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As the costs of the war in Iraq mount, Yasmin Saikia, assistant professor of history, is writing about the human costs of another war — one never before heard about by most people.
The 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh began as a civil war between West and East Pakistan. Then India stepped in to fight West Pakistan, while the United States, long a Pakistani ally, continued to send supplies to West Pakistan. In the end, East Pakistan became the independent nation-state of Bangladesh.
That's how the textbooks tell it. But Saikia is writing about the facts that don't show up in official documents. In a book she hopes to finish by the end of 2007, Saikia is sharing stories of some of the 200,000 women who were raped during the war.
This summer, Saikia received a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship to work on this project.
In 2001, Saikia spent a year in Bangladesh and interviewed 200 women.
About 50 of them gave her permission to use the interviews in her book.
"It was a very hard exercise to gain their trust and get women to talk to me, because for 30 years they have kept quiet," Saikia said.
"Many of them said, 'please don't use my story because my son would be appalled to know that I had been raped,' or 'I'm a widow now, and I have no help around, and if people knew I was raped this whole community would ostracize me.' It was not women's fear or shame for themselves. It was a social issue of being outcast again by a community that had never really acknowledged what they had suffered."
At first Saikia intended to focus her project entirely on these women.
But then, 12 days before she was to leave Bangladesh, she talked to a former soldier who had fought in the civil war.
After joining the East Pakistani militia and learning to use a gun, he felt invincible, he told Saikia, like a hero for his nation. During the war he instigated the rape of a woman who had been his neighbor since childhood.
"And to this day, 30 years later, he cannot make sense of why he did it," Saikia said. "That woman had become an enemy because she spoke another language and was from another ethnic group. He asked me, 'Do you think I am a hero?'"
Saikia decided to broaden her book to explore how the violence changed both the women who endured it and the men who perpetrated it. Many of them behaved as they did during the war because they identified with one group or another — Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, soldier.
"They live within these confined labels every day," Saikia said.
"But when they are talking of this historic moment of 1971, many people who had experienced the war firsthand are able to then question the same identity that made them carry out this violence. It's momentarily questioning, no doubt. But in that questioning I have found hope that there is a possibility of writing a human story."
Saikia would like to hear from scholars in other disciplines who want to discuss some of the philosophical questions she's exploring. Contact her at saikia@email.unc.edu.
Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Angela Spivey