Freedom in the air
While trying in vain to quell the Banglaees' struggle for freedom, the Pakistani military turned mad dogs during the nine months of the 1971 Liberation War.
Trampling on the Geneva Conventions, they brutally tortured their captives, especially the Bangladeshi women. Their brutality was exposed, during and after the war, by local and international media.
According to different official fact sheets on the Liberation War, as many as 200,000 to 400,000 women, aged between eight and 75, were raped by the Pak army and their local collaborators in 1971. Tens of thousands of them were made pregnant. At least 23,000 abortions were performed in Dhaka alone and 300-400 “war-children” were born in 22 clinics in the city.
These are the figures that have been recorded. Now that rape was, and still is, considered to be a social stigma in the country, how many such incidents remained untold and unreported is left to our imagination.
While mining contents for its special online repository on the Liberation War -- 'Freedom in the air', The Daily Star Online gathered rare video footages, photos and reports run in the local and foreign media on the bone-chilling atrocities of the occupation army.
Available at freedomintheair.thedailystar.net, the online depository also contains exclusive interviews of war heroes, key diplomatic cables including then US Consul General Archer K Blood's "Dissent Cables", famously known as “Blood Telegrams”, and the report of Pakistan government-formed Hamoodur Rahman Commission which censured the politicians and army for genocide in Bangladesh in 1971.
Three of those rarely watched videos vividly present Pakistan army's disgraceful acts on Bangladeshi women.
In a video report (tinyurl.com/kexpnkx ) broadcast on February 20, 1972, Liz Trotta of NBC told the story of Sayeba, 16, who was a widow of a local Mukti Bahini commander. The Pak army broke into their house during the war, raped her in front of his husband at gunpoint, and then forced her to watch her husband getting killed by the raiders. She remained with her parents after December 16. But her parents were worried for no man would ever marry their daughter who had become a “disgrace” to the society. But Sayeba was apparently lucky that at least her family provided her a shelter. There were women, who were raped during the war, who did not have anywhere to go. They were rejected by their husbands, their parents and by everyone they knew.
Another video (tinyurl.com/lvm3owy) showed the story of Khadija, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, who along with her friends was abducted by the Pak army. She was taken to army barracks in Mohammadpur and kept as a sex slave along with 40 others like her for six months till the Pak army surrendered on December 16. The Pakistani hyenas used them as they wished, kept them naked so that they could not run away in the daylight. When she was rescued after December 16, she was visibly traumatised and burst into tears saying, “I want to go back to my mother!”
A clip (tinyurl.com/p7weh6y) from “9 Months To Freedom” (1975), taped in Agartala of India, narrated a teenage Bangladeshi girl's heartbreaking story. She, sister to a Bangladeshi student leader, was taken and kept in a Pakistani camp as a sex slave. Unable to bear the torture, she tried to escape from there. A bullet hit her skull when the barbarian army opened fire on her. She died a few days after the documentary was filmed.
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