Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (19 page)

Indira Gandhi's Indian Army had successfully routed the
West Pakistanis and had abruptly concluded the war in Bangla

desh when small stories hinting at the mass rape of Bengali ..vomen

began to appear in American newspapers. The first account I read, from the Los Angeles Times syndicated service, appeared in the New York
Post
a few days before Christas, 1971.
It
reported that the Bangladesh government of Sheik Mujibur Rahman, in recogni tion of the particular suffering of Bengali women at the hands of Pakistani soldiers, had proclaimed all raped women "heroines" of the war for independence. Farther on in the story came this omi nous sentence: "In traditional Bengali village society, where women lead cloistered lives, rape victims of ten are ostracized."

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Two days
·
af ter Christmas a more explicit story, by war corre spondent Joseph Fried, appeared in the New York
Daily
News, datelined Jessore. Fried described the reappearance of young Ben gali women on the city streets af ter an absence of nine months. Some had been packed off to live with relatives in the countryside and others had gone into hiding. "The precautions," he wrote, "proved wise, if not always effectiv
·
e."

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 Mukti Bahini free dom fighters told of how wives were raped before the eyes of their bound husbands, who were then put to death. Just how much of it was the work of Pakistani ''regulars" is not clear. Pakistani officers maintain that their men were too disciplined "for that sort of thing."

Fearing I had missed the story in other papers, I put in a call to a friend on the foreign desk of The New York
Times.
"Rape of Bengali women?" He laughed. "I don't think so.
It
doesn't sound like a
Times
story." A friend at Newsweek was similarly skeptical. Both said they'd keep a lookout for whatever copy passed their way. I got the distinct impression that both men, good journalists, thought I was barking up an odd tree.*

In the middle of January the story gained sudden credence. An Asian relief secretary for the "'orld Council of Churches called a press conference in Geneva to discuss his two-week mission to Bangladesh. The Reverend Kentaro Buma reported that more than
200,000
Bengali women had been raped by Pakistani soldiers dur ing the nine-month conflict, a figure that had been supplied to him by Bangladesh authorities in Dacca. Thousands of the raped women had become pregnant, he said. And by tradition, no Mos lem husband would take back a wife who had been touched by

*
NBC's Liz Trotta was one of the few American reporters to investigate the Bangladesh rape story at this time. She filed a TV report for the weekend news.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

another man, even if she had been subdued by force. "The new authorities of Bangladesh are trying their best to break that tradi tion," Buma informed the newsmen. "They tell the husbands the women were victims and must be considered national heroines. Some men have taken their spouses back home, but these are very, very few.''

A story that most reporters couldn't find in Bangladesh was carried by AP and UPI under a Geneva dateline. Boiled down to four paragraphs, it even made The New York Times.

Organized response from humanitarian and feminist groups was immediate in London, New York, Los Angeles, Stockholm and elsewhere.
"It
is unthinkable that innocent wives whose lives were virtually destroyed by war are now being totally destroyed by their own husbands," a group of eleven women wrote to The New York Times that January. "This . . . vividly demonstrates the blind ness of men to injustices they practice against their own women even while struggling for liberation." Galvanized for the first time in history over the issue of rape in war, international aid for Bengali victims was coordinated by alert officials in the London office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The Bangladesh government, at first, was most cooperative. In the months to come, the extent of the aggravated plight of the women of Bangladesh during the war for independence would be slowly revealed.

Bengal was a state of 75 million people, officially East Paki stan, when the Bangladesh government declared its independence in March of
1971
with the support of India. Troops from West Pakistan were flown to the East to put down the rebellion. During the nine-month terror, terminated by the two-week armed inter vention of India, a possible three million persons lost their lives, ten million fled across the border to India, and
200,000, 300,000
or possibly
400,000
women ( three sets of statistics have been vari ously quoted ) were raped. Eighty percent of the raped
.
women were Moslems, reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and Christian women were
-
not exempt. As Moslems, most Bengali women were used to living in purdah, strict, veiled isolation that includes separate, secluded shelter arrangements apart from men, even in their own homes. The Pakistanis were also Moslem, but there the similarity stopped. Despite a shared religious heritage, Punjabi Paistanis are taller, lighter-skinned and "rawboned" com pared to dark, small-boned Bengalis. This racial difference would

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provide added anguish to those Bengali women who found them selves pregnant af ter their physical ordeal.

Hit-and-run rape of large numbers of Bengali women was brutally simple in terms of logistics as the Pakistani regulars swept through and occupied the tiny, populous land, an area little larger than the state of New York. ( Bangladesh is the most overcrowded country in the world.) The Mukti Bahini "freedom fighters" were hardly an effective counterforce. According to victims, Moslem Biharis who collaborated with the Pakistani Army-the hireling razakars-were most enthusiastic rapists. In the general breakdown of law and order, Mukti Bahini themselves committed rape, a situation reminiscent of World War II when Greek and Italian

• peasant women became victims of whatever soldiers happened to
  

·
pass through their village.

Aubrey Menen, sent on a reporting assignment to Bangladesh, reconstructed the modus operandi of one hit-and-run rape. With more than a touch of romance the Indian Catholic novelist chose as his archetypal subject a seventeen-year-old Hindu bride of one month whom he called "the belle of the village." Since she was, af ter all, a ravished woman, Menen employed his artistic license to paint a sensual picture of her "classical buttocks": ". . . they were shaped, that is, as the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa had pre scribed, like two halves of a perfect melon."

Menen got his information from the victim's father. Pakistani soldiers had come to the little village by truck one day in October. Politely and thoroughly they searched the houses-"for pam phlets," they said. Little talk was exchanged since the soldiers spoke a language no one in the village could understand. The bride of one month gave a soldier a drink of coconut juice, "in peace."

At ten o'clock that night the truckload of soldiers returned, waking the family by kicking down the door of their corrugated iron ·house. There were six soldiers in all, and the father said that none of them was drunk. I will let Menen tell it:

Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed behind with the family, one of them covering them with his gun. They heard a barked order, and the bridegroom's voice protesting. Then there was silence until the bride screamed. Then there was silence again, except for some muffled cries that soon subsided.

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In a few minutes one of the soldiers came out, his uniform in disarray. He grinned to his companions. Another soldier took his place in the extra room. And so on, until all the six had raped the belle of the village. Then all six lef t, hurriedly. The father found his daughter lying on the string cot unconscious and bleed ing. Her husband was crouched on the floor, kneeling over his vomit.

Af ter interviewing the father, Menen tracked down the young woman herself in a shelter for rape victims in Dacca. She was, he reported, "truly beautiful," but he found her mouth "strange."
It
was hard and' tense. The young woman doubted that she would ever return to her tiny village. Her husband of one month had refused to see her and her father, she said, was "ashamed." The villagers, too, "did not want e." The conversation, Menen wrote, proceeded with embarrassing pauses, but it was not without high tension.

I took my leave. I was at the door when she called me back. "Huzoor," a title of honour.

"Yes?"

"You will see that those men are punished," she said. "Punished. Punished. Punished."

Menen's report on the belle of the village was artfully drawn, but it did dramatize the plight of thousands of raped and rejected Bengali women. Other observers with a less romantic eye provided more realistic case studies. Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to beauty. Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually assaulted during the nine-month repression. Pakistani soldiers had not only violated Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of hundreds and held them by force in their military barracks for nightly use. The women were kept naked to prevent their escape. In some of the camps, pornographic movies were shown to the soldiers, "in an obvious attempt to work the men up," one Indian writer reported.

Khadiga, thirteen years old, was interviewed by a photojour nalist in Dacca. She was walking to school with four other girls when they were kidnapped by a gang of Pakistani soldiers. All five were put in a military brothel in Mohammedpur and held captive

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for six months until the end of the war. Khadiga was regularly abused by two men a day; others, she said, had to service seven to ten men daily. (Some accounts have mentioned as many as eighty assaults in a single night, a bodily abuse that is beyond my ability to fully comprehend, even as I write these words.) At first, Khadiga said, the soldiers tied a gag around her mouth to keep her from screaming. As the months wore on and the captives' spirit was broken, the soldiers devised a simple quid pro quo. They withheld the daily ration of food until the girls had submitted. to the full quota.

Kamala Begum, a wealthy widow, lived in a Dacca suburb. When the fighting started she sent her two daughters into the countryside to hide. She felt she could afford to stay behind, secure in her belief that she was "too old" to attract attention. She was assaulted by three men, two Pakistanis and one razakar, in her home.

Khadiga and Kamala Begum were interviewed by Berengere d'Aragon, a woman photographer, in a Dacca abortion clinic.

Rape, abduction and forcible prostitution during the nine month war proved to be only the first round of humiliation for the Bengali women. Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman's declaration that victims of rape were national heroines was the opening shot of an ill-starred campaign to reintegrate them into society-by smoothing the way for a return to their reluctant .husbands or by finqing bridegrooms for the unmarried ones from among his Mukti Bahini freedom fighters. Imaginative in concept for a country in which female chastity and purdah isolation are cardinal principles, 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 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. Another stum bling block, perhaps unexpected by the Bangladeshis, was the atti tude of the raped women. "Many won't be able to tolerate the presence of a man for some time," the same official ad
.
mitted.

But more pressing concerns than marriage had to be faced. Doctors sent to Bangladesh by International Planned Parenthood