Redress for Sexual Violence Before the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh: Lessons from History, and Hopes for the Future

Care with dignity in humanitarian crises: ensuring sexual and reproductive health and rights of displaced populations

“…The current sexual abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Syria provide further examples. [12][13][14][15] Sexual violence (SV) survivors experience negative physical, psychological and social outcomes that may last a lifetime. A literature review by Robbers and Morgan on prevention and response to SV among female refugees shows that placing a strong emphasis on programmes that engage and educate communities has the potential to target underlying causes of SV.…”

War Crimes Trials in Bangladesh: Justice or Politics?

“…Rape and genocide are the two worst forms of the violation of human rights in the world (Halder, 2012). During the war period two lac (200,000) women were raped and 25,000 were made pregnant by the Pakistani military with the cooperation of Bangladeshi collaborators, which has been mentioned previously (D’Costa and Hossain, 2010; Linton, 2010). Although these figures have been criticized by a few scholars, including Bose (2005), and the numbers have varied from study to study, most studies have accepted theses statistics, and also that around 10 million people fled across the border and took shelter as refugees in India (Kabir, 2016; Mascarenhas, 1971: 112–120; Rahman and Billah, 2009).…”

“…In Bangladesh, various types of war crimes committed by the Pakistani military and their collaborators (of Bangladeshi origin, e.g. Razakar, Al Bador and Al Shams) during the nine-month-long war of independence in which three million people lost their valuable lives (D’Costa and Hossain, 2010; Linton, 2010; Rahman and Billah, 2009). The nature and types of war crimes and violation of human rights which were committed in Bangladesh in 1971 are briefly analysed below.…”

“…As a reaction to this refusal to hand over power, mass protests and civil unrest erupted across East Pakistan, and this turned into a war of independence. During this war, ‘three million people lost their lives, ten million fled across the border to India as refugees and around [a] quarter [of a] million women were raped including twenty-five thousands of pregnancies [sic]’ (D’Costa and Hossain, 2010; Kabir, 2016; Linton, 2010: 194;). Also, 65 million people were kept as prisoners in their own home within the country.…”

Agami (The Time Ahead, 1984), the First “Short Film” of Bangladesh: Toward a New Cinematic Aesthetic of Imaging Time and Nation

“…The official historiography of Bangladesh also, in many cases, excluded Birangona s from different documents and records. The 16 volumes of the Bangladesher Shadhinota Judhdho Dolilpotro (Liberation War of Bangladesh: Documents), published by the Ministry of Information of Bangladesh, includes a limited number of testimonies of wartime rape, within which information on women freedom fighters has hardly been recorded (D’Costa and Hossain, 2010, p. 335; Gayen, 2015, p. 2; Mohsin, 2004, p. 20; Saikia, 2011, p. 55). Kaberi Gayen, by referring to Belal Sarkar, writes about how mainstream history narrates differently the roles of men and women in the Liberation War, highlighting only women’s state in their “loss of honor”: “Bangladesh has achieved the independence from the blood of three million martyrs and the loss of ijjat (loss of chastity) of two hundred thousand women” ([Sarkar, 1998, p. 2] quoted in Gayen, 2015, p. 2).…”