Bangladesh

[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

[RTH10260]

Bangladesh police given ‘shoot-on-sight’ orders amid national curfew
Citizens confined to homes with no internet access as student-led protests lead to deadly clashes with authorities

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Deepa Parent
Sat 20 Jul 2024 15.34 CEST

Police in Bangladesh have been granted “shoot-on-sight” orders and a nationwide curfew has been imposed as student-led protests continue to roil the country, leaving more than 100 people dead.

The curfew, imposed at midnight on Friday, was expected to last until Sunday morning as police tried to bring the swiftly deteriorating security situation under control, with military personnel patrolling the streets of the capital.

The curfew was lifted briefly on Saturday afternoon to allow people to run essential errands, but otherwise people have been ordered to remain at home and all gatherings and demonstrations have been banned. The government has also imposed a communications blackout, with all internet and social media access blocked since Thursday night.

While the government is not releasing official statistics of fatalities and injuries, local media has estimated thousands have been injured and that the death toll has hit 115.

In extreme cases, police officers have been granted powers to open fire on those violating the curfew, confirmed Obaidul Quader, the general secretary of the ruling Awami League party.

The protests that have spread across Bangladesh are some of the worst the country has experienced in more than a decade. They began earlier this month on university campuses as students protested against the reintroduction of civil service job quotas that they say are discriminatory and benefit the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister.

This week, the protests have spread far beyond campus grounds and grown into a larger movement against Hasina’s government, which has ruled since 2009. Hasina is accused of overseeing rampant authoritarianism, police brutality and corruption, with her re-election in January boycotted by the opposition and widely documented as rigged. The country’s economy has also suffered a severe economic downturn since the outbreak of Covid, leaving tens of millions unemployed and grappling with record inflation.

Shafkat Mahmud, 28, a student protester from Uttara, a neighbourhood of Dhaka, said this was no longer just a student protest, but nationwide civilian unrest akin to “civil war”.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/artic ... nal-curfew

[RTH10260]

Looks like the former posting of our fogbowser Ben might have been more dangerous than his last.

[Ben-Prime]

Looks like the former posting of our fogbowser Ben might have been more dangerous than his last.

I am still in regular contact with some of my former direct reports there, but I am in the middle of moving from one hotel to another on training and consultation status in D.C.; so until I get to one set of classrooms or set up my full PC that has my credentials for remote email access, I can't even check in to see if people I care about are okay. I am hoping by the time I'm settled in my next hotel tonight that I will have some status updates from some of them.