Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War

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.

During the war Bengali nationalists also committed mass rape of ethnic Bihari Muslim women, since the Bihari Muslim community supported Pakistan. Indian soldiers as well as Bengali millitiamen were also identified as perpetrators of rape by scholar Yasmin Saikia.

...
Wikipedia