Documentary: Muktir Nary, A Documentary About Birangona: Women of War Bangladesh Liberation War 1971

Documentary: Muktir Nary, A Documentary About Birangona: Women of War Bangladesh Liberation War 1971 On-Air at Maasranga Television Producer: Zobayer Iqbal The Bangladesh Liberation War (Bengali: মুক্তিযুদ্ধ Muktijuddho), also known as the Bangladesh War of Independence, or simply the Liberation War in Bangladesh, was a revolution and armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement in East Pakistan and the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. It resulted in the independence of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The war began after the Pakistani military junta based in West Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight against the people of East Pakistan on the night of 25 March 1971. It pursued the systematic elimination of nationalist Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, religious minorities and armed personnel. The junta annulled the results of the 1970 elections and arrested Prime Minister-elect Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. During the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence, members of the Pakistani military and supporting Islamist militias from Jamaat e Islami raped between two and four hundred thousand Bangladeshi women in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. During the war, a fatwa in Pakistan declared that the Bengali 'freedom fighters' were Hindus and that their women could be taken as the 'booty of war'. Imams and Muslim religious leaders publicly declared that the Bengali women were 'gonimoter maal' (war booty) and thus they openly supported the rape of Bengali women by the Pakistani Army. The activists and leaders of Islamic parties were also involved in the rapes and abduction of women. Scholars have suggested that rape was used to terrorise both the Bengali-speaking Muslim majority and the Hindu minority of Bangladesh. The rapes caused thousands of pregnancies, births of war babies, abortions, incidents of infanticide and suicide, and, in addition, led to ostracisation of the victims. Recognised as one of the major occurrences of war crimes anywhere, the atrocities ended after surrender of the Pakistani military and supporting Razaker militias. Initially India claimed its support for the Mukti Bahini and later intervention was on humanitarian grounds, but after the UN rejected this argument, India claimed intervention was needed to protect its own security, and it is now widely seen as a humanitarian move. Despite the Pakistani government's attempts to censor news during the conflict, reports of atrocities filtered out, attracting international media and public attention, and drawing widespread outrage and criticism. In December 1971, East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh after a nine-month war with West Pakistan and their local Bengali collaborators. Faced with a huge population of rape survivors, the new Bangladeshi government – six days after the end of the war – publicly designated any woman raped in the war a birangona (a brave or courageous woman; the Bangladeshi state uses the term to mean 'war-heroine') as an attempt to reduce their social ostracism. Even today, the Bangladeshi government's bold, public effort to refer to the women raped during 1971 as birangonas is internationally unprecedented. Yet the term remains unknown to many outside Bangladesh. In 1972, the independent government of Bangladesh set up rehabilitation centres for birangonas, which undertook abortion, put their children up for international adoption, arranged their marriages, trained them in vocational skills, and often ensured them government jobs. Wartime rapes were widely reported in the press from December 1971 until the middle of 1973, after which it was relegated to oblivion in government and journalistic consciousness for 15 years, re-emerging once again in the 1990s. (The issue of wartime rape, however, remained on the public stage as a topic of literary and visual representation – films, plays, photographs – since 1971.) What was missing were testimonial accounts of birangonas and their experiences. In 1992, three birangonas from an impoverished background were photographed in a civil society movement demanding the trial of collaborators. These photographs were published in leading national newspapers. From here, the political trajectory of the birangona assumed a new form as the Bangladeshi press began reporting on wartime rapes again.