Sexual violence, indigenous Jumma women and CHT
‘Amader dhamanite Kalpana Chakmar rakta’ (The blood of Kalpana Chakma runs through our veins)... Kalpana Chakma was abducted 17 years ago.
The ruthless systematic sexual violence against women in Bangladesh, however, did not end in our land in 1971. Another period of systematic sexual violence targeting non-Bengali, Jumma or indigenous women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts was initiated soon after 1975, when the CHT was militarised.
SEXUAL violence against women in the context of armed conflict has been examined in feminist scholarship from at least the 1970s. In the 1990s, feminist scholarship showed that rape has been used historically in armed conflict as ‘an instrument of terror’, and classified rape as ‘a war crime and a crime against humanity’. However, it has also been illustrated that all wars do not involve indiscriminate rape — examples include the Israel-Palestine and El-Salvador conflicts.
During the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, the Pakistan army, in collaboration with local Bengali men in paramilitary forces, systematically committed acts of sexual violence against Bengali women. Sexual violence in the 1971 conflict involved nationalist intentions. Because the West Pakistani rulers held the view that East Pakistani Bengalis were not ‘pure’ Muslims, Muslim Bengali women were raped with the gross intent ‘to purify the Bengali nation’. They also targeted Hindu Bengali women because of their non-Muslim religion. A religious nationalism entangled with hegemonic Urdu linguistic nationalism led to ‘rape’ being used as a ‘weapon of war’. Bengali women were raped in their thousands, but the exact number still remains controversial, with the highest number given being as large as 200,000.
Twenty-five thousand women alone who were held in ‘rape camps’ were impregnated. An unknown number of Urdu-speaking, non-Bengali Bihari Muslim women were also raped by Bengali men. For over four decades justice for sexually violated women during the war in our land remained a marginalised issue. Ongoing trials at the International Crime Tribunal of Bangladesh of a number of leading Bengali collaborators in the 1971 war bring a ray of hope for justice in response to the coarse injustice committed over four decades ago.
The ruthless systematic sexual violence against women in Bangladesh, however, did not end in our land in 1971. Another period of systematic sexual violence targeting non-Bengali, Jumma or indigenous women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts was initiated soon after 1975, when the CHT was militarised. The state’s 1978-1979 policy of mass transmigration, settling 350,000 Bengalis from the plains into the CHT made the situation worse. There had always been a scarcity of usable land in the CHT. The state, with its military, took the violent solution of eviction and extermination of indigenous peoples to implement its transmigration programme. This resulted in an escalation of retaliation attacks on settlers and the military by the Shanti Bahini, the indigenous guerrilla force. Reprisal attacks by the military on the Shanti Bahini, and indiscriminate attacks by the military, other security personnel and settlers, on Jumma civilians followed. In such attacks, Jumma women were sexually targeted.
From 1979 to 1993, researchers recorded 14 mass-scale massacres of Jummas in the CHT, describing them as ‘creeping genocide’ and ‘ethnocide’. Amnesty International recorded a horrific testimony, in which a survivor describes the sexual assault of Jumma women in the 1984 Bhushanchara massacre. In this description, a clear nationalist intent can be recognised of using sexual violence against women to destroy a perceived enemy — the Chakma nation:
My village falls in the Barkal rehabilitation zone where a large number of Muslims have settled over the years. There is thus continuous tension between the two communities. In the summer of 1984 there were frequent clashes and the Muslims often used to threaten us saying that the army will come and teach us a lesson.
The army came on May 31, accompanied by a large group of Muslims some of whom were armed. They destroyed our village, raped women and killed people. I saw two women getting raped and then killed by bayonets. One Aroti, who is my distant cousin, was also raped by several soldiers and her body was disfigured with bayonets ... Five or six of us were hung upside down on a tree and beaten. Perhaps I was given up for dead and thus survived. The memories of that day are still a nightmare for me. Even now I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat remembering the sight of the soldiers thrusting bayonets into [the] private parts of our women. They were all screaming ‘No Chakmas will be born in Bangladesh’.
This extreme desire to eliminate a nation by mutilating women’s body parallels the Pakistan army’s ‘purifying’ of the Bengali nation by impregnating Bengali women. The use of hegemonic nationalism to rationalise the calculated strategic use of sexual violence against the women of a perceived enemy is common to both armies... read more:
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