 Welcome back to St. Tech. This is transitional justice, and we're going to talk about the brave women of Bangladesh. They are heroines, but it was almost 50 years ago. And we need to know more about what happened there because we really haven't paid adequate attention. And Mahun Qazi of Project Expedite Justice has been working on this, and she's going to tell us more about what happened and what we are doing about it now all these decades later. Welcome to the show, Mahun. Thank you. We're excited to be here. So tell us your role at Project Expedite Justice. What are you doing for them and how does it connect with the genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh? So currently I'm working as a communications assistant at Project Expedite Justice. So really helping out with the social media and kind of just little other things here and there. But I was kind of drawn to PEJ because of their role working with survivors of mass atrocities today. And I found that really interesting because I've worked closely looking at the testimonies of survivors of mass atrocities, specifically of 1971 for the last almost three years now. So I found that their mission to be really inspiring. Yeah, it is inspiring. Unfortunately, the world has not paid sufficient attention to it because the genocide at the very least should be a lesson to the following generations. We need to learn and figure out the human condition over any genocide. So, Mahun, your family is from Pakistan. You're a Muslim. What qualifies you to do this investigation? So, well, I guess I can talk a little bit first about what intrigued me to do this investigation, which was the fact that my mother was born around kind of the same time as this war, this genocide was taking place. And she didn't actually find out about it until 40 years later when she was living in the US, well established here. And of course, they'd always known there was a war, but they didn't know the specifics of it. So that conversations with her kind of prompted it. And then conversations with the Bangladeshi friends at some points in my life, when I was as young as seven, they were like, Oh, our countries used to be one country, and I had no idea of this either. And then eventually this just became something that I thought like I needed to hold other Pakistanis, Pakistani diaspora, specifically people accountable for this, because we say never again so often. And I feel like that just kind of gets lost at some point. And yeah, then I applied for my master's at Columbia University, and I got my master's in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies, but I concentrated specifically on modern South Asian history from 1857 to modern day. And I focused a lot on 1971 and this genocide specifically. Now, did you realize when you selected that topic for your master's that you would be in great demand over the years that followed? People really need to know more about Middle Eastern and what are they called Middle Eastern, North African, North African studies to understand what's going on these days. So you have a tremendous benefit there to have that under your belt. Don't you agree? Yeah, I would hope so. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, but you come at it from at least a historical point of view of a Muslim whose mother was in Pakistan. But I recall reading that this genocide was Pakistan that is in East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh, largely against the Hindu people in what is now known as Bangladesh. I mean, are you biased in any way? I don't think so because I think I also find it important to make the distinction that it wasn't necessarily a Hindus versus Muslim thing. The reason a lot of the justification behind it was a Hindu versus Muslim thing. That's what the Pakistani army told their soldiers, a lot of the higher ups told this is the language of justification that they used was, okay, well, we have the memory of 1947 of the partition of South Asia, fresh in our minds. And that was a time of, I think, great pain for everyone, right? It's a time of celebration that we're free from British rule. We have these two separate countries. But at the same time, there was all this pain that came about because of that. And it made a lot of rivalries, obviously, between Hindus, Muslims, whoever have you. So then going into 1971, where there's still kind of this disdain between Muslims and Hindus, they kind of use this language to rile everyone up. And there are a lot of soldier testimonies of when they found out, like later, that they had been lied to, and that they were killing other Muslims, because Bangladesh at the time did have a lot of Hindus. It had more Hindus, or East Pakistan, I guess, at the time had a lot more Hindus than were in West Pakistan. But a lot of the people living in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, they were also Muslim. So when some of the soldiers had found out that they were killing other fellow Muslim brothers and sisters, they were extremely devastated by this. And there's this saying within, I guess, specifically within this field of like a few different authors who have studied this really closely. And they talk about how a lot of the testimonies of these soldiers, they talk about the loss of Insania. And Insania most closely means humanity. So 1971 was a period of great loss of humanity in South Asia, specifically. Well, let's get the basic history. So 1947, India gained independence from Britain. All right. Okay, that followed this big, I guess it's mostly religious argument between the Muslims in Pakistan. And Pakistan was in two separate places, West Pakistan, now known as the current Pakistan, and East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. What a geographical mess that is. And it was not a happy time because there was a lot of war going on. And there was a lot of resentment between India, which was largely Hindu, right? And the Pakistan, which is large in both sides, largely Muslim. So query, when did when did East Pakistan become Bangladesh? Well, East Pakistan after nine months of war became Bangladesh in 1971. So after this long war, but they were, as you said, they kind of these two territories of what was then West Pakistan and now, and then East Pakistan, they're over 1000 kilometers away. And it was very interestingly divided up like that. It should not have been divided like that. And you have the kind of the bureaucratic center in West Pakistan. And then you have a lot more of the population being in East Pakistan. So it was kind of a mess at that time. Yeah. I mean, did they, you know, I know people who are, they treat themselves as Indian, but they were born in West Pakistan. And when, you know, Pakistan was separated from India, they moved back into India proper. But but they see themselves as part of the original territory of Pakistan. It's really interesting that this separation is not quite not quite yet complete. Kind of people are integrated in their own way. So now, now we talk about women and we talk about the heroic women of Bangladesh. And we need to know more about that. We need to know what your mother discovered 40 years later. What exactly happened to the women in the course of this war that ultimately resulted in, you know, the change from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, 1971? Yeah. So in the kind of nine months of where the genocide was taking place. And there's been, I think the figures are really disputed. So anywhere from 30,000 to 3 million people were killed, like mostly Bangladeshi individuals, Bengali individuals during this time. And the numbers of women who were assaulted, sexually assaulted, raped, violated during this time also kind of ranges from like anywhere from like the lower thousands to 400,000. And these women in the light of Bangladesh becoming a new, its own country, Sheikh Mojib Irhan, the founder of Bangladesh, he basically gave them the term heroic women or birangona. So birangona means brave women, right, were war heroines, so to speak. And that means heroic Bangladeshi women, right? Yes, heroic Bangladeshi women. And it was basically to honor these women who kind of had maybe in their eyes and like the eyes of like this new nation building effort, it was like, okay, like, we need to kind of give them a place in our memory as well. We need to honor them in some way. So while it was done in a kind of, in a way to honor these women, I think it ended up a little bit backfiring. Yes, these women still ended up being ostracized in the new nation under the premise of like honor and all of this stuff. Wow. You know, I'm just to jump forward for a minute and we'll cover the, you know, the events of the interim, but a U.S. representative in Congress introduced a resolution in 2022, I think probably about a year ago, recognizing the genocide and, you know, making it a part of recognized Asian history. And I'm not sure that it ever passed. And what you have, and I'm sure you've, you've studied this, what you have is a failure to recognize what happened. It wasn't just that your mother didn't hear about it. You said it wasn't publicized. It just happened within the context of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. And these are really troubling events. But they never got covered. You really have to do research to find out what happened. Am I right? Yeah, you're completely right. Not only just in Pakistan because in the period after the genocide under Ziyal Haq, there was a lot of censorship under that regime. And what I specifically studied was public memory and how textbook education kind of affects that in post genocide, Bangladesh and Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh and Pakistan. But in the U.S. as well, which is interesting when you break up the point about the current resolution and not being passed because there are records of, I believe it was President Nixon at the time. And when, I guess like the White House found out that these, this killing, these killings were happening, they were pretty indifferent to it at the time. So, and this also all was happening during kinds of the Cold War era. So I don't know, maybe contextualizing it, but it's interesting that like there's now 52 years, or I guess maybe it might, it's going to be 53 years later now, almost. Now there's finally an effort to kind of break that silence. And it's a huge step forward. And there have been efforts in Pakistan as well to kind of to break that silence, but it's kind of a slow awakening. Well, you know, it troubles me as a part of genocide. And this happened in the Ukraine war. It happened with Hamas is rape. In fact, you know, it's deeply built into the firmament of human history. And I don't understand, you know, we, we, you and I have grown up in a civilized society where this is condemned. It's not appreciated at all. And, you know, you, you can go to jail for life for that. But, query, why, why so much rape? And, you know, I know that in India, talk about India just for a minute, because I'm familiar with, you know, there seems to be this, this, this rape thing that has been publicized by young men raping young women on buses, as I recall. And I don't understand why this happens. Is it a cultural thing? Is it a political thing? Is it a religious thing? Is it part of genocide? Wholesale rape really offends the sensibilities, don't you think? I think particularly placing rape or sexual violence in the context of what was happening in 1971 for like the, I guess the Pakistani government or the Pakistani military specifically at that time, it was rape was used as a kind of a tool of cleansing the improper, impure Hindu, more Hindu Bengalis because, because of colonial remnants that the, the, the Pakistani government or the Pakistani military took over after 1947. And when Pakistan in a different way became the colonial administrators for Bangladesh, Bangladesh again being East Pakistan at the time, there was kind of this idea that was portrayed where Bengalis were, they were darker, they were, you know, they had all these qualities that kind of made them subservient in the eyes of Pakistanis, whereas Pakistanis specifically the Punjabi military elite, they were lighter skinned, they were taller, they were more suited for war and they were suited for those kinds of things. And that's why a lot of them in specifically under British colonial rule, a lot of them were part of the military and things like that. So when that kind of carried over, the army decided that, okay, this is going to be a project that we need to cleanse these women's wombs and we need to create a pure Pakistan, right? So by doing this, we'll be able to create a new nation of people who will be pure just like us. So in this case, not that all rapes that happened during, during the war were by the Pakistanis to Bengali women, because there are instances of neighbors, like Bengali neighbors raping like the Bengali women, there were so many different instances of like Bihari women, Bihari women being a specifically or those speaking ethnic minority group in Bangladesh, them being raped by Bengalis as well. Just there was, it was happening to everyone, unfortunately, or it was happening to the various different ethnic groups. But in, I guess in the general narrative, it was happening as a tool of kind of control of the population, which again goes back to what you were saying about raping used as a tool of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yeah. Okay. I want to explore that just a little more. If I find that a given group is impure and you know, at a lesser level somehow, and I, and I wound up having my army rape them. Oh, and you include in every culture in the world, the rape is an embarrassment. The rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman sure to being killed. So if I go and rape large numbers of women, I am embracing them. I am humiliating them. I am not improving their lives. I am not endearing them to my culture at all. I'm making them hate me. It creates widespread hate for sure and resentment that goes on and on and on. So that's one aspect of it. But you suggest another aspect. The cleansing aspect is I want to, I want to spread my seed. I want these women to have babies that include my seed. I want to change their DNA. Is that part of this? I want to make them, make their children, make their society more like mine. I want to create a new race or a race that's closer to my race. But which of it, which of those things is happening here? I think both to some degree. But because there was the whole thing of embarrassment and shame and is that or respect or honor is a big part of, you know, like South Asian, different like communities in South Asia. Like is that the really big thing? So specifically, the rape then of the Birangona women was understood to some degree as also the rape of the entirety of Bangladesh, right? This was an embarrassment for the entirety of Bangladesh. Like how could this have happened to us, right? And then these women were then ostracized and there were all these different issues. But also in order to, you know, with the project of, you know, making these impure women have pure children, there was another issue of a lot of these women who after the war were left with these children, they were forced to have abortions by the Bangladesh State Mother Teresa's Foundation also carried out some of those abortions. Or they kind of lost the opportunity to be not in all cases, of course, not this isn't a blanket statement, but in some cases, they also lost the opportunity to be mothers to these children. So a lot of these babies were put up for adoption. There's a few different cases of this. And one of the books that it's really insightful on this whole topic is called Amir Birangona Bolchi or The War Hero and I Speak. And that was written by an author, or it was written by Nelima Ibrahim, and it was translated by Nusrat Rabi. And that book kind of goes into more detail of different accounts of like war heroines actually speaking. So in, I would say since the 90s, there's been an effort kind of of these war heroines to come forward and tell their stories. Well, that's interesting that, you know, if a lot of women were raped in 1971, and they could not afford, didn't have the availability of an abortion, and they gave birth, then you have a whole generation of children who are a product of that rape. It reminds me of Vietnam. You know, the GIs who went to Vietnam, they had children by the Vietnamese women, and they were called Hossoi, and nobody liked them because they were neither Vietnamese nor American. So what happened to this generation of all the children that were born of this large number of rapes in and around 1971? Are they identifiable? Can you call them up and can you talk to them? Will they tell you who they are? Is there an organization of them? Because right now, they must be, what, 40 plus 50, almost 50 years old, these people, and there must be plenty of them, no? I would assume so, but also I think it's very contextual because some of the accounts of this, some of the women, you know, are like a lot of them are urban, some of them are in villages, and so they're spread out all across different districts of Bangladesh. So I don't think there's really a unifying factor for this generation, or in some cases, some of the women actually, after Bangladesh's liberation, they went to Pakistan to find the people who had assaulted them, and try to, like, say, this is your child, and this is one of the stories, I believe, in Amoebira and Guanambulchi, where one of the women goes to Pakistan, and then she's kind of forced to, like, live there in private, but it does create this whole problem of, okay, now you have this whole group of people who are neither here nor there, like you were saying, especially for, like, how can they pledge allegiance to one country or the other, but I don't think that's as prominent necessarily as a thing in this case specifically. Yes, I mean, it's interesting that somebody went back to try to find the father, I guess, that's an interesting story. It sounds like a great movie, actually. All of this sounds like a great movie. I hate to put it in those terms. So why are these women heroes? What did they do in that war and after that war to organize themselves, to deal with those who would attack them, to deal with the Pakistanis who were abusing them? Why are they heroes? So the term hero or hero in this context was more so just a name given to them. Besides being called war heroines, they weren't really afforded necessarily any sort of respect in the main society. The term birangona was also in some levels of society misconstrued as barangona. I'm also not entirely sure of the pronunciation of that because that's a term I've only ever read on paper. I've never heard said out loud. And barangona means prostitute. So it was also used as kind of a demeaning term to denote them afterwards. In terms of them being honored as heroes or heroines in the larger context, if they had gotten any recognition for it or anything like that, their absence is really visible from the public memory of bangladeshis. Of course, everyone in bangladeshis, they're very aware of it. But at the same time, if you go to the there's a one of the biggest memorials or war museums in bangladesh in Dhaka, I believe, they have they're honoring a like female fighters like freedom fighters. And there's a small number of freedom fighters that are actually honored. But at the same time, the war heroines who are also deemed this award, they're kind of absent from those walls. So there's that. And then besides that, there's a large effort to rehabilitate these women after the war on the bangladesh government. They tried paying men to marry these women so that they could, you know, just like they could enter into marriages, they would not have to face that shame anymore. They would be okay with this. And it'd be fine. A lot of the times the men were like the men in their lives were paid. So either sometimes it was their husbands, or they would try to find a husband for them, pay the husband. Sometimes they would try to pay their brothers. They would bribe them with cars. They would with all these different things. Or in other cases, they started different like rehabilitation centers where they could train them in different areas and then let them be of use to the larger society. Well, that's very constructive, actually. Now, did they keep the children? So when you find them a husband back in the 70s, did they come along with a child as a product of the right? I think it was, again, very dependent on each case because some children did end up in adoption centers. Some women just did not want to. And then some women were really like, you know, they were like, absolutely not that as my child, no matter what. But a lot of the women just the idea of the fact that they had to get married and honored to be in order to be respected in the society. After, you know, what had happened to them was not obviously their choice. It was no one's choice. But the perpetrators and a very terrible one, of course, at that. But yeah, they it was very, I think all of these cases are very context dependent because the other thing to keep in mind with this is you don't have as many women kind of speaking out about it. Like the kind of the accounts like you'll hear are very few and far between just because not a lot of people want to come forward even almost 53 years later now. Yeah, even now. Yeah. Well, there's not the kind of thing you want to talk about publicly, but it sounds like from what you say that the country, the people, the population, you know, is in touch with us. They remember it. Even if the people in Pakistan don't remember it, don't never knew about it. The people here in Bangladesh, they remember, am I right? This has got to be part of their heritage. I hate to use that word, but they're historical experience now. And they are very proud of it. And rightfully so, they should be proud of the fact that not the fact of these women, but they should be proud of the fact that they had this liberation where they were successful in gaining victory. But I do have several Bengali friends, one of whom told me like accounts of going to his grandmother's village and seeing the bullet holes in the walls that are still there again, 45, 50 years later. So this is very prevalent in their memories to this day. That same friend, his father's friend saw his friends killed in front of his eyes. So this isn't even like this is these are people from who could be off my father's generation, my grandfather's generation, if I really want to put it that way, like, it's very, very, very fresh still. Did these women, the ones who we treat as heroes, did they fight? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. Again, very context dependent. I saw a photograph of a troop of women, Bangladeshi women, marching down the street. Looks like they were ready. They were participating in the military action to deal with Pakistani attackers. But I don't know. I don't know exactly where or when or to what degree. So here we are in 2023. And you are investigating in project expedite justice investigates these things. And you take statements and, you know, we've talked to a lot of people from PHA. And usually the atrocities happened within recent memory. In this case, it's not within recent memory. In this case, people are people involved getting older. They're dying. They or they simply have rejected this part of their own personal history. They don't want to talk about it. So it's a project for you to go out and get a statement from somebody. How do you do that? That's my first question. My second question is going to be, what do you do with it? But let's talk about getting the statements because it sounds like that is very difficult. Getting the statements is really extremely difficult. In my time while I was getting my master or working towards my master's thesis specifically, I was never able to get a statement from anyone themselves. I had to rely on the works of different authors who worked more closely with this, like Nainika Mukherjee, Yasmin Sekia. These are people who actually went and lived in Bangladesh in some cases and gained the trust of these women in order to get statements from them. I highly doubt that someone like me could go and get statements from people. I could get statements about the war. I could get statements about the genocide, but specifically from war heroines. That would be extremely difficult. But there are artists in recent years, especially in the UK, who have been making more of an effort to kind of document these things, whether through plays, through movies. There's a lot of different efforts now, which is I think it's good that the silence is being broken in the way it is. Well, I think that's true. You don't need to have a lot of statements. You don't need thousands of people to make statements to find out what happened or to make a movie or to write a book or an article. So there's a value in getting only just a few to find out what happened. And when do you put those statements? It's not like the international court is going to do anything with those statements. What do you do with them? Do you bind them up and propagate them somewhere? Do you write a book, an article, make a movie? What do you do with those so the world learns? I think the best course of action that authors, so many authors that I was able to learn from their works during the time that I was working on this, their best word of advice was just to make sure these women's voices are heard and make sure their memories aren't forgotten. And that's why maybe I also feel like my duty as a Pakistani woman is to learn their stories because this is something that my country kind of did against these women. So it's my duty to learn this and it's my duty to educate other people. And that's the only thing we can do because there was a commission that was started. I think when Bangladesh was freshly liberated and everything, there was an effort to kind of get these survivors justice. But that died out because a lot as time kept going on, a lot of the perpetrators were dying or they were rehabilitated into different into Pakistani society and Bangladesh society, but quietly or they were rehabilitated into politics, which kind of coerced these women again into silence. So from a political or maybe a geopolitical point of view, how is the relationship now knowing what we do know between Bangladesh and Pakistan? Have we had a denouement there? Is it friendly or do people hold these events between the two countries? I think in recent years, there have been more efforts from Pakistani specifically or Pakistan is in Pakistan specifically in academic spaces to speak out about these things. But there is still a lot of censorship going on in some different ways. I think because of everything going on in Pakistan right now, the political situation, more and more people are inclined to learn and more and more people are apologizing about the fact that the genocide happened or the fact that they didn't know that it happened. So I think the two countries are on relatively good terms right now. There isn't necessarily a huge amount of hatred, but at the same time, I think there is still, especially from a Pakistani standpoint, there is still this like, don't ask, don't tell a kind of thing, like they'd rather enjoy the silence than you don't have to confront these uncomfortable realities. Uncomfortable realities indeed. So has there been accountability? Has accountability, has there been accountability in Pakistan with the people who did this? Or has there been accountability in Bangladesh with the people who maybe somehow participated in it? Or has there been no accountability on either side? What do you think? I think if there has been any accountability, it's been very, very little to a degree where it probably wouldn't be noticed, like notable at all. And again, a lot of them, a lot of the perpetrators were kind of just rehabilitated into society at large. Like it never really was a widespread thing that, okay, we need to go after them. They were in a lot of cases, specifically, I want to say, in Yasmeen Sekia's book, Nayanika Mukherjee's book, and Nileema Ibrahim's book, these perpetrators kind of just like, you know, were able to live comfortably. They couldn't maybe talk about it. I know a few of these authors actually traveled to Pakistan to talk to some of the perpetrators there, and they also talked to some perpetrators in Bangladesh. So, you know, they were able to talk about it years later, but there was never anything that, okay, let's get them thrown, you know, behind bars, or let's get them to, you know, let's have a settlement, let's do something. There was never really any movement for that. So here's my final area I want to ask you about. We do this. We study it. We write about it. We take statements and we somehow, we use that as raw material in order to find out what happened. But also, it seems to me that we do this for another reason. We do this to find out what motivated people to do this, what motivated the world not to intervene, which is troubling, but motivated the United States to turn its back on what was happening in 1971. And I guess what the question is, and I put it to you, you must be thinking about it. What have we learned from this? What can we learn from this? What should we learn from this? Because, you know, honestly, my home, it keeps on happening. This genocidal thing, a mass rape thing, it keeps on happening. We have simply got to stop that from happening. I don't know if the UN is the right organization for it. I don't know if the International Court is the right, you know, tribunal for it. I don't know if universal jurisdiction you know, counts. But it happened in Ukraine. It happened on October 7th. It's going to continue to happen. You know, we say never again, never again like 1971. And yet, it happens again. What should we do? What should we learn? How can we stop this from happening? How can we make it clear that this is not acceptable conduct? That's a really good question, I think. I would not know how to answer that, honestly. Because, as you said, saying never again is nearly never enough because you can see it kind of happening today in, you know, different parts of the world. You can see it happening whenever there's conflict taking place. And it just, I guess, it's part of conflict and fortunately it shouldn't be. But you're right, like what organization can you really even take this to in order for there to be like reparations or there to be any sort of, you know, punishment or like any sort of way to move past this stuff. I would just hope that one day we are able to live in a world where we don't have to hear about this stuff continuously happening. But I wouldn't know how to, when people are still too uncomfortable to speak about certain silences, then I don't think they could ever be kind of confronted with, again, these uncomfortable realities. So I think it will take maybe a long time for things to change. Well, let me answer that question, my own question in part. Okay. It's to make the world aware of what happened, of the horror of what happened, to make the world aware that this is horrible atrocity and has terrible effects on people and communities and cultures. And so what you're doing has value right there, what you're doing here today on ThinkTech has value. And I would say that that resolution in Congress has value. I hope it gets passed. So to make it known as value. And with you, I can't think of anything else. But I think that is something that's doable. And it's not, you know, there's no great barrier to do it. So keep on doing your work, my own. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us today. It's been great to learn from you. And I really appreciate what you were saying and what you are studying and what you are doing. No, thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk about everything I've learned over the last three years. Yeah. Thanks for doing that. Aloha.