Roberts, Adam.

“NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo”, Survival – Global The Birangonas of the Bangladesh War:
Politics and Strategy, 41, no. 3 (1999), pp. 102 – 123
Issues of Gendered Representation
Russell, Graham et al. “Syria: US ‘Locked And Loaded’ If Chemical Weapons
Used Again – As It Happened.” The Guardian. 14 Apr. 2018.
and Justice
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/apr/14/syria-donald- S AK S HI GALA
trump-announcement-chemical-attack-live. Accessed 26 Apr. 2018.

“Suspected Chemical Attack On Douma City - VDC - Violations Documentation

Center - ‫مركز توثيق اإلنتهاكات‬.” VDC - Violations Documentation Center. 2018.
https://vdc-sy.net/suspected-chemical-attack-douma-city/. Accessed 26
Apr. 2018.
The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
Tibon, Khoury, and Landau. “U.S., France and U.K. Strike Syria Over Chemical
Attack.” haaretz.com. 15 Apr. 2018.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/trump-approves-
precision-strikes-in-syria-explosions-near-damascus-1.5995358. Accessed
26 Apr. 2018.
“Use of Chemical Weapons In Syria Would Be ‘Crime Against Humanity’ – Ban.”
UN News. 23Aug. 2013.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2013/08/447352-use-chemical-weapons-
syria-would-be-crime-against-humanity-ban. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Walzer, Michael. “The Argument about Humanitarian Intervention”, Dissent,
winter (2002), pp. 29 -37.
Ward, Alex. “The US Has Bombed Syria To Punish It For A Chemical Attack.”
Vox. 16 Apr. 2018.
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17221420/trump-syria-attack-strike-
assad-russia-response-chemical-weapon. Accessed 26 Apr. 2018.
Weiss, Thomas G. Humanitarian Intervention. Ideas in Action. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2007.
‘They keep her alive as a wound. Her life, her severe history, remains
unaddressed.’1 When anthropologist Nayanika Mookherjee traveled to Dhaka
in Bangladesh in 1997 for preliminary fieldwork on theorisations of wartime
rape, she was not greeted by the silence she had expected. Instead, she found
her own assumptions corrected — rape was not absent from war narratives
from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Rape was invoked everywhere and
its most significant symbol was the birangona. Birangona, meaning war-heroine,
was the title given to rape victims from the 1971 war by the Bangladesh
government in 1972. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first Prime
Minister, believed that the nation owed victims of sexual violence during the
war ‘a debt of honour and respect.’2 But like Mookherjee questions, was the
state keeping rape victims alive as wounds? Was the title birangona meant to
rehabilitate victims and erase the stigma attached to rape or was it simply a
name derived for the public memorialisation of their experiences? And what
did this identity of the war-heroine mean for justice and accountability?
The prevalence of rape during the 1971 war is a complex issue, with several
layers of politicised and nationalist narratives framing it. This essay, in
particular, attempts to understand the concept and nuances of the title
birangona. The aim is to to reconcile two fragments of the same discourse
— what is the representation of the birangonas in public memory and
state narratives and how it has engendered a judicial system that seeks to
homogenise their experiences. The first part of this essay illustrates how
the conceptualisation of the birangona title by the state has affected the
1 Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of
1971, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 26.

2 Marion Scholte, ‘Liberating the Women of 1971’, Forum: The Daily Star, March 2011.

126 EXIT 11 THE BIRANGONAS OF THE BANGLADESH WAR 127

representation of rape victims from the war. The second part of this essay to Bengali nationalist and masculine identities.’4 Sexual violence and the
will briefly engage with the problematic characteristics of homogenising birangona became a public secret, an oxymoron in itself. The very public
the subjectivities of sexual violence. The third part of this essay, built upon memorialisation of their experiences that had protected them from stigma in
an understanding of how representations of the birangona have enabled a the immediate aftermath of the war in the 1970s became a taboo in the 1990s.
generalised interpretation of victims’ experiences, evaluates the war tribunal The women’s revelations were considered to have been a transgression not of
that was established in 2009. This segment focuses on how the birangona their bodies but of Bengali masculine pride.
identity in particular influences the way war crimes against women were
There is a third dimension to this representative dichotomy between honour
framed and prosecuted. As such, this essay critically evaluates transitional
and shame, and that is heroism. Mookherjee addresses the characterisation
justice to argue that socio-cultural representations of victims of sexual
of rape victims as freedom fighters. She writes that this representation was
violence have a significant impact on the way accountability and persecution
a ‘rhetoric of heroism which identified war heroines as liberation fighters as
for sexual violence as a war crime are framed to this day.
they had sacrificed and fought with their bodies through violent encounters.’5
Part I: Representation of the Birangona and its Issues This suggests that one of the key elements that protected birangonas from
complete ostracisation from Bangladeshi society in the 1970s was their
Rape victims from the 1971 war have been bestowed with a highly specific
characterisation as liberation fighters in dominant state narratives. It also
identity that is unique to the context of Bangladesh. Instead of creating a
highlights the power that state narratives and representations hold in
structure of erasure and exclusion when it came to the visibility of rape
framing the inclusion and exclusion of certain categories of people. Where
victims in post-war communities, the state engendered a new narrative that
the birangona was a revered figure in the 1970s, two decades later, she was
shunned shame and embraced samman (respectability) for victims. According
no longer a figure from the war that needed to be included in nationalist
to Nayanika Mookherjee, this lack of ‘sexual sanction’ against rape victims,
discussions.
especially in grassroots communities like villages, was based upon the idea
that the sexual violence was forced and systematic, a tragedy that could have The second representation of the birangona deals with not the rape victim
‘befallen any family.’ 3
as an individual herself but rather an object that keeps the state narratives
of the war alive in a human form, as a memoir. Louise Harrington refers to
However, what is significant about this representation of rape victims as
this institutionalised depiction of rape victims as ‘an appropriation of the
honourable as opposed to shameful, is how drastically it was altered in the
female body for the purpose of state building.’6 This ‘state building’ process
1990s. While still labeled birangona, there was a shift in the public discourse
not only led to the negation of female victims’ autonomy and agency but a
surrounding them, especially with regards to if it was appropriate to bring a
commodification of the female body as an object that had been tarnished but
discussion on sexual violence into mainstream narratives at all. Bina D’Costa
argues that the shift in the way birangonas were perceived in the 1990s was
primarily a result of the creation of an academic and intellectual infrastructure
4 Bina D’Costa, ‘Birangona: Bearing Witness in War and Peace’, in Of the Nation Born: The Bangladesh
that came into existence because of the growing demand for the persecution
Papers, New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers Pvt., 2016, p.73.
of war criminals, ‘Nationalist interpretations of rape of women saw these
5 Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘Remembering to Forget: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence
experiences as being less about the women themselves than the challenge in the Bangladesh War of 1971’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute vol. 12, no. 2 (2006),p.
421-36.

6 Louise Harrington, ‘Crossing Borders in Partition Studies and the Question of the Bangladesh
3 Mookherjee, p. 70. Liberation War’, Postcolonial Text, vol. 11, no. 2, 2016, p. 8

128 EXIT 11 THE BIRANGONAS OF THE BANGLADESH WAR 129

was reclaimed by the state and its nationalists. In attempting to eulogise the
birangona and her role in the nationalist project, the state canonised her as a
permanent reminder of successful vengeance against Pakistan.
Part II: Homogenising Experiences of Sexual Violence
This section primarily addresses the problems associated with homogenising
the experiences of victims of sexual violence and the implications of some of
these issues for post-conflict justice systems.
One of the most significant questions that needs to be asked is was the state
reproducing the spectacle of sexual violence as a form of controlling women’s
expression? Yasmin Saikia attempts to answer this question:
It must be remembered that it was the state, a hypermasculinised
state that gave these women the name birangona. It is not women,
but structures and institutions beyond their control that restrict
their speech and force them to express their experience in a
certain way.7
Saikia’s argument about how the hypermasculine state controls the expression
of subjectivities of sexual violence during the war suggests that the state has
no interest in recognising different realities of rape victims. Instead, the very
construction of the birangona label is a tool to subjugate female agency so that
a monopolised narrative, beneficial for nationalist discourse, could be framed.
Another implication of the birangona category is that it became an alternative
legal language for sexual violence to enter discussions in the public sphere.
For example, there is no word for rape in Urdu, which was the language
spoken majorly by West Pakistanis in East Pakistan. Similarly, the Bangla word
dharshan is the closest word to rape. However, according to East Pakistan law,
it was not applicable in women’s testimonies of rape legally because it did
not ‘sufficiently’ describe the act itself. The lack of a cohesive legal language
for rape that preceded the 1971 war meant that the title birangona became a
7 Yasmin Saikia, ‘War as History, Humanity in Violence: Women, Men, and Memories of 1971, East
Pakistan/Bangladesh.’ in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human
Rights, edited by Heineman Elizabeth D., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, p. 163.
130 EXIT 11
substitute for the legal framing of rape victims. This implied that the women
who were called upon to testify in war trials, especially those in early 2010s,
were labeled birangona and that one category was considered to include all
forms of sexual violence they had experienced. As a result, these ramifications
associated with the generalised representation of rape victims in the war,
lead to the question that Mookherjee asks— ‘Do human rights forums and
war tribunals have space to accommodate the complexities of such human
narratives?’8
Part III: Gender and Transitional Justice
The International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT of Bangladesh), set up
in 2009, is a domestically established war crimes tribunal aimed to prosecute
war crimes from the 1971 War of Liberation from Pakistan. This segment of
the essay, drawing upon the analytical findings above, is divided into three
subdivisions. First, it answers the question of how the ICT has attempted to
incorporate sexual violence as a war crime in the trials. Second, it explores
the role of civil activism in transitional justice for rape victims and the
birangonas. Third, it highlights the broader implications of how gender fits into
the framework of transitional justice. These trials have received widespread
criticism from several domestic and international communities because
the Bangladesh government has been accused of using them as strategy to
suppress political opposition. As a result, the politicisation of the trials is a
factor that must not be disregarded when evaluating them.
The question of how the ICT of Bangladesh has incorporated the persecution
of sexual violence will be answered with reference to two specific trials.
According to Mookherjee, in 2008 she interviewed an investigating officer
from the ICT who revealed that the tribunal was ‘processing victims’
testimonies.’9 This suggests that the tribunal would accommodate oral and
literary testimonies as legitimate forms of evidence of sexual violence.
However, only one oral testimony since the ICT was established in 2009,
has been used in court to convict a war criminal. In 2012, Abdul Quader
8 Mookherjee, p.260.
9 Mookherjee, p. 272.
THE BIRANGONAS OF THE BANGLADESH WAR 131
Mollah was convicted of war crimes, including rape, and sentenced to life
imprisonment. One of the testimonies presented against him was that of a
woman who testified that she had witnessed Mollah rape and murder her
younger sister along with eleven other accomplices. Although the authenticity
of her testimony has been questioned by some legal experts in Bangladesh,
this particular trial suggests that war criminals in the ICT still enjoyed some
degree of impunity when it came to accountability for sexual violence. It is also
noteworthy that despite several other war criminals being charged with rape,
Mollah’s trial remains the only trial where the actual testimony of a victim was
presented in court as valid evidence.
The second trial that sheds light on how rape and sexual crimes have been
in the mandate for crimes that may be prosecuted in the ICT is a trial from
2017. In April 2017, three ICT judges passed a verdict convicting war criminals
Mohammed Moslem Pradhan and Syed Mohammed Hussain of ‘genocidal rape’
of Hindu women. This particular conviction is significant because it was the
first proceeding in the history of the ICT where a clear acknowledgement of
genocidal rape was instrumental in the prosecution of the two defendants. The
New Age newspaper reported this from the trial:
The majority verdict says that rape or sexual violence committed
upon the Hindu women might be validly viewed as a crime
perpetrated against a ‘group’ and not against an individual woman,
and therefore, the rape committed upon Hindu women was indeed
‘genocidal rape.’10
This recognition of genocidal rape is another example of the inclusion of
sexual violence in the ICT. It is also an acknowledgement of the role played
by religion in making certain communities and women more vulnerable
to violence than others. Still, the recognition of sexual violence as a tool of
genocide in 1971 is a noteworthy milestone towards increasing the visibility of
sexual violence in transitional justice.
One particularly unique facet of the ICT of Bangladesh is the role that civil
10 Das, Tapos Kanti, ‘ICT Terms 1971 Rape of Hindus “genocidal”’, The New Age, April 20, 2017.
132 EXIT 11
activism has played in influencing its legal framework. Bina D’Costa and
Sara Hossain, in 2010, had suggested that civic activism revolving around
documentation of birangonas’ subjectivities could translate into a discourse on
legal accountability:
Most activism around accountability, while it has referenced
incidents of sexual violence, or has reflected on documenting
women survivors’ post war accounts, has not closely explored
issues regarding legal accountability, for example relating to
evidence gathering, victim and witness protection, trial procedures
etc.11
Eight years on, D’Costa and Hossain’s suggestion has been manifested in a
different way. The civil activism prior to the ICT has not altered the legal
and institutional basis of the trials. However, it has taken advantage of the
legal accountability that the trials invest in war criminals to advocate for a
stronger and more reliable jurisprudence specifically aimed at prosecuting
sexual violence. Mookherjee refers to the birangonas and their experiences as
a ‘ghost that the trials may have aimed to expunge.’12 Civil activism has used
the exposure and attention received by the ICT to increase the visibility of
this ghost while campaigning for a legal amendment that accommodates the
subjectivities of sexual violence instead of homogenising them.
This essay also raises questions about the broader implications of transitional
justice. Wendy Lambourne and Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon argue that
because international criminal law treats rape in war as ‘extraordinary’ as
opposed to rape in peace. As a result, transitional justice fails to accommodate
for the ‘ordinary’ violence and its consequences that victims are forced to
grapple with. They suggest that when international energy and resources are
invested in a small number of high profile prosecutions, thousands of women
are left to deal with the ongoing ‘ordinary’ violence often alone or with only
11 D’Costa, Bina, and Sara Hossain, ‘Redress for Sexual Violence Before the International Crimes
Tribunal in Bangladesh: Lessons from History, and Hopes for the Future’, Criminal Law Forum, vol. 21,
no. 2 (2010), p. 331-359.
12 Mookherjee, p. 275.
THE BIRANGONAS OF THE BANGLADESH WAR 133
discriminatory traditional justice processes available to them. time has had a significant impact on the rehabilitation of victims of sexual
violence. Further, it has explored how sexual violence is accommodated into
Whilst women may be able to seek such “extraordinary justice”
Bangladesh’s long-drawn challenges in acquiring justice. Still, the ongoing ICT
in the transitional justice context, in addition to ongoing
for Bangladesh trials raise an important question for gender-based violence in
socioeconomic and political disadvantage, they will often continue
conflicts of this magnitude— Is there space in the framework of transitional
to suffer sexual violence and not be able to seek redress through
justice for subjectivities of experiences not only during the conflict but also
the “ordinary justice” system.13
after it?
This argument illustrates the need to disengage the ‘exceptional’ nature of
sexual violence in war so that the challenges faced by women can be addressed
through pragmatic judicial systems focused on rehabilitation. B IB LIO GR AP HY
D’Costa, Bina. ‘Birangona: Bearing Witness in War and Peace.’ in Of the Nation
Another significant implication of gendered dynamics in transitional justice
Born: The Bangladesh Papers. New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers Pvt., 2016.
is that it is restricted to criminal prosecutions. Criminal prosecutions are
limited in their ability to deal with the post-conflict rehabilitation challenges Das, Tapos Kanti. ‘ICT Terms 1971 Rape of Hindus “genocidal”.’ The New Age,
that survivors of sexual violence face. Because transitional justice has been April 20, 2017.
traditionally conceptualised to be restricted to legal proceedings like tribunals
D’Costa, Bina, and Sara Hossain. ‘Redress for Sexual Violence Before the
and truth commissions, there is little space left to accommodate the multiple
International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh: Lessons from History, and
judicial needs of women in post-conflict communities. As a result, there is a
Hopes for the Future.’ Criminal Law Forum, vol. 21, no. 2 (2010), p. 331-59.
need to redefine what transitional justice means, especially when evidence
clearly highlights that legal accountability is not enough to redress the power Harrington, Louise. ‘Crossing Borders in Partition Studies and the Question of
dynamics that disenfranchise women in post-war communities. the Bangladesh Liberation War.’ Postcolonial Text, 8, 2016.

The 1971 war of liberation is the singularly most important event that led to
the creation of the sovereign state that is today Bangladesh. Its consequences
and implications resonate in Bangladesh’s socio-cultural, political and legal
spheres even today. It remains a highly politicised as well as divisive event in
national discourse. This essay has attempted to engage with women and their
experiences with violence during the war at the centre of a discourse that
draws upon public memory, social visibility and transitional justice. Where
all three elements appear to be seemingly independent of each other, the
birangona, the violated Bengali war-heroine, links them together. This essay
has demonstrated how the metamorphosis of the birangona identity over
Lambourne, Wendy, and Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon. ‘Engendering
Transitional Justice: A Transformative Approach to Building Peace and
Attaining Human Rights for Women.’ Human Rights Review, vol. 17, no. 1
(2015), p. 71-93.
Mookherjee, Nayanika. ‘Remembering to Forget: Public Secrecy and Memory
of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971.’ Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, vol. 12, no. 2 (2006), p. 421-36.
Mookherjee, Nayanika. The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and
the Bangladesh War of 1971. Duke University Press, 2016.

13 Lambourne, Wendy, and Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon, ‘Engendering Transitional Justice: A

Transformative Approach to Building Peace and Attaining Human Rights for Women’, Human Rights
Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (2015), p. 71-93.

134 EXIT 11 THE BIRANGONAS OF THE BANGLADESH WAR 135

Saikia, Yasmin. ‘War as History, Humanity in Violence: Women, Men, and Spectacular Failure: How South
Memories of 1971, East Pakistan/Bangladesh.’ in Sexual Violence in Conflict
Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, edited by Heineman
Africa’s Past Paints a Bleak Picture of
Elizabeth D., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Korean Denuclearization
Scholte, Marion. ‘Liberating the Women of 1971.’ Forum: The Daily Star, March IAN HO Y T
2011.

In mid-April of 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un announced that he

was open to talks regarding the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula
(Choe). This unexpected move from the newest nuclear state becomes even
more surprising given the failures of those before, such as Iran, Iraq, and
Libya. Much like North Korea, these regimes dedicated huge portions of their
post-colonial extractive economies to develop nuclear weapons, but felt the
price of pursuit was too high to bear. In fact, of the states who have sought
nuclear weapons in the last half century, all were once colonial subjects.
Why are nuclear weapons so sought after by post-colonial states, and what
could possibly compel a state having already paid the nuclear club’s price
of admission to burn their ticket? One potential insight arises from the only
state to already tread the path of de-nuclearization: Apartheid South Africa.
By understanding the function of nuclear weapons during South African
disarmament twenty-seven years ago, we can shed light on how and why
post-colonial regimes engage with nuclear weapons. Using South Africa
as a case study, I assert that from initial pursuit to final disarmament, the
South African nuclear weapons program grew as a symbolic extension of the
Apartheid state’s ideological image. Applying this model to the Kim regime of
North Korea reveals that denuclearization will remain exceedingly unlikely
unless disarmament serves as a means of redefining the structure of regime’s
spectacle.

In order to make legitimate comparisons between Apartheid South

Africa and Kim’s North Korea, we must first establish that each society is
sufficiently analogous in both historical and institutional context. At the most
fundamental level, both states grew out of colonialism, with both South Africa
and North Korea adopting the extraction-focused imperialist infrastructures

136 EXIT 11 SPECTACULAR FAILURE 137