Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War

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Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War
Location	East Pakistan now Bangladesh
Date	March 1971 - December 1971
Target	women, chidren and men in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan)
Deaths	3 million
Perpetrators	1,597 charged

During the Bangladesh Liberation War, rape was committed by members of the Pakistani military and the militias that supported them. Over a period of nine months, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were raped. Susan Brownmiller, in her report on the atrocities, said that girls from the age of eight to grandmothers of seventy-five suffered attacks. The abuses were only stopped by the intervention of the Indian armed forces. Eastern Pakistan seceded and became the independent nation of Bangladesh. In 2009 a report named 1,597 people as having helped carry out the abuses and a commission was established to prosecute those accused.

Background

In 1948, a few months after the partition of India, Mohammad Ali Jinnah tried to impose Urdu as the national language. In a speech at a meeting in Dhaka, he said,

Let me make it very clear to you that the state language of Pakistan will be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one language, no nation can remain solidly tied together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned, Pakistan's shall be Urdu.

This declaration came in spite of the fact that only 4% of Pakistan's population spoke Urdu at the time. He branded those who supported the use of Bengali as communists, traitors and enemies of the state. The refusal by successive governments to recognize Bengali as the second national language led to the formation of the Bengali language movement and to more support for the newly formed Awami League. A protest in Dhaka in 1952 was forcibly broken up, resulting in the deaths of several protesters. Nationalists viewed those who had died as martyrs for their cause, and the violence led to calls for secession. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 caused further grievances, as the East was cut off from the West within an hour of the start of the war, because the military had assigned no units to the defense of the region.

In December 1970 the East Pakistan based Awami League headed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won a national majority in the first democratic general election since the independence of Pakistan. However the West Pakistani establishment prevented them from forming a government. Former president Yahya Khan then banned the Awami League and declared martial law. On 26 March 1971 the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight against the supporters of a nascent Bengali nationalism, indiscriminately killing Bengali civilians. In the resultant civil conflict the Pakistan Army employed systematic violence against civilians, resulting in the deaths of up to 3 million, creating up to 10 million refuges who fled to India, and displacing a further 30 million.

Pakistani Army actions

The intensity of the West Pakistani military action surprised international observers and Bengali nationalists, since the pro-democracy movement had been peaceful till then. Between the middle of May and September 1971, the Pakistani army dug in and remained in their strongholds, from which they conducted operations against villagers who may have helped the liberation movement. Genocide scholar Samuel Totten has accused the army of using organized rape as a weapon of war and has cited reports of the commander of the Dhaka operations saying "he would kill four million people in 48 hours and thus have a 'Final Solution' of the Bengali problem". They also conducted nighttime raids, assaulting women in their villages, often in front of their families, to "punish" and terrorize. Girls and women were also kidnapped and held in special camps were they were repeatedly raped and gang-raped. Many of those held in the camps were murdered or committed suicide. In what has been described as a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire ethnic group, many of those assaulted were raped, murdered and then bayonetted in the genitalia. Totten alleges elements of racism in the Pakistan army, who he says considered the Bengalis "racially inferior—a non-martial and physically weak race". The final week of the war saw the worst of the atrocities. With defeat certain, the Government conducted a premeditated campaign of genocide. Entire villages were razed to the ground and the inhabitants killed. Over a two-day period intellectuals and professionals were taken from their homes and murdered. Their names were found in the diary of Major-General Rao Farman Ali.

Militias

According to Peter Tomsen, the Inter-Services Intelligence in conjunction with Jamaat-e-Islami formed militias such as Al-Badr ("the moon") and the Al-Shams ("the sun") to conduct operations against the nationalist movement. Local collaborators known as Razakars also took part in the atrocities. The term has since become a pejorative akin to the western term "Judas".

International reaction

The events of the nine-month conflict are widely viewed as genocide. Adam Jones has said that were the upper estimates of those killed correct this conflict would be comparable to the Rwandan genocide and the executions of Soviet troops by Nazi Germany. The atrocities in East Pakistan were the first instance of war rape to garner international media attention, and Sally J. Scholz has written that this was the first genocide to capture the interest of the mass media.

Time magazine reported on girls who had been kidnapped and held in military brothels:

One of the more horrible revelations concerns 563 young Bengali women, some only 18, who have been held captive inside Dacca's dingy military cantonment since the first days of the fighting. Seized from Dacca University and private homes and forced into military brothels, the girls are all three to five months pregnant. The army is reported to have enlisted Bengali gynecologists to abort girls held at military installations. But for those at the Dacca cantonment it is too late for abortion. The military has begun freeing the girls a few at a time, still carrying the babies of Pakistani soldiers

Liz Trotta reported in 1972 from a village suffering from the aftermath of the conflict. She interviewed a 16-year-old widow whose husband had been murdered in front of her before she was raped, making her pregnant. The Pakistani government had tried to censor reports coming out of the region, but media reports on the atrocities did reach the public, and gave rise to widespread support for the liberation movement. It is believed that India's intervention was supported by the majority of states under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and on humanitarian grounds. In an interview in 1972 Indira Gandhi justified the use of military intervention, saying, "Shall we sit and watch their women get raped?"

The Nixon administration aligned with Pakistan as part of its military strategy against communist expansion into the region, but American public support for the people of Bangladesh was increased by televised reports coming from the region. Senator Edward Kennedy commented that they had done nothing worse than to win an election. The events were discussed extensively in the British House of Commons. John Stonehouse proposed a motion which was supported by a further 200 Members of Parliament:

That this House believes that the widespread murder of civilians and the atrocities on a massive scale by the Pakistan Army in East Bengal, contrary to the United Nations Convention on Genocide signed by Pakistan itself, confirms that the military Government of Pakistan has forfeited all rights to rule East Bengal, following its wanton refusal to accept the democratic will of the people expressed in the election of December, 1970; therefore believes that the United Nations Security Council must be called urgently to consider the situation both as a threat to international peace and as a contravention of the Genocide Convention; and further believes that until order is restored under United Nations supervision, the provisional Government of Bangla Desh should be recognised as the vehicle for the expression of self-determination by the people of East Bengal.

Although this motion was presented twice before parliament, the government did not find time to debate it.

Critics of the United Nations have used the 1971 atrocities to argue that military intervention was the only thing to stop the mass murder.

On 1 August 1971 George Harrison and Ravi Shankar organized The Concert for Bangladesh which raised almost $240,000 for the refugees.

Aftermath

Estimates of those raped vary from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. After the conflict the victims went through a second ordeal: widespread sexual infections and feelings of intense shame and humiliation. Many of the women were ostracized by their families and communities, and others committed suicide. A doctor at the rehabilitation center in Dhaka reported 170,000 abortions of pregnancies caused by the rapes, and 30,000 war babies being born.

Estimates of the number of pregnancies range from 25,000 to the Bangladeshi government figure of 70,000. Observers suggested that some of these pregnancies were intended by the soldiers and perhaps their officers as well. A report from the International Commission of Jurists said, "Whatever the precise numbers, the teams of American and British surgeons carrying out abortions and the widespread government efforts to persuade people to accept these girls into the community, testify to the scale on which raping occurred". The Commission also said that Pakistani officers not only allowed their men to rape, but also enslaved women themselves.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called the victims birangona ("heroine"), but this only underscored the fact that these women were now deemed socially unacceptable as they were "dishonored", and the term became associated with barangona ("prostitute"). The women's human rights organization Bangladesh Mahila Parishat took part in the war by publicizing the atrocities being carried out by the Pakistani army. In 1996 Nilima Ibrahim wrote Ami Birangana Bolchi (The Voices of War Heroines), a collection of eyewitness testimony from seven rape victims, which she documented while working for a rehabilitation center.

In 2009, after a 19-year investigation, the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee released documentation naming 1,597 people they said to be responsible for the atrocities. The list included members of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a political group founded in 1978. In 2010 the government of Bangladesh set up an International Crimes Tribunal to investigate the atrocities of that era. However, human rights advocates are of the opinion that the mass rapes and killings of women may not be addressed. Irene Khan has said of her own government's reaction:

A conservative Muslim society has preferred to throw a veil of negligence and denial on the issue, allowed those who committed or colluded with gender violence to thrive, and left the women victims to struggle in anonymity and shame and without much state or community support.

Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh Deputy Leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, the first person to face charges related to the conflict, has been indicted by the tribunal for twenty counts of war crimes, including murder, rape and arson. He has denied all charges. Four other members of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, including Motiur Rahman Nizami, have also been indicted for war crimes. Human Rights Watch has supported the tribunal, and they have also been critical of reported harassment of lawyers representing the accused. Brad Adams, director of the Asia branch of Human Rights Watch, said:

If the Bangladeshi government wants these trials to be taken seriously it must ensure that the rights of the accused are fully respected. That means making sure that lawyers and witnesses don't face threats or coercion.

Media depictions

Orunodoyer Ognishakhi (Pledge to a New Dawn), the first film about the war, was screened in 1972 on the first Bangladeshi Independence Day celebration. It draws on the experiences of an actor called Altaf. While trying to reach safe haven in Calcutta he encounters women who have been raped. The images of these birangona, stripped and vacant-eyed from the trauma, are used as testimony to the assault. Other victims Altaf meets are shown committing suicide or having lost their minds. In 2011 the film Meherjaan was shown at the Guwahati International Film Festival. It explores the war from two perspectives: that of a woman who loved a Pakistani soldier and that of a person born from rape.

Pakistani government reaction

After the conflict the Pakistani government decided on a policy of silence regarding the rapes. They also set up the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, which was highly critical of the army. The chiefs of staff of both the army and the Pakistan Air Force were removed from their positions for attempting to interfere with the commission. The report was compiled by Hamoodur Rahman, who interviewed politicians, officers and senior commanders. The final reports were submitted in July 1972. They were all destroyed except for one held by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the findings were never made public. In 1974 the commission was reopened and issued a supplementary report, which remained classified for 25 years until the magazine India Today published it. The report said that 26,000 people were killed and that the rapes numbered in the hundreds. Political Scientist Sumit Ganguly believes that the Pakistani establishment has yet to come to terms with the atrocities carried out, saying that, in a visit to Bangladesh in 2002, Pervez Musharraf expressed regret for the atrocities rather than accepting responsibility.

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