THE COLONEL WHO WOULD NOT REPENT: by Salil Tripathi

Author:Salil Tripathi [Tripathi, Salil]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2014-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

THE BRAVE ONES

here is a sense of finality about death. Someone dies; those who loved the person grieve. The person who has died is now beyond pain, feeling nothing, as the body is lowered in a grave or a fire is lit on the funeral pyre, the ashes becoming part of the ether.

With rape, as with any other violent crime, it is different. In one sense the woman’s life changes fundamentally, and not because she has chosen it that way. As a rape victim testified in the Foca trial following the Bosnian conflict, ‘They have taken my life without killing me.’ The woman has not done anything; horrific violence has been committed to her. And yet, in many societies, she has to bear the blame and the shame for what happened. In many places, those who loved her once may not love her anymore. They worry about the shame she has brought to the family, about what society will think, who will bring up the child if she ends up getting pregnant, and sometimes wonder why the rapist didn’t kill her as well.

Rape is a heinous crime, and the victim relives the nightmare, the trauma, again and again. It is an invasion of another person’s bodily integrity. It is violent, it is intrusive. It is meant to subjugate and humiliate. It is about power, not sex. Soldiers in armed conflict have often thought of rape as one of the ‘spoils of war’. Raping women in a conquered land is not only about sexual gratification. Nor is it about fulfilling a basic need or instinct. It is about reminding the powerless of the power the invader has; that the invasion is not only of the country, city, village, and home, but also an invasion of the person’s body, and the person subjected to it is the woman whose defeated family, home, village, or indeed the country, is too weak to protect. It is part of a patriarchal discourse where the woman is seen as a man’s property, and by humiliating her, the invader humiliates the man who was meant to protect her. If her family—the father, the brother, or her husband—regarded her as one under their protection, the invader is saying, she is no longer theirs; she is his. And he can, and will discard her later. A physical act that’s meant to be mutual, expressing love between two people who consent to be intimate with one another, is drained of those tender feelings, and instead becomes the manifestation of brute strength and raw cruelty.

Many Pakistani soldiers raped many women in Bangladesh during the nine months of the war. Numbers, again, are impossible to ascertain. Some women were raped only once; many were raped repeatedly. Some were taken away to cantonments as sexual slaves. At the end of the war, there were 93,000 Pakistani POWs. The crackdown lasted from 25 March to 16 December—that is, 266 days. That much we know. How many of the affected women would report such rapes,

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