A US-based organisation Women’s Media Centre has estimated that at least 400,000 women were ravished by the Pakistanis during the War of Independence of Bangladesh in 1971.
Founded by Gloria Steinem, the Women’s Media Center under its Women Under Siege Project investigated how rape and sexualized violence are
used as tools of war and genocide. Women and girls from as young as eight years old to 75-year-old grandmothers were abducted and held in Pakistani military barracks where they were subjected to mass rape, often followed by mass murder, it was said.
A 1973 article in the New York Times Magazine quotes the chair of the National Board of Bangladesh Women’s Rehabilitation Program-the
organization formed to help survivors: “Dr. [Geoffrey] Davis of the International Planned Parenthood Federation who travelled all over Bangladesh,” the chair reports, “estimates that at least 400,000 women were ravished by the Pakistanis,” said Women Under Siege Project on its website on 8 February 2012.
The Women’s Media Center also cited interviews with survivors who describe how young girls were “strapped to green banana trees and repeatedly gang-raped. A few weeks later, they were strapped to the same trees and hacked to death.”
According to the centre, a 2009 Human Rights Watch report states that rape occurred on a “large but undetermined scale (figures of 200,000 to 400,000 victims are often mentioned in the literature, though some scholars claim that these figures are seriously inflated).”
Controversial Indian scholar Sarmila Bose, who published a journal article that appeared to downplay rape as well as a book about the 1971 war, sparked a backlash from other scholars on Bangladesh, said the centre.
“As always, the incidence of sexualized violence is not easy to calculate. In Bangladesh, however, where stigma and social exclusion for rape survivors was quite brutal following the war, numbers may be especially difficult to determine.”
Besides, a Bangladeshi born-Washington based journalist Anushay Hossain said in one of her opinion articles appearing in the New York Times,
“While the role of women as fighters and supporters of the war are shared and celebrated, the stories of almost 400,000 Bangladeshi women and girls who were raped and tortured at the hands of the Pakistani army in rape camps, and the war babies they gave birth to, remain largely unknown to the world.”
The article styled “Why is the mass sexualized violence of Bangladesh’s Liberation War being ignored?” appeared on Friday.
“When Bangladesh won her Independence, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Father of the Nation, gave the rape survivors the title of ‘Birangonas’, which translates to war heroine in Bengali, in an attempt to respectfully reintegrate the women into society. Sadly, the gesture largely failed.
After being assaulted, mutilated and impregnated by Pakistani soldiers, rape survivors in post-liberation Bangladesh were shunned by society, and the word Birangona became synonymous with dishonored and violated women - spoils of the 1971 war,” read Anushay’s article.
The article further said, “After the war in Bosnia, the world recognized rape as a war crime. Although Bangladesh finally set up war crimes tribunals in 2011, 40 years after independence, five years into its controversial existence, its verdicts and process are condemned by the international community.
It is unlikely the tribunal will be the platform to finally deliver justice to these women, many of them still alive today.”