Justice For 1971 War Rapes

The history of 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation accords the mass rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators. After about 40 years of the Liberation War, the matter of rape of the Bangladeshi women was brought under litigation, to a certain extent, in the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT-BD). However, the issue of justice for the rape victims of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation still lacks comprehensive social and legal attention. A question remained very much unexplored as to whether ‘legal justice’ through trials essentially ensures ‘social justice’ for the war rape victims of Bangladesh. It thus remains an unspoken narrative in Bangladesh in respect of how the war rape victims actually perceive ‘justice’. Another question that arises in this regard is whether ‘complete justice’ is being done in the course of ensuring legal justice to war rape victims. It may be mentioned that no systematic and/or comprehensive research has been conducted so far on this subject. This research would endeavor to get an account from 385 Bangladeshi war rape victims and their families about the socio-legal aspects of the long-awaited justice.

War Heroines Speak tells the heroic and sorrowful stories of 7 women survivors who were subjected to rape and torture by the Pakistani army during the 1971 Bangladesh war. Striving to shed light on the realities of war crimes, this book has been translated from the original anthology compiled by Dr. Nilima Chowdhury in 1994. No other book captures the human impact of war in rural and urban Bangladesh-- and the ripple effect from the frontlines to the communities. In this quiet narrative, the young women and children clearly express how they went from an idyllic childhood to the horrors of genocide. Dr. Nusrat Rabbee hopes this translate book will help the world understand the history behind this genocide and to hold Pakistan accountable for wartime crimes.

Following the 1971 Bangladesh War, the Bangladesh government publicly designated the thousands of women raped by the Pakistani military and their local collaborators as birangonas, ("brave women”). Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration of birangonas as heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.

In Asia the "Age of Extremes" witnessed many forms of mass violence and genocide, related to the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire, the proxy wars of the Cold War, and the anti-colonial nation building processes that often led to new conflicts and civil wars. The present volume is considered an introductory reader that deals with different forms of mass violence and genocide in Asia, discusses the perspectives of victims and perpetrators alike.

This book gives a detailed political analysis of nationbuilding processes and how these are closely linked to statebuilding and to issues of war crime, gender and sexuality, and marginalization of minority groups. With a focus on the Indian subcontinent, the author demonstrates how the state itself is involved in the construction of a gendered identity, and how control of women and their sexuality is central to the nationbuilding project. She applies a critical feminist approach to two major conflicts in the Indian subcontinent – the Partition of India in 1947 and the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 – and offers suggestions for addressing historical injustices and war crimes in the context of modern Bangladesh. Addressing how the social and political elites were able to construct and legitimize a history of the state that ignored these issues, the author suggests a critical re-examination of the national narrative of the creation of Bangladesh which takes into account the rise of Islamic rights and their alleged involvement in war crimes. Looking at the impact that notions of nation-state and nationalism have on women from a critical feminist perspective, the book will be an important addition to the literature on gender studies, international relations and South Asian politics.

This book examines the development of international humanitarian law (IHL), the protection of the victims of armed conflict, the IHL from a Third World perspective, the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution under Islamic law and the issues faced in implementing IHL.

Bangladeshi women recall the sexualized violence of the war of 1971, fought between India and what was then East and West Pakistan.

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations—from courts to NGOs to the UN—have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence. Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of conflict-based sexual violence. Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones helps to fill in the historical gaps. It provides insight into subjects that are of deep concern to the human rights community, such as the aftermath of conflict-based sexual violence, legal strategies for prosecuting it, the economic functions of sexual violence, and the ways perceived religious or racial difference can create or aggravate settings of sexual danger. Essays in the volume span a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic scope, touching on the ancient world, medieval Europe, the American Revolutionary War, precolonial and colonial Africa, Muslim Central Asia, the two world wars, and the Bangladeshi War of Independence. By considering a wide variety of cases, the contributors analyze the factors making sexual violence in conflict zones more or less likely and the resulting trauma more or less devastating. Topics covered range from the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators, to the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence, to the historical background of the contemporary feminist-inflected human rights moment. In bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, this wide-ranging collection provides historians and human rights activists with tools for understanding long-term consequences of sexual violence as war-ravaged societies struggle to achieve postconflict stability.