Sarmila Bose the Culprit

Since it is National Women’s Day, I would like to share something with all of you guys.  I want to talk about a very educated woman who is in denial of a specific genocide that took place in Bangladesh.  With the amount of accurate and valued information from the time the war in 71 started to the respected writers who have written books of the factual incidents, along with sharp statistics, nobody can bend history.

If you're not familiar with the whole 1971 scene in Bangladesh then let me inform you.  You can relate it to Nanjing, Indonesia, or Rwanda.  This actually outnumbers Rwanda and Indonesia.

Before the independence of our motherland in '71, it was a part of Pakistan, known as East Pakistan.  During the fight for liberation and our mother language (Bangla), a mass number of young students, civilians, and soldiers died.  Many were killed grotesquely, most of which were women; women of all ages who were Bangladeshis and Refugees from India. 

Let’s go into further detail.  The genocide was taken place in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) by the Pakistani Army starting from March to December 1971.  The things that happened within these 9 months to the innocent East Pakistani Civilians resulted in a death toll going from 300,000 to 3,000,000 people.  Many men were taken by Pakistani soldiers and shot on the spot.  Many of you have respected family members who had been through this.  Out of the total, 200,000 to 400,000 women were RAPED.

It ranged from an 8-year-old child to a 75-year-old grandmother. Women were assaulted in the hostels of universities, schools, civilian homes.  They were forcefully taken by army men, locked up in a room, kept as nightly use by the military, raped, gang-raped, tortured, and in several cases killed in extremely painful ways, buried in piles after piles.  400,000. Think of it.  They were daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, grandmothers.

In 2005, Sharmila Bose wrote a paper, "Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh War",  that was published in the Economic and Political Weekly, denying the numbers of the rapes done by the Army and the Razakars and stated that the amounts of rape cases were exaggerated in order to get more attention.    Furthermore, she states that the Pakistani Army men were all loyal and fought only mature men and spared their wives and kids.  She questions about systematic policy of rape.  She states that it is impossible for an army of 34,000 men (the actual number is 90,368) to rape 300,000 women.  She completely denies that such incidents of horrible rape cases ever happened.  She overlooks and discredits the hundreds of thousands of victims who were raped. 

Ms. Bose even puts down an eyewitness to a rape named Rabeya Khatun.  She states, “She is illiterate, as her signature is a ‘tip-sohi’ or finger imprint. Khatun, therefore, is not in a position to verify what is written in her name.”  Because she is illiterate? That’s the kind of mindset you got from studying in Harvard, Ms. Bose?  Really?  She goes further and says, “It is quite possible that sexual violence occurred at Rajarbag – police stations across south Asia are notorious for such offences, but until and unless other, credible witnesses come forward, the hellish account attributed to one illiterate woman simply will not suffice.” 

Here’s one EDUCATED rape victim she accuses of asking for attention from the Pakistani Army.   Ferdousi Priyabhashini, a mother of three children, was a willing participant?  

“A final inconsistency in Ferdousi’s account is that as the Indian army and Bangladeshi freedom fighters approached Dhaka, she was warned by a non-Bengali clerk in her office that she would be killed and should flee. Ferdousi makes much of the threat to her life – but as Bangladesh became independent, only those who were perceived to have willingly fraternised with the Pakistani regime were at risk of the wrath of freedom fighters, not victims of the regime.”

 What an insult to all the rape victims during the liberation of Bangladesh. 

Our country, like many others, went though a horrible nightmare to get liberated.  But were one of the few countries that have such an outrageous number of rapes. 

The worst and most horrific part of a war is rape.  

No, i take that back. It's Worst when people don't believe about the rape.