WOULD WE HAVE BEEN CLOSER TO FREEDOM?
Editor: Let qualified anthropologists bring forward rigorous evidence that this kind of mass depravity existed in pre-industrial cultures.///
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rahnuma ahmed
WHENEVER I approach her, I feel numb. I feel speechless. I want to know who she is. But I don’t know who to ask. How to ask.
This photograph has always haunted me. I don’t remember when I first saw it. Probably in a book of war photographs. And later in the Muktijuddho Jadughar, where I have gone many a times with relatives and friends, visiting from abroad.
‘She was pulled out. Dragged out from the Pakistani army’s bunker,’ said Naibuddin Ahmed, the photographer.
…..
War fractures the lives of survivors, often in ways that cannot be repaired. War rape creates a war within a war. It can outlive war. Pre-war normalcy often eludes the survivors forever.
Thirty-eight years on and I look at myself. I look at us women. I look at our normal, peacetime lives. And I wonder, if justice had been done, if the war criminals had been tried, if women had returned to their families, to their parents, husbands, lovers, brothers, if they did not have to go to Pakistan, or to brothels, or to Mother Teresa’s in Kolkata, if those pregnant could have their babies if they had wished, would my life, would our lives have been differently normal?
If justice had been done, would the rape of hill women have been a necessary part of the military occupation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts? Would the offenders have enjoyed impunity? Would there not have been independent judicial investigations? Would those guilty have gone unpunished? Would the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been militarily occupied at all?
Would we have been closer to freedom?
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