Kill 3 Million and the Rest Will Eat of Our Hands - Genocide Rape and the Bangladeshi War of Liberation - Anwar Ouassini and Nabil Ouassini
“Kill 3 Million and the Rest Will Eat of Our Hands”
Genocide, Rape, and the Bangladeshi War of Liberation
Anwar Ouassini and Nabil Ouassini
From the book Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia
Edited by: Frank Jacob
2019
This paper revealed how West Pakistani racial projects utilized during the war dehumanized and categorized the Bengalis as racially inferior, which produced the policies that later gave way to brutal forms of violence. Moreover, we showed how religious ideologies were employed by the state to determine and shape what and who were considered Muslim and a part of the Islamic faith tradition. This approach to the conflict gave the Pakistani state authority to label the Bengalis as non-Muslim and therefore formulated the legitimacy needed for both the military and the militias to pursue rape as a tool of war. While Bangladesh may never truly face the effects of the genocidal violence on their collective memory head on, there are many components of the genocide and the accompanying sexual violence that the contemporary global system continues to suffer from. Including the conflict surrounding ISIS in Iraq and Syria and their religious ideological justifications for sexually enslaving Yazidi women and girls, to neighboring Myanmar where thousands of Rohingya have been killed, raped, and maimed by the democratically elected, National League of Democracy party. The lessons of Bangladesh will continue to inform present and future conflicts and genocides.
