Refuting the claim of 200,000 rapes during the 1971 'liberation' war

 Lets take a look at what the Bangladeshi journalist Jauhari said soon after the war on the basis of his survey:

"I have spoken to no less than five hundred peoples of different districts and have asked them, ‘Has anyone in your family or among your relatives, friends or acquaintance been raped by Pakistani soldiers?’ None affirmed, everyone said ‘no’. It may be that some of them were ashamed to disclose. Besides, it is not impossible for the Pakistan Army to have a few characterless soldiers. But, how could these produce the figure of two hundred thousand? Moreover’ how was this figure arrived at within a week of the liberation of the country? Who did the survey?" 

 Reference: Tirish Lakher Telesmat (The Riddle of Thirty Lakh), Asha Prokashani, 435 Elephant Road,Dhaka -1217, 1994: 14.

So its clear that rape was not endemic or the rule in 1971. The Pakistan Army had to run the civil administration of East Pakistan, feed its people and fight Indian infiltration as well as Mukti Bahini.

Its obvious that the number and stories of rapes have been exaggerated, like the numbers and stories of killings. Dr Sarmila Bose couldn't find any rape cases in her case studies and field work in Bangladesh. Even though she had heard from others that there had been rapes in the cases and villages she was studying, but the on-the-ground witnesses told her the Army did not harm women and children. That also supports the fact that rape was not endemic in 1971 and that there are a lot of lies and exaggerations floating about.

But where did this 200,000 figure come from?

It comes from a certain Australian surgeon called Dr Geoffrey Davis who came to Bangladesh in 1972 for six months to perform abortions. He estimated that 470,000 women were raped and 200,000 became pregnant. This medically impossible claim of almost 50% pregnancy rate gives away his lie. Anyone with a minimum training in female physiognomy would know that conception rates are 20-25%. He also repeated his absurd hypothesis of 50% pregnancy rate resulting from the "war rapes" more than once in his diary "The Changing Face of Genocide - Bangladesh." Bangladeshi academic Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury in his book "Behind the Myth of Three Million" cited Davis' medically ludicrous claim of 50% pregnancy rate to show that Davis was lying. Dr Chowdhury also wondered where all these women were. Despite being a Bangladeshi, he didn't know any woman who had been raped.

In his diary he also claimed that 150,000-170,000 of the 200,000 women had already had abortions by the time he got there.[1] That contradicts his earlier claim in a 1972 New York Times article that 5,000 pregnancies had already been terminated by "crude" methods.[2] He also made other preposterous claims like the Bangladeshi population was 90 million (it was actually ~70 million). He claimed in his 2002 interview with Bina D'Costa that he was doing 100 abortions a day while a "variable number" were happening in other towns.[3] Yet in a New York Times article from 1972 he said he did 100 abortions in Dhaka in his first month while a "variable number" were happening in other towns..[3]

His self contradictions, medically impossible claims and wrong statistics completely nullify his value as a credible source for any claim. His allegations about Tikka Khan also reveal a certain prejudice against Pakistan. He made a number of wild claims, jumping from one wildly high figure to the next using faulty methodologies. In one instance he claimed that since 1.1 million women were of childbearing age it was fair to assume that a third of them were raped. He also claimed that there were 1500 pregnancies per thana. This is contradicted by Jauhuri (a Bangladeshi) who found that he couldn't find anyone in any district who knew about any rape incident. Its obvious that Geoffrey Davis (a foreigner to Bangladesh) was lying.

The National Board of Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation Program (BWRP) used the following method. It claimed that two women had gone missing from each thana (police station) each day between 26 March and 16 December (270 days). Since there were 480 thanas at the time they multiplied 480 x 270 x 2 to arrive at a figure of 268,200. It then subtracted 68,000 to allow for women who might have been missing for "other reasons." This is how it arrived at a figure of 200,000 women raped.[4]

 But this is a baseless methodology. It depends on the premise that 2 girls went missing each day from each thana. This premise has no evidence. How did the Board figure out that 2 women were going missing each day everywhere? Were the thanas keeping records? Moreover, it discounts the fact that women would have been going to India as refugees. As we have seen the Bangladeshi journalist Jauhuri toured the various districts and couldn't find anyone who knew a case of rape.

Nevertheless the claim of 200,000 women has been repeated everywhere just because it was claimed by the Bangladeshi government (with no proper count). It was mentioned by Susan Brownmiller in her 1975 book "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape." That book was important because it changed how the world viewed rape in general. But she only wrote 7 pages in her book on the 1971 rapes. And she gave no source for her assertion of 200,000 rapes and 25,000 pregnancies. She also gave no source for most of her other assertions. The closest reference she gives to any primary source are some quotations of a couple of girls' cases mentioned by the journalist Aubrey Menen in her New York Times article in 1972.

 The Bengali Hindu academic Bina D'Costa (who confesses in her book that she abhors Pakistanis) cites Brownmiller for her claim of 25,000 pregnancies. But she cleverly adds the words "Official documents suggest" to give a veneer of documentation to the unsourced and baseless claim of "25,000 pregnancies."

Its also interesting that the Australian feminist Germaine Greer announced back in 1972 that she was going to Bangladesh to interview Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers. She even wrote an article called "The Rape of the Bengali Women" for The Sunday Times back in 1972. Its been cited by feminist scholars such as Nayanika Mookherjee in their works on the 1971 rapes. Yet the same Germaine Greer now says that the story of 300,000 raped women in Bangladesh was "not true." She also says that the idea that the Pakistani commanders used rape in Bangladesh as a policy "was never stood up" and an "urban myth."[5]

Bangladeshis don't know what has happened to most of the "raped women." There are no records of the rehabilitation centres for the rape victims or information of how long they lasted or what happened to their inmates. This shows that the Bangladesh is hiding something. Bangladeshi academic Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury suggests that all this information has been hidden/destroyed because the data does not support the claim of mass rape at the scale which Bangladesh officially alleges. According to Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury one of the later day "myth-makers" in 1974 could only report that 100 of these women had been given into marriage. Sarmila Bose also could not find any report from the rehabilitation centres.

  In her book "Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia" Bina D'Costa mentions it was extremely difficult for her to find any rape victim or war baby. Another researcher of the same topic, Yasmin Saikia, had the same problem finding "rape victims" and "war babies." Both assumed that this was because rape victims don't want to expose themselves. However, there is also the explanation that they just do not exist at the scale which is alleged, which is why they can hardly find anyone.

A similar explanation can also be given for why, when ten thousand Bengali "freedom fighters" came forward to marry these women, hardly any marriage was reported to have taken place. The Bangladeshi government, according to this New York Times report, [6] blamed it on high dowries demanded by the grooms. But the true reason is probably because the women just did not exist, in those numbers at least.

 There are still some survivors of course who testify to being raped. But their existence does not in any way support the claim of 200,000 women raped. With the scale of rape being alleged, one would expect to find many, many more survivors. Especially in a country like Bangladesh where the rape of women during war is still more openly talked about than a more conservative country like Pakistan. In East Punjab we lost an estimated 50,000 girls during Partition of whom around 20,000 girls came back yet its more common to hear of their stories in Pakistan than it is to hear of the supposedly "much larger number" of raped women in Bangladesh.

He says his colleague Geoffrey Davis "estimated" that 100,000 women had been raped.[9] Actually, Potts was wrong. His friend Davis had actually estimated at least 470,000 rapes. But note how much these figures of "100,000" and "200,000" and "400,000" vary wildly from each other. It shows a lack of serious accounting and wild estimation. These estimates are all a result of bias. Its natural that seeing the "sheer human suffering" of the few girls who actually had abortions, caused these doctors to become overly emotional and sympathetic for them and start exaggerating the extent of Bengali suffering. It was the same sort of Western sympathy for Bengali suffering after the 1970 Bhola cyclone which caused Western journalists in East Pakistan in March to not fully emphasise in their reports the Bengali nationalist attacks on West Pakistanis and Biharis before 25 March

 Malcolm Potts is only a reliable source for the knowledge he is an eye witness of. Not the information he has got and based off hearsay. In his book he says "we offered them abortions and performed hundreds of the operations over several months."10 Note the word "hundreds." Not "thousands." Not "tens of thousands." But "hundreds" only. And that too "over several months." Moreover, its unclear how many of these pregnancies were caused by Pakistani soldiers as opposed to Razakars. For example, he himself in his book gives an anecdote of a Bengali girl who had been impregnated by a Bihari.

In his address to the United States Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session [-Ninety-fourth Congress, First Session] (p.582)[see link] to the US Senate, Leonard Laufe, who was part of the IPPF team which did abortions in Bangladesh, said that 200,000 women had been raped. Then he added these were the Bangladesh government figures. Then he says "of these, 20,000 were pregnant."

Of course, he didn't count the pregnancies. He was merely repeating one of the popular estimates, which all differed wildly. For example, the International Commission of Jurists in its 1972 report on East Pakistan merely relayed that the Bangladeshi government claimed that there 70,000 pregnancies. Susan Brownmiller says in her book said that "25,000" is the generally accepted figure of pregnancies. Of course neither counted. As said earlier when reading Laufe's testimony it is essential to separate the facts he directly observed from those which he was told about by others. For instance, he says that the week before his team arrived "300 new-born babies were found floating down the Ganges River." In the next paragraph he says that he knows of at least 250 suicides within the 2 weeks before he arrived.

The question is, how does Dr Laufe know of these cases. He obviously does not know these suicide cases personally since he himself admits they happened before his arrival nor did he himself see or count those babies in the river. Who told him? And how do we know that whoever told him were not exaggerating figures and stories like in so many other things in this conflict? Likewise. Dr Laufe says that "we are aware of literally thousands of criminal abortions that were performed by midwives out in the villages in which breen branches or sticks from trees were cut, inserted through the cervix as a foreign object, and we saw many who came in with these sticks protruding out of their abdominal wall, so that its sights were not nice" Now Dr Laufe obviously also did not see these "literally thousands" of criminal abortions that he claims to be aware of.

All we know from his testimony is that many women came to his team's clinic with sticks protruding out of their abdominal wall. He doesn't specify how many when he says "many." Meanwhile, an obituary in the Los Angeles Times by Elaine Woo [see link] for Harvey Karman, the other doctor who was part of the IPFF team, says that he "was part of a humanitarian mission to terminate the pregnancies of 1,500 Bangladeshi women and girls who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers." Its obvious that the various statistics on the number of pregnancies are all wild speculation and lack an accounting basis. So almost nothing can be reliably said.

In her journal article "Available Motherhood: Legal technologies, `state of exception' and the dekinning of `war-babies' in Bangladesh" [11] Nayanioka Mookherjee says:  

 ‘Medical help’ was organized under the auspices of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF London) and USAID. These organizations donated money, set up abortion clinics, provided medicines and retained the services of abortion providers and gynaecologists from the US, the UK and Australia – people who not only provided safe abortions for thousands of women who had become pregnant through rape, but also trained local doctors. Notable among them were Harvey Karman, Malcolm Potts (then the medical director of IPPF), Geoffrey Davis and Leonard Laufe, who set up ‘industrial scale procedures’ (Murphy, n.d.) of abortion. These ‘abortion centres’ were set up in middle-class residential areas in Dhaka. They alone terminated 95 percent of the pregnancies in Bangladesh occurring as a result of wartime rape. The centres performed more than 100 abortions in the first month of their existence, and 2500 overall. 

So overall there were only 2500 abortions? Yet we have been hearing false claims of 25,000 pregnancies. Going by Mookherjee's word that these were 95% of the pregnancies resulting from wartime rape in Bangladesh, that increases the number of abortions/pregnancies to 2632. Justice Sobhan, who apparently headed War Rehabilitation Organisation in Bangladesh also gave a figure of overall 2,300-2,500 abortions. (But keep in mind that Justice Sobhan might be exaggerating. He is an involved source). The probability of exaggeration even in these figures of 2,300-2,500 abortions is possible. After all when Marcus Franda did ‘Random checks at the local level’ in 1972 he saw that Awami League functionaries had ‘invariably’ exaggerated victim numbers between three and ten times. That was for deaths. It is possible that the same applies for the number of rape victims. If Awami League officials had a habit of exaggeration, such that a foreign observer had to say they had invariably inflated casualty figures, then it is also not far-fetched that a Bengali judge would do the same. 

Next comes the issue of war babies. There were Western reporters in early 1972 estimating that 5,000 war babies would be born. However, foreign couples who came to Bangladesh looking to adopt war babies found that the number of "war babies" born was way lower.12 For example, there were only 21 "war babies" in Mother Teresa's shelter of whom 15 were adopted by Canadian couples in July 1972. The remaining 6 were reported to have died later. Its also known that children born in shelters like Deva Sadan and Shishu Bhavan were not necessarily war babies, but also included orphans, foundlings, "illegals" (not necessarily fathered by Pakistani soldiers).[13]

 By December 1973 one newspaper article claimed that nearly 200 war babies had already been adopted abroad and about another 50 were still awaiting adoption.[13] Its unclear how the paper figured out that these babies were fathered by Pakistani soldiers (as opposed to others like Razakars). The paper also mentions what I referred to above; that over 2000 pregnancies were terminated in the clinics. (Although we can't be sure that all women seeking abortions were pregnant from soldiers or were seeking abortions for other reasons).

The 15 war babies adopted by Canadian couples in 1972 were obviously part of the 200 "war babies" mentioned above. But it gets fishy when one reads the accounts, in Mustafa Chowdhury's book,[14] of how these 15 children were born in Mother Teresa's shelter. Their mothers who gave birth to them were anonymous women who came to the shelter to give birth and left. They might not have all been rape victims. They might just have been poor mothers trying to get rid of unwanted children or orphans. Could be any reason. Bangladesh did not exactly have a transparent and accurate recording system. Sarmila Bose gives an example in her article "Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh War" of a mental girl (with no memory or recollection of herself) who we really know nothing about but she is still paraded around without evidence as a woman "raped by Pakistan Army."
 

 

While Champa was supposed to have received treatment at the rehabilitation centre for two years (the centre was set up in 1972), the register of the mental hospital showed her admission there to be in 1972. The hospital register noted that Champa "might have been raped by the Pakistani army", while Champa said she remembered nothing about that year or how she ended up at the mental hospital. Mookherjee, clearly worried about the implications of what she has discovered, writes, "I must hastily add that I draw attention to these minute disjunctions to explore the assumptions that might have influenced the narrativisation of Champa's 'story' on the part of the journalist."

Mookherjee refers more than once to "200,000 women" raped in East Pakistan with- out questioning the basis for this number, and with regard to Champa, she argues that if forgetting is her way of expressing her trauma (of rape by the Pakistan army - which Mookherjee has just shown is a claim made by others and without evidence), then she should be allowed to remain silent. In conclusion she writes, "This paper should not be read as a negation of the violence of sexual violence of 1971". But, of course, Mookherjee's paper is a negation of the sup posed rape of Champa by the Pakistan army!

All we really know about Champa after reading Mookherjee's paper is that she is a mentally ill woman who has spent several decades at the Pabna Mental Hospital. She says she remembers nothing about 1971 or how she came to be at the hospital. The available evidence does not indicate whether she was raped by anyone. Nor is there evidence that she ever came into contact with the Pakistan army. The elaborate newspaper story about her "rape" and her "eyes brimming with tears" written by the journalist was a fabrication, as Mookherjee conclusively shows. The journalist had not even met Champa. His source was the non-governmental organisation which was trying to remove Champa from the only place she knew as home - the mental hospital - and parade her in Dhaka as a rape victim.

  In another interesting anecdote mentioned about Mother Teresa, it is said she went to one of the Pakistan Army's supposed "rape camps" but she could not find any girls. All she found was hair and coats.[15] But we can't take the hair and coats as evidence of anything, There were a lot of forgeries in this war. For example, a Bihari author Aquila Ismail once said in an interview to The Express Tribune newspaper that she and her mother and sister were put in a refugee camp before migrating to Pakistan where the camp organisers told Western reporters that they were Bengali women who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers.[16]

In his book Blood and Tears, Qutubuddin Aziz also mentions how Indians showed some pictures to Western correspondents which "were claimed to be of the Bengali female victims of the Pakistan Army’s alleged atrocity; a close look at the physical features and dresses of the pictured females disclosed that they were West Pakistanis, not Bengalis" God knows how many more fabrications and misrepresentations are out there. Its a very poorly documented and misrepresented conflict where a lot of propaganda went in.

 Conclusion
Assuming that there were 2632 abortions + 250 war babies adopted by 1973 + (guessing here) an equal number of war babies who were kept that would bring us to around 3132 pregnancies. Given that the average conception rate is 20%-25% we arrive at a figure of between 12,000 and 15,000 rapes.

And this is of course assuming that these figures of two and a half thousand pregnancies and 200-250 war babies for adoption were not in themselves forgeries by the government of Bangladesh which has destroyed all the documents about the women in 1971.

Moreover, its also known that, especially while the Pakistan Army was fighting at the border, the Razakars were active inside. There seem to have been more razakars (135,000?) active than there were Pakistani soldiers. Much or perhaps even most of these pregnancies may have been a result of rapes by Razakars and not Pakistani soldiers.