Spring forward.
To delete this message, click the X at top right.

Bangladesh

Post Reply
User avatar
RTH10260
Posts: 14353
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 10:16 am
Location: Switzerland, near the Alps
Verified: ✔️ Eurobot

Bangladesh

#1

Post by RTH10260 »

‘We lay like corpses. Then the raping began’: 52 years on, Bangladesh’s rape camp survivors speak out
In 1971, the Pakistan army began a brutal crackdown against Bengalis in which hundreds of thousands of women were detained and repeatedly brutalised. Only now are their stories beginning to be told

Warning: graphic information in this report may upset some readers

Thaslima Begum in Dhaka
Mon 3 Apr 2023 08.00 BST

It was the summer of 1971, and the distant murmurs of a war that began months earlier had made their way to Rajshahi in Bangladesh, across the north bank of the Padma River, to Noor Jahan’s door. The 14-year-old was playing in the courtyard with her little sister when a loud military truck came to a halt outside the family’s farmhouse.

Armed soldiers threw the two girls into the back of the truck, where they discovered several women sitting back to back with their hands tied. “They told us to look down and to remain silent,” recalls Jahan, now 65. The truck continued through the small town, making several stops; each time loading more women and girls into the back as if they were cattle. All the women were sobbing silently, Jahan describes, too afraid to make a sound.

“We had no idea where they were taking us. I watched from the corner of my eye as the marigold fields surrounding our home disappeared from sight,” says Jahan. “I remember clutching my sister’s hand tightly and being terrified the entire time. We had all heard about the Butcher of Bengal and his men.”

The Butcher of Bengal was the nickname given to Pakistan’s military commander, Gen Tikka Khan, notorious for overseeing Operation Searchlight, a murderous crackdown on Bengali separatists in what was then East Pakistan, which led to a genocidal crusade during the liberation war that followed.

But Jahan was about to become a victim of another brutal tactic of the Pakistani army. Alongside the killings, soldiers carried out a violent campaign of mass rape against Bengali women and girls, in what many historians believe amounted to a direct policy under Khan’s command to impregnate as many women as possible with “blood from the west”.

When the truck finally came to a stop, the girls found themselves in military barracks. The next few months were a blur for Jahan, who regularly passed out during her confinement. “We lay there like corpses, side by side. There were 20, maybe 30, of us confined to one room,” she recalls tearfully. “The only time we saw daylight was when the door creaked open and the soldiers marched in. Then the raping would begin.”



https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... surviviors
Post Reply

Return to “Foreign Countries and Culture”