to the one where Jahan was detained were established all throughout the nation during the conflict that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. Between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women have reportedly been raped, according to official estimates, however even those figures are viewed as modest by some.
Bengali women’s experiences were among the first documented instances of rape being used as a deliberately deployed weapon of war in the 20th century, even if ethnic rape, according to the reports, was a part of Partition years before.
Razia Begum was tied to a tree before several Pakistani soldiers raped her
Similar dreadful experience was shared by Razia Begum who said that she had gone to look for her husband Abu Sarkar, who had been missing for several days in August 1971. Sarkar was a fruit vendor at Tejturi Bazaar in Dhaka, so she eagerly walked through its deserted lanes, but she could not find him. As Begum rounded a corner, she came face to face with a squad of soldiers. She attempted to flee but was shot in the head with a rifle, leaving her with a scar.
Begum was brought to a neighbouring bush, where she spent weeks being raped repeatedly. The troops were stationed nearby and made several daily returns. “They tied me to a tree and took turns raping me during their breaks,” says Razia who is 78-years-old today. The men finished torturing her and dumped Begum into a little ditch.
She was ultimately discovered by a passerby, who brought her to a refuge that Begum portrays as a lost-and-found one for women who were kidnapped during the conflict. For the several women who had been kidnapped and left kilometres from their homes, such improvised shelters had been erected in regions all across the region.
The conflict ended abruptly on December 16, 1971. Thousands of Bengali women, including Jahan and Begum, would be rescued from shelters and rape camps across the nation despite the fact that independence had been gained.
One of four kidnapped sisters died as she could not bear the pain
Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa, and Budhi Begum, four sisters, were also kidnapped by Pakistani army and local allies. They were incarcerated for 2.5 months and were among the more than 200,000 women who were confined in rape camps. “Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” said Malekha adding that her elder sister Budhi Begam lost her life before being released as she could not bear the pain.
Maleka Khan, then secretary of the Bangladesh Girl Guides Association rescued several women back then. “There were women who were completely naked. They were abandoned in bunkers, where they had been kept and tortured during the war. We bought clothes and blankets and wrapped the women in them,” she said who is 80-years-old now.
“They were in a state of shock and couldn’t speak. Some had their hair chopped off, while others were heavily pregnant. There was an air of disbelief about the whole thing. It was all so horrific,” she was quoted as saying.
The newly independent Bangladeshi government then offered safe housing for the ladies. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s founding father, gave rape survivors the title of “Birangona” (a war heroine) and formed a rehabilitation programme for the women, of which Khan was made executive director, in an effort to help them reintegrate into society. Temporary legislations to allow later abortions and an international adoption campaign for babies that had been abandoned were also passed.
The stories of these women were also documented by film-maker Leesa Gazi, a British-Bangladeshi actor and playwright in her documentary named ‘Rising Silence’. The documentary has won several awards to date.
Rape remains a tactic of fear used by the military to terrorise civilian populations and undermine their sense of dignity. In a recent study, the UN special envoy on sexual assault in conflict highlighted 12 militaries and police forces, 39 non-state entities, and 18 nations where women were being raped in battle.
Bangladesh has already been successful in obtaining genocide designation from the Lemkin Center for Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch, and the US House has just presented a historic resolution recognizing that a genocide took place in 1971. The administration is currently pushing for the UN and the rest of the world to acknowledge that a genocide occurred during the liberation struggle.
