DR. M A Hasan writes for DOT :
The reign of slaughter, torture and rape carried out by the Pakistani military during the liberation war in Bangladesh shook the consciousness of many human rights campaigners around the world. Ideas of basic human values were called into question. Facts regarding the rape and torture of Bengali women surpassed all known records of violations of women. About 450000 women were sexually assaulted, many in front of their husbands, children, fathers, mothers and in-laws in villages, towns, cities and other places all over the country in 1971. This was done as a deliberate policy by the military to try to undermine the moral fibre and pride of the Bengali people. Many accounts of sexual abuse have been lost in the mists of time and those victims who survived are still experiencing difficult times – distressed, disturbed, shattered by nightmarish memories. Evidence of the exercise of barbarism and brutality by Pakistani soldiers can be found in Chabbisha village in Tangail District about 100 kilometres northwest of Dhaka. Soldiers entered that village after a fire-fight with the Mukti Bahini. They torched the entire village in an act of revenge and then they raped some 20 women. Bhanu Begum was one of them. Her house was also burnt to ashes.
Initially, when the soldiers attempted to rape Bhanu Begum she
resisted fiercely. That enraged the brutes and one of them snatched
her child away and made to throw the baby into the flames of a burning
haystack. Bhanu Begum then stopped resisting. She was repeatedly
raped. Bhanu is uncertain of the duration of her ordeal because she
lost consciousness at one point. However, when the soldiers had all
gratified their lust, they sprinkled gunpowder over her and her baby
and pushed them into a fire. Bhanu Begum’s body was burned and her
eyes were damaged. Her baby boy, Ranju, suffered burns to his forehead
and also on one side of his body. But they survived. Susan Brownmiller
describes a similar incident in her book, Against our Will: A History
of Women and Rape.
A terrible experience also befell a newly wed couple in 1971. Two
soldiers entered their room and started brutalising the couple. In
front of the groom, they raped his bride until she lost consciousness.
Sweeper, Rabeya Khatun, recorded many heinous rape incidents at
Rajabagh police head-quarters in Dhaka, which was the scene of the
slaughter of the majority of Dhaka’s policemen at the beginning of
Operation Searchlight. It was adopted as a base for the invaders, who,
with the help of local Razakars and other collaborators, regularly
abducted young girls from schools and colleges and brought them to the
police station. They kept them in the living quarters and raped them
in turn. These soldiers behaved like beasts, becoming frantic with
lust and masculine braggadocio.
They stripped girls naked and slapped, punched or kicked them to the
floor and then raped them repeatedly, some actually biting the girls
madly in the process. They forced bayonets and gun barrels into their
private parts. That was their idea of fun. The girls were totally
shattered, bruised and bloodied and some of them were mortally
injured. The barbaric incidents that occurred in Rajarbagh in 1971
must be classified among the most atrocious violations of female
dignity in living memory. Such abuse and cruelty has seldom been
paralleled in history. Sometimes, the injured girls were kept hanging
upside down naked to satisfy perverse desires of the soldiers. In the
process many of them died from internal wounds, bleeding and organ
failures.
Many thousands of Hindu women and girls were raped and killed from
late March into April as Operation Searchlight gained momentum. In
some cases the violated women were handed over to Razakars, al-Badr or
other collaborators to be further raped and killed. Before the end of
April, Muslim women were raped in front of their fathers, their
children, their mothers, their sons, their in-laws or neighbours to
damage Bengali national male pride. 80% of the rape victims were
Muslim females. Also, many Bengali Muslim girls were kept in military
camps to be used as sex slaves. Some were taken from camp to camp to
be used as ‘comfort girls’.
In what was obviously an orchestrated agenda, Pakistani soldiers were
encouraged to rape women all over Bangladesh to satisfy their lust.
Sometimes they raped women simply to taunt their Bengali husbands,
fathers or brothers. They raped women systematically as a policy to
try to break the morale of the nation.
To force Bengali Hindu families to flee from the country, they killed
the younger men and raped the women. After killing the Hindu men and
raping and torturing their female relatives, they evicted the families
from their homes and properties in pursuit of a policy of ethnic
cleansing. They raped and often murdered Hindu women in the name of
Islam. They drove women into temples and other places sacred to Hindus
and raped them to defile those places. They wanted to annihilate all
Hindu men and all ‘disloyal’ Muslims from the Bengali nation in the
name of Islam.
Pakistani soldiers also raped Muslim women in Bangladesh in the
perverse belief that rape-babies would be born into their brand of the
Islamic faith and that they would be loyal to Pakistan. They said this
to some of their victims. Time after time, Bengali women and girls
hiding in fields and forests were captured and raped. To destroy the
pride of the nation they raped the mothers, the daughters, the sisters
and the wives of Bengali Muslims and Hindus systematically.
The Pakistani army also sought to destroy the honour and pride of
Bengali men so that they could prove them to be a cowardly race. By
forcing them to stand and watch their wives, daughters, sisters and
mothers being raped seems to have been a confirmation for them of
cowardice. In almost every village, town and city of Bangladesh,
Pakistani soldiers used rape as an instrument of humiliation. Needless
to say, for soldiers with automatic weapons to regard fearful,
unarmed, civilians as submissive cowards proves nothing except the
stupidity of those with the guns.
The Nazis murdered millions of people and German soldiers raped
countless numbers of women in Eastern Europe during World War II. But
they did not torture female victims the way Pakistani soldiers did
Bengali women in 1971. Hitler, Himmler and Wehrmacht officers would
not have tolerated such sadistic cruelty to women. They certainly
tortured people they believed were in possession of useful information
but they regarded themselves as a civilized race, a superior race.
They killed people in a clinically designed exercise but there are no
recorded cases of them mutilating any of their female victims before
killing them. To kill perceived enemies is one thing, to delight in
the torture of a female for sadistic pleasure is another. Even the
Nazis knew that such acts are beyond the bounds of civilization or
human decency.
Yet, these sorts of outrageous things were done to women all over
Bangladesh by the Pakistani soldiery and their accomplices in 1971.
The WCFFC has the evidence of many Bengali people who witnessed such
horrific scenes. It also begs the question; what longer term effects
did this sort of psychotic behaviour have on the 55000 military
personnel who returned home when the release of POWs took place? Most
of them raped and many of them also tortured and killed women in 1971.
Some of them did this on a daily basis for nine months. Were they then
so easily able to return to the peaceful life of civilians afterwards
and to pray in their mosques?
What after all when there is no remorse and no regret from a state
involved in most horrendous genocide and crimes against humanity. What
kind of people stand behind this monster that is also a vital
question.
The global community upholding human regard and justice must come
forward to end this deadly silence.