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Rape of 300,00 Bengalis by Pakistani Army in 1971 was not a true story: Germaine Greer

1 million people say one thing, 10 people say the exact opposite, what do you think is more likely?
in fact this is what you would call a conspiracy theory

LOLOLZ where did the 1 million figure come from.

Anyways even Bangladeshis know the statistics are trash. I have even come cross some Bngladeshis who accuse the Indian army of worse atrocities than Pakistani Army in 1971.

Its now universally accepted that the 3 million killed figure and 300,000 raped figure are extremely inflated.
 
It is a propaganda figure mostly used by pro-Bengali nationals and our Indian friends-obviously to malign PA and Pakistan, and of course present themselves as victim of some mass genocide. While the figure itself is far from the truth, we have seen what little research on this matter has led to...
"(vii) No rape of women by Pakistan army found in the specific case studies: In all of the incidents involving the Pakistan army in the case studies, the armed forces were found not to have raped women. While this cannot be extrapolated beyond the few specific incidents in this study, it is significant, as in the popular narrative the allegation of rape is often clubbed together with allegation of killing. Rape allegations were made in prior verbal discussions in some cases and in a published work on one of the incidents. However, Bengali eyewitnesses, participants and survivors of the incidents testified to the violence and killings, but also testified that no rape had taken place in these cases. While rape is known to occur in all situations of war, charges and counter-charges on rape form a particularly contentious issue in this conflict. The absence of this particular form of violence in these instances underlines the care that needs to be taken to distinguish between circumstances in which rape may have taken place from those in which it did not." [1]

"The falsity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's repeated allegation that Pakistani troops had raped 200,000 Bengali girls in 1971 was borne out when the abortion team he had commissioned from Britain in early 1972 found that its workload involved the termination of only a hundred or more pregnancies."[2]

And the mass genocide:
"According to the Bangladesh authorities, the Pakistan Army was responsible for killing three million Bengalis and raping 200,000 East Pakistani women. It does not need any elaborate argument to see that these figures are obviously highly exaggerated. So much damage could not have been caused by the entire strength of the Pakistan Army then stationed in East Pakistan even if it had nothing else to do. In fact, however, the army was constantly engaged in fighting the Mukti Bahini, the Indian infiltrators, and later the Indian army. It has also the task of running the civil administration, maintaining communications and feeding 70 million people of East Pakistan. It is, therefore, clear that the figures mentioned by the Dacca authorities are altogether fantastic and fanciful."[2]

[1] Anatomy of Violence Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971. (PS: the author is an Indian)
[2] Hamoodur Rehman Commission report(I dare you to challenge the credibility of the report itself)

@Atanz , can't have you missing on this information and thread. Why are the atrocities committed by the insurgents ignored?

@HRK , @Icarus ,@Slav Defence ,@Khafee , and others, i will be touching on this in the coming chapter of Political History. Give it some. This is an extract from it.
regards
 
A lot of Indian soldiers were part of the atrocities. And I got this info from a Bengali.

Anyways its funny. The PA has no history of rape besides the one it is accused of in 1971. In none of the PA's other counter insurgency operations before and after 1971 was it accused of rape by any population. Compare that to the Indian Army where mass rape charges prop up everywhere it goes i.e. Kashmir, Hyderabad, etc.

Keep in mind that the areas where Pak Army has been the most deployed is known to have the most beautiful women (i.e. Kashmir and the Tribal Areas and Balochistan).
 
It is a propaganda figure mostly used by pro-Bengali nationals and our Indian friends-obviously to malign PA and Pakistan, and of course present themselves as victim of some mass genocide. While the figure itself is far from the truth, we have seen what little research on this matter has led to...
"(vii) No rape of women by Pakistan army found in the specific case studies: In all of the incidents involving the Pakistan army in the case studies, the armed forces were found not to have raped women. While this cannot be extrapolated beyond the few specific incidents in this study, it is significant, as in the popular narrative the allegation of rape is often clubbed together with allegation of killing. Rape allegations were made in prior verbal discussions in some cases and in a published work on one of the incidents. However, Bengali eyewitnesses, participants and survivors of the incidents testified to the violence and killings, but also testified that no rape had taken place in these cases. While rape is known to occur in all situations of war, charges and counter-charges on rape form a particularly contentious issue in this conflict. The absence of this particular form of violence in these instances underlines the care that needs to be taken to distinguish between circumstances in which rape may have taken place from those in which it did not." [1]

"The falsity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's repeated allegation that Pakistani troops had raped 200,000 Bengali girls in 1971 was borne out when the abortion team he had commissioned from Britain in early 1972 found that its workload involved the termination of only a hundred or more pregnancies."[2]

And the mass genocide:
"According to the Bangladesh authorities, the Pakistan Army was responsible for killing three million Bengalis and raping 200,000 East Pakistani women. It does not need any elaborate argument to see that these figures are obviously highly exaggerated. So much damage could not have been caused by the entire strength of the Pakistan Army then stationed in East Pakistan even if it had nothing else to do. In fact, however, the army was constantly engaged in fighting the Mukti Bahini, the Indian infiltrators, and later the Indian army. It has also the task of running the civil administration, maintaining communications and feeding 70 million people of East Pakistan. It is, therefore, clear that the figures mentioned by the Dacca authorities are altogether fantastic and fanciful."[2]

[1] Anatomy of Violence Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971. (PS: the author is an Indian)
[2] Hamoodur Rehman Commission report(I dare you to challenge the credibility of the report itself)

@Atanz , can't have you missing on this information and thread. Why are the atrocities committed by the insurgents ignored?

@HRK , @Icarus ,@Slav Defence ,@Khafee , and others, i will be touching on this in the coming chapter of Political History. Give it some. This is an extract from it.
regards

Hon'ble WAJsal

The author is in an Indian in same vein as Hussain Haqqani is Pakistani. She has been much discussed and thoroughly rebutted by Dr. Mookherjee in EP&W. Few excerpts are as follows
......................
The article cites the case of Ferdousy Priyobhashini who as a single woman had to look after her widowed mother and young siblings and continued to work during the war and becomes the focus of sexual violence by various Pakistani officers as well as Bengali collaborators.

The article interrogates Priyobhashini’s account questioning why she stayed back during the war and whether her rape was as a result of coercion or a voluntary sexual act by stating that she "willingly fraternised". By that argument is the article suggesting that Priyobhashini brought the rape upon her since she stayed back? This is extremely problematic and parallels the biases within various rape laws which seem to suggest that women must have brought the rape upon them in different instances.

By this argument the sociologically nuanced analysis of how single women and their sexuality are always suspect, is never addressed and instead Priyobhashini’s experience is highlighted by the derisive comment that she "makes much of her threats". The complexity of war time violence and the various threatening compulsive situations is well articulated in the work of Cynthia Enloe, Veena Das, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. Primo Levi’s work on the holocaust also shows the complex negotiations made by survivors.

............

As Bose has gathered most of her information from highly dubious one-sided Pakistani sources following atrocious and unbelievable lines, "The picture painted of captain Ataullah by his fellow officer, who knew him, completely contradicts the one given by Mandal, who appears to have only seen his dead body. Clearly, if captain Ataullah had been based in Nageswari and only gone up to Bhurungamari the day the Indian attack started, he could not have been responsible for whatever might have been going on in Bhurungamari. Mandal offers no corroborating evidence for his character assassination of an officer who had died defending his country, and therefore, cannot speak in his own defence."



The article also states the account of Champa from one of my articles [Mookherjee 2003] and tries to infer that no rapes happened during the Bangladesh war. My article was exploring how the trauma of rape is understood in independent Bangladesh and in the process I explore how scholars of memory make sense of the process of forgetting. The nuanced arguments I make about Champa is hinged on long-term fieldwork, cross-checking of hospital files and documents and finding the social workers who found her and brought her to the hospital. These are the "evidences" of Champa’s war-time violent encounter of rape. I have also worked with and written about other women who encountered rape during the Bangladesh war. This was done by means of over a year’s fieldwork as well as cross-checking interviews, and examining archival, official documents, etc.

http://www.epw.org.in/uploads/articles/11334.pdf

P.S. She is an US national of Indian decent.
 
Hon'ble WAJsal

The author is in an Indian in same vein as Hussain Haqqani is Pakistani. She has been much discussed and thoroughly rebutted by Dr. Mookherjee in EP&W. Few excerpts are as follows
......................
The article cites the case of Ferdousy Priyobhashini who as a single woman had to look after her widowed mother and young siblings and continued to work during the war and becomes the focus of sexual violence by various Pakistani officers as well as Bengali collaborators.

The article interrogates Priyobhashini’s account questioning why she stayed back during the war and whether her rape was as a result of coercion or a voluntary sexual act by stating that she "willingly fraternised". By that argument is the article suggesting that Priyobhashini brought the rape upon her since she stayed back? This is extremely problematic and parallels the biases within various rape laws which seem to suggest that women must have brought the rape upon them in different instances.

By this argument the sociologically nuanced analysis of how single women and their sexuality are always suspect, is never addressed and instead Priyobhashini’s experience is highlighted by the derisive comment that she "makes much of her threats". The complexity of war time violence and the various threatening compulsive situations is well articulated in the work of Cynthia Enloe, Veena Das, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. Primo Levi’s work on the holocaust also shows the complex negotiations made by survivors.

............

As Bose has gathered most of her information from highly dubious one-sided Pakistani sources following atrocious and unbelievable lines, "The picture painted of captain Ataullah by his fellow officer, who knew him, completely contradicts the one given by Mandal, who appears to have only seen his dead body. Clearly, if captain Ataullah had been based in Nageswari and only gone up to Bhurungamari the day the Indian attack started, he could not have been responsible for whatever might have been going on in Bhurungamari. Mandal offers no corroborating evidence for his character assassination of an officer who had died defending his country, and therefore, cannot speak in his own defence."



The article also states the account of Champa from one of my articles [Mookherjee 2003] and tries to infer that no rapes happened during the Bangladesh war. My article was exploring how the trauma of rape is understood in independent Bangladesh and in the process I explore how scholars of memory make sense of the process of forgetting. The nuanced arguments I make about Champa is hinged on long-term fieldwork, cross-checking of hospital files and documents and finding the social workers who found her and brought her to the hospital. These are the "evidences" of Champa’s war-time violent encounter of rape. I have also worked with and written about other women who encountered rape during the Bangladesh war. This was done by means of over a year’s fieldwork as well as cross-checking interviews, and examining archival, official documents, etc.

http://www.epw.org.in/uploads/articles/11334.pdf

P.S. She is an US national of Indian decent.


The comparison between Sarmila Bose (an Oxford educated academic whose work got praise from academics such as Dirk Moses) and Hussain Haqqani (who was caught in the Memogate scandal) is false.

Anyways, Nayyanika Mookerjee is a liar as Sarmila Bose has exposed her. Mookerjee made up a lie that Professor Willem criticised Bose. Bose uncovered this to be a lie

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/30/the-bangladesh-war-1971-book?INTCMP=SRCH

I was astonished to read in Nayanika Mookherjee's article (8 June) the generalised claim that in my book Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, "Pakistani army personnel are gentle, quiet, kind, honest, 'fine men' with a good humour and 'with no ethnic bias against the Bengalis.'" I believe that these are foolish and highly irresponsible allegations to make against a book on such a sensitive subject. On the contrary, as an earlier article in the Guardian noted (21 May), Dead Reckoning "complicates" such simplistic narratives of that war. My book contains numerous examples of positive and negative characteristics in individuals from both sides. Historically, attempts to disentangle myth from reality in the 1971 Bangladesh war have been bedevilled by false claims – sometimes on a spectacular scale. Mookherjee quoted Professor Willem van Schendel as though he had pronounced on my just-published book. I gather from Professor van Schendel that he has not reviewed that book.

Dr Sarmila Bose

University of Oxford
 
The comparison between Sarmila Bose (an Oxford educated academic whose work got praise from academics such as Dirk Moses) and Hussain Haqqani (who was caught in the Memogate scandal) is false.

Anyways, Nayyanika Mookerjee is a liar as Sarmila Bose has exposed her. Mookerjee made up a lie that Professor Willem criticised Bose. Bose uncovered this to be a lie

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/30/the-bangladesh-war-1971-book?INTCMP=SRCH

I was astonished to read in Nayanika Mookherjee's article (8 June) the generalised claim that in my book Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, "Pakistani army personnel are gentle, quiet, kind, honest, 'fine men' with a good humour and 'with no ethnic bias against the Bengalis.'" I believe that these are foolish and highly irresponsible allegations to make against a book on such a sensitive subject. On the contrary, as an earlier article in the Guardian noted (21 May), Dead Reckoning "complicates" such simplistic narratives of that war. My book contains numerous examples of positive and negative characteristics in individuals from both sides. Historically, attempts to disentangle myth from reality in the 1971 Bangladesh war have been bedevilled by false claims – sometimes on a spectacular scale. Mookherjee quoted Professor Willem van Schendel as though he had pronounced on my just-published book. I gather from Professor van Schendel that he has not reviewed that book.

Dr Sarmila Bose

University of Oxford

It's her word against hers. I do not see any direct quote from Van schendel just Mookkerjee claiming one.

Anyway lets discuss the merits of the excerpts I have posted where Bose alleges in so many words that Priyobhasini was asking for it
 
Sure, you would all listen to a white woman about what happened in Bangladesh they must be the epitome of unadulterated truth.

If people want an opinion from white people so bad then they should read about Bangladeshi rapes from Cynthia Enloe or Susan Brownmiller among others, or better yet someone from Bangladesh itself Irene Khan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/world/asia/25iht-letter.html?_r=0

The crux of the matter is we will never know what the exact number except for the fact that it is quite high, International Commission of Jurists, WHO, IPPF among others went on site but as there were a large number of abortions, suicides by victims, infanticides, et cetra were never able to concur on the number.
 
Hey, the truth is that both sides stretched their own truths. Both sides committed horrible atrocities - but the atrocities committed by the Indian army and the MB are oppressed and hidden - these atrocities mainly targeted the Muhajir community.

Indians tend to bring this out a lot without looking at their own history and thinking of themselves as an angel state.
But forget all of their history from 1947 and onward have been stained with massacres, mass rapes and many other atrocities.

They began as early as 1948 - killing over 150,000 Hyderbad Muslims and even to these days - you hear a rape/molest case of Soldiers every week.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24159594
 
Rape has been the inevitable reality for a militarily subjugated and defeated occupied populace since time immemorial.

Its about power and humiliation much more than just about copulation.

There is nothing that leads me to believe that East Pakistan in 1970, leading up to 1971 was any different.
 
Hey, the truth is that both sides stretched their own truths. Both sides committed horrible atrocities - but the atrocities committed by the Indian army and the MB are oppressed and hidden - these atrocities mainly targeted the Muhajir community.

Indians tend to bring this out a lot without looking at their own history and thinking of themselves as an angel state.
But forget all of their history from 1947 and onward have been stained with massacres, mass rapes and many other atrocities.

They began as early as 1948 - killing over 150,000 Hyderbad Muslims and even to these days - you hear a rape/molest case of Soldiers every week.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24159594

Leave the Indians alone bhai. They need a hero mentality after doing so many rapes.
 
Sure, you would all listen to a white woman about what happened in Bangladesh they must be the epitome of unadulterated truth.

If people want an opinion from white people so bad then they should read about Bangladeshi rapes from Cynthia Enloe or Susan Brownmiller among others, or better yet someone from Bangladesh itself Irene Khan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/world/asia/25iht-letter.html?_r=0

The crux of the matter is we will never know what the exact number except for the fact that it is quite high, International Commission of Jurists, WHO, IPPF among others went on site but as there were a large number of abortions, suicides by victims, infanticides, et cetra were never able to concur on the number.

Susan Brownmiller and the Western commentators cited no sources. They just repeated Indian and Bangladeshi propaganda. none of the statistics have any research or data to back them up.

There's a Bangladeshi professor Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury who says these mass rape allegations are a lie.

What really matters is what BANGLADESHIS say or believe

There's Bangladeshis on this very forum who have rejected these false exaggerated rape statistics.
 
There's Bangladeshis on this very forum who have rejected these false exaggerated rape statistics.

The Bangladeshi government does nt think so and has demanding an apology from
Pakistan ; for several years now ; and this has become a thorny issue
between the two countries

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world...mes-in-1971/story-YvM6zFMiFcacrPTulelFvO.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sorry-bangladesh_b_8815110.html?section=india

http://tribune.com.pk/story/471715/why-pakistan-should-apologise-to-bangladesh/
 
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