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Chapter II, Reading 8 Rape Women have of course been subjected to all the forms of torture heretofore described. But one of the most common is rape and sexual assault. In the course of wars, in particular, such torture is rampant. Susan Brownmiller's classic Against Our Will contains a powerful passage describing the rapes of hundreds of thousands of Bengali women by Pakistani soldiers and their paramilitary allies during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. For these women, as Brownmiller explains, the suffering generated by the torture itself was compounded by the reactions of their husbands and families. Indira Gandhi's27 Indian Army had successfully routed the West Pakistanis and had abruptly concluded the war in Bangladesh when small stories hinting at the mass rape of Bengali women 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 Christmas, 1971. It reported that the Bangladesh government ofSheik Mujibur Rahman ,28 in recognition of the particular suffering ofBengali 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 ominous sentence: "In traditional Bengali village society, where women lead cloistered lives, rape victims often are ostracized." Two days after Christmas a more explicit story, by war correspondent Joseph Fried, appeared in the New York Daily News, datelined Jessore.29 Fried described the reappearance of young Bengali women on the city streets after 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 effective." A stream ofvictims and eyewitnesses tell how truckloads ofPakistani soldiers and their hireling razakari"0 swooped down on villages in the night, rounding up women by force. Some were raped on the spot. Others were carried offto military compounds. Some women were still there when Indian troops battled their way into Pakistani strongholds. Weeping survivors ofvillages razed because they were suspected of siding with the Mukti Bahini31 freedom fighters told of how wives were raped before the eyes oftheir 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." In the middle ofjanuary the story gained sudden credence. An Asian relief secretary for the World Council of Churches called a press conference in Geneva to discuss his two-week mission to Bangladesh. The Brownmiller, Against Our Will 89 Reverend K.entaro Burna reported that more than 200,000 Bengali women had been raped by Pakistani soldiers during the nine-month conflict, a figure that had been supplied to him by Bangladesh authorities in Dacca.32 Thousands of the raped women had become pregnant, he said. And by tradition, no Moslem husband would take back a wife who had been touched by another man, even if she had been subdued by force. ''The new authorities of Bangladesh are trying their best to break that tradition ," Burna 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." 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 ofeleven women wrote to the New York Times thatJanuary. ''This ... vividly demonstrates the blindness 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 Pakistan, 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 intervention of...

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