Author: Anwar Ouassini and Nabil Ouassini

Introduction

On 26 March 1971, the independence of Bangladesh was declared by Shiekh Mujib Rahman (1920–1975), the eventual first president of the new nation state after he had called for campaigns of civil disobedience and armed resistance against President Yahya Khan’s junta in West Pakistan. For the next six months, the Bangladeshi War of Liberation was fought between the Pakistani military junta (West Pakistan) that was unwavering in its possession of “East Pakistan” and Bengali nationalists determined to gain independence in the face of political, economic, cultural, and linguistic suppression. The protracted conflict resulted in numerous violent atrocities that eventually evolved into genocidal violence, mass killings and deportations. One of the unique characteristics of the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh was the systematic use of rape and torture against the populace. While the rape and torture of women, men, and children in Bangladesh was not historically viewed within the larger discursive repertoire of genocide, the changes in international law and other genocidal events in Rwanda, the Congo, Bosnia, and Darfur has allowed scholars to revisit and expand the definitions of genocide to include components of sexual violence. This chapter explores the role of rape as a tool of war in the context of the War of Liberation in 1971, Bangladesh. In doing so, the paper will first present a chronological description of the conflict, contextualize the historical back ground, and evaluate the use of racial and religious ideologies that produced the ideological impetus and justification for the genocide; specifically, the use of systematic and targeted rape in the war. The chapter will conclude with a discussion on the lessons from the conflict that the international community can learn from especially in the context of genocidal rape.

Background

The East-West Pakistan conflict and the subsequent War of Liberation (1971) was a direct consequence of the temporal power of the 1947 partition of British India. The political and economic structures that were manufactured in East and West Pakistan, favored the Punjabis and Sindhis who dominated West Pakistani politics.After consolidating and centralizing power in West Pakistan, subsequent regimes exploited, dominated, and repressed the East where more than half of the population resided. Moreover, nearly all of the major institutions were filled by West Pakistani elites including the civil service, the military, and the overall administration of government.1 A system of direct representation would have provided East Pakistan with a concentration of political power and thus, the West Pakistanis instituted a geopolitical program (One Unit) that merged the four major provinces in West Pakistan into one as a counterbalance. This would imaginatively rework East-West Pakistani democracy in favor of the West. These inequalities were also reflected in the economic structures as East Pakistani wealth was consistently transferred and allotted to Western Pakistani projects and investments including the building of the capital, Islamabad.^[2]

Although the majority of both West and East Pakistan were Muslim, other ethnic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics overshadowed their shared religious identities. These public disagreements were