Author: Sara Sethia

War Stories | An Account of Partition

by Sara Sethia ● Posted on
1

War Stories is a monthly column by Sara Sethia that intends to account war experiences and stories, both first hand and others, across borders in an effort to propagate peace activism.

Warning: this piece contains sensitive information which may trigger certain readers.

The Indian Independence Struggle and the Partition that ensued is often narrated as a matter of great pride- more so as a story of imponderable human resilience and boundless patriotism, an exemplar of the ideals of liberty, humanity and peace.

Time and again, as our classrooms and our history lessons talk about victories and deaths, enemies and foes, as we blur the boundaries of those to be loved and those to be despised, these stories about the ugliest facets of human paradoxes will be lost under the garb of superficial ideals and unfounded euphoria. If we shy away from accepting the brute reality of what we lost in all those wars that we won, peace will continue to be a burden, a bloated pouch of words flung from one nation to another until the remnants from the trampled humanity taint it into a tale of invisibility.

This account is one from the deep recesses that haunts the glorious story of Independence. It’s a manifestation of one of the many costs of the Partition in 1947.

Communal disharmony and riots between the Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus was at the helm at that time. Muslims and Sikhs, who had been amicable neighbours since aeons, grew suspicious of each other and were later, raging with fury about the other’s existence. Beautiful evenings that they once spent with each other in the by-lanes of the village or near the wells, were now shrouded in war cries.

In March 1947, Sikh villages in the vicinity of Rawalpindi were assaulted by Muslim mobs. People in the villages were astonished. As “Allah O Akbar” raged through the skies and hands lifting weapons conspicuously occupied the peaceful skies, everyone wondered at the sudden turn of events. Several generations of their families had peacefully coexisted in the village. This was new.

Soon the mob approached a village. One of the members of the mob assured the Sikhs that the mob would return from their village without causing any harm if and only if the Sikhs handed over a girl from the village to them.

Sikh women in the village were forced into hiding. Ber Bahadur Singh was a teenager, who too was forced into hiding with the rest of the villagers. As the circumstances worsened, Ber Bahadur Singh’s father decided to take action.

He called his daughter, Maan. She obediently sat in front of him, her back facing his face. He raised his sword to strike her head off but missed. She brought her braid forward. Her father struck her with his sword and her head rolled on the ground.

One after the other, men began striking the heads off the women of their family to protect their ‘honour’ because they feared that the mobs would kidnap their women, force them to convert their religion and rape them. Preposterously, there were no cries, no commotion- only the dreadful noise of swords cutting through the air and striking the heads of women.

Tears well up in Ber Bahadur Singh’s eyes as he recalls this incident, an incident that continues to haunt him even in his senility.

However, what makes me shudder with fear and anguish is that Ber Bahadur Singh’s YouTube video, which seems to be the only testimonial of this incident online, is titled “How Sikhs saved their women from Muslim Mobs during Partition of 1947”.

Women. Honour.

That day is a reminder of why I as a person can never regard the Partition as a manifestation of liberty. The mob believed that there was no better way to insult the Sikhs than to rape their women. The Sikhs believed that murdering women in such a situation was the most honourable death for them. These women were reduced to mere objects of honour for men to decide their fates according to convenience.

Love. Loss.

They were happy families. They were happy communities. Yet, their lives were obliterated in an instant. A loss that no glory could supplant. Their lives would be jarred with memories of their wives’ hair gorgeously flowing over her face, of her eyes which made their day. Dreams would bring back dreadful memories of the times when their nights were replete with their sister’s endless chatter or their mother’s stories. It was and is dreadful because all that was once mellifluous is now tainted with the noise of swords chopping their heads.

What was saved and what was lost is an inexplicable beat in the deepest recesses of their hearts; hearts that know they didn’t want what they did; hearts that wished they hadn’t known honour; hearts that wish the war never came.

Disclaimer: Before you develop an opinion about which community is evil or bad, remember that there are stories in the hidden folds of history that may smash your judgements in an instant. It’s not who wronged whom — the war has left no hands clean. It’s about why we wronged the people we were supposed to love, the people who were not ‘others’ due to the difference in their religions or nations. It is rather about why war compels us to throw into oblivion the relationships we shared and the humanity we swore by.

Sara Sethia is a Research Associate (Gender Justice) at One Future Collective.

Featured image: Washington Post

 

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice

War and Menstruation

by Sara Sethia ● Posted on
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Often, the deepest casualties of war are the ones that don’t find words. Silenced, we believe they don’t exist, as they surreptitiously mock human rights, etching stains forever.

Menstruation.

Imagine your fifteen year old self (yes, men too). Idealism, passion and dreams of the future. You were probably studying in a school, with fans at least and single gender bathrooms, with latches and running water. You probably had a group of friends and evenings suffuse with hygienic food and warm sleep. You probably also took shots of all the essential vaccinations and had a medical store around the corner of your home.

What would your fifteen-year-old self, do, stuck in a refugee camp with the chill of the night befalling you as you try to breathe in a cramped tent? What would your fifteen years old self, do, if you had no school to teach you what menstruation is, no family to explain why you were bleeding and no running water? What would your fifteen years old self, do, when the people around ostracised you because you were bleeding (it’s not even under one’s control, damn it!) and stared at you as you silently walked around in stained, smelly clothes with painful infections flourishing in your vaginal areas?

According to a study conducted by Global One in displacement camps in Syria and Lebanon, 60% of the female refugees did not have access to underwear and a greater proportion had no access to sanitary napkins.

However, what augments this problem for female refugees is lack of access to clean toilets and of privacy. Refugee girls in Lebanon described the toilets as cramped and dirty and said that they preferred to change their menstrual material in their shelters, though shelters provided no privacy.

“The walls that make the tents and separate them are normally just blankets, plastic sheeting and transparent”, said one adolescent girl from Lebanon. “Someone from outside can see you in there.”

Often, puberty is a confusing phase of life. As a child, I remember how I always had my mother to look up to for explanations about the physical and emotional turmoil that I was experiencing when I reached puberty

A thirteen-year-old child, who just lost her family in an air-strike, stuck in an underground loft with a group of strangers. Who will she look up to when she gets her first period?

A fifteen-year-old is on a fierce journey through the sea in the hope to salvage her life. She gets her first period. Without food and water, in a ship crammed with people on a rocky sea, how will she deal with it?

When Sarah started menstruating in Egypt during the months-long journey that would take her from Eritrea to Britain, she had to use “toilet paper, tissue, anything” to soak up the blood. She was preparing to make the journey across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Italy and did not have access to sanitary products. “You’re travelling with a small bag, an empty bag because when you go to the boat, they ask you to make it lighter.”

Her periods make her vulnerable. They become her vulnerability. Where do these vulnerabilities find respite?

In the numerous superstitions and customs associated with menstruation.

Out of school and barely surviving, young girls and women have no access to information about menstruation and menstrual hygiene. The consequences of which are low self-esteem, shame and an abode for numerous severe health conditions.

“You must dry your underwear and pads in secret. People may steal it for witchcraft. This can cause you infertility”  

                                – A refugee woman

“Sometimes I go and tell the teacher because many times when we alert them they hide, or sit in one place for hours,” he says, adding that the rest of the pupils distance themselves from girls who are menstruating.

                                – 14-year old Robert Anyanjo in a refugee school.

The taboo and the superstitions associated with this monthly phenomenon puts girls and women in physical danger. The shame associated with periods implies that a woman has to travel to secluded areas of the camp in the dark to dispose off or to change her sanitary napkin, due to lack of disposal facilities and toilets. This, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to physical assault and again, they have nobody to look up to for justice due to the silence and shame associated with a woman’s virginity and honour.

Don’t forget, they have to deal with this every month.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

Several organizations, such as the United Nations, are trying to deliver sanitation kits to provide women access to sanitary napkins. However, these are usually not enough and often women are ashamed to collect sanitary napkins from the organizations distributing them due to the fear of being mocked on and laughed at. Further, the problem runs deeper than merely the lack of access to sanitary napkins. The lack of water and safe toilets, make it difficult for refugee women to use sanitary napkins even if they are available. The taboo and shame associated with this natural process, make it difficult for them to talk about the stress, pain and health issues that they are facing. The lack of awareness about menstrual hygiene and about the entire process of periods in general, make this natural phenomenon a horrifying experience of millions of refugee women every month.

Yet it leaves no stains in the entire debate about the refugee crisis.

It is important to realise the magnitude of this problem. Lack of education about menstruation and hygiene implies that several generations of women will continue to feel ashamed about their body and their period, several generations of women will be taught to remain silent about their needs and difficulties, several generations of women will be taught to feel disempowered and weak. Often, the issue of menstruation is ignored when we talk about refugees because it’s not about life or death. However, if we look at their survival as being different from their empowerment, will this crisis ever see an end?

Sara Sethia is a Research Associate (Gender Justice) at One Future Collective.

EducationFeminismGender JusticeInclusivityMenstruationmental health

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice

Rape as a War Crime

by Sara Sethia ● Posted on
1

Beyond gender, beyond humanity.

 

What’s more human?

She carries the shame of a mauled vagina.

He, blood between his legs, the loss of masculinity in his head.

Invasion. Torture. Rape.

Has no gender.

 

Often, the most important stories are the ones we never hear. Under the masquerade of bravery and honour, wars are troves of anecdotes that the human race is ashamed of. You won’t find them in words, but in the silence of millions of people, across the boundaries, trampled by the fires of morality and purity, which unfortunately aren’t carved to accept and empower the mauled.

Rape in War is as old as War itself.

1945: World War 2- Red Army’s Invasion of Germany

“If I knew what was to follow in Berlin then, I’d probably have killed myself. I was sheltering in an air raid shelter when they came for me. They held me for fourteen days and nights and raped me constantly, one after another.”

-Margot Woelk, now 98, her eyes misty with tears while she recounts the experience.

1993: Bosnia Genocide

“They took Amela Greljo and her sister Jasmina and Amna Kovac and Suada Prguda. They were very beautiful. There was no doubt why they took them. All we heard afterwards was that they had been taken to a brothel in Foca. Amna was 16, Suada 20. Amela was also 17, her sister only 16. Almasa’s mother, who was also raped, received a scribbled note from her daughter three weeks later. It said: ‘Dear Mother, I’m OK. Don’t worry about me. Send me my dresses.’ Later, Almasa sent another note saying she was now called by a Serbian name.”

-Emria from a gymnasium where women were mass raped

2014: South Sudan

“I couldn’t even see my little girl anymore. I could only see blood”

-Mary. They took turns to rape her after raping her ten-year-old child, who succumbed to her injuries.

This is the real, haunting face of war, that history textbooks shy away from recording. While the world becomes the battleground, humanity is raped and mauled; silenced in victory speeches and forgotten.

For aeons, rape has been systematically used as a weapon in wars to terrorize and weaken civilians on the opposing side. Rape is not merely a consequence of war. It is in fact, an important strategy employed to exert dominance and power. It is systematically employed to desecrate the social and cultural fabric of the ‘enemy’ nation. It is an attempt to leave an indelible blotch of shame and destruction even after the war is over because often the women who are impregnated as a result of these rapes are ostracized by the society, the children born out of rape often have to lead lives devoid of dignity and identity while some women commit suicide to escape the harrowing consequences of living in a society which won’t even lend a voice to their pain. The stigma, around rape and the association of a woman’s virginity with the family’s honour, often results in victims being either forced to hide the fact that they were raped or attracting contempt instead of support from their own society. During the invasion of Berlin by the Red Army in 1945, Ingeborg was raped by two Russian soldiers at gunpoint. Now aged 90, she recalls how she was compelled to remain silent about the horrors she went through that night- “My mother liked to boast that her daughter hadn’t been touched”. The perpetrators of rape could go back home, often as heroes who won the battle while the women they raped carried the shame for the rest of their lives. Rendered impure, the future of these women was at stake. Viewed with contempt and rendered unfit for marriage, they led each day of their lives with the memories of the horror they experienced.

Until 1994, “rape and sexual violence were just seen as a spoil of war”, to quote the words of Pierre-Richard Prosper, who along with Sara Darehshori, led the persecution in the inaugural case of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This landmark case resulted in rape being classified as a war crime for the first time in history.

Let’s delve deeper into how this path-breaking judgement came into existence.

Rwanda had been the epicentre of ethnic tensions between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsi ethnicities since times immemorial. Although the Hutus and Tutsis are very close, they share the same language and traditions. When the Belgians arrived in Rwanda as the colonial rulers of the country, they produced identity cards, distinguishing people based on their ethnicity. They imposed the idea that Tutsis were superior to the Hutus and bestowed upon them several privileges while the majority Hutus lived a life of impoverishment. After the Belgians relinquished power in Rwanda, the Hutus took control of the country. Years of resentment and rage found an outlet on 6th April 1996, when the then Hutu Rwandan President was killed by a rocket that attacked his plane. This incident lead to the unleashing of terror on the country’s Tutsis. More than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in about 100 days. This magnitude of violence took the world by shock. Hence, the United Nations intervened by setting up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide.

The prosecution was spearheaded by two young American lawyers Pierre-Richard Prosper and Sara Darehshori. A 1996 report by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, reported that “Rape was the rule and its absence the exception”. The report also states that about 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls were raped during the genocide. The magnitude of sexual violence, especially rape, was what led Prosper and Darehshori to argue that rape should be classified as a war crime. They won the case in 1998. Their victory was important:“Failure literally was not an option — too much depended on it. If we lost, what would that mean to the victims and the survivors? Their deaths were not being recognized or valued.”

However, there is another dark secret that the war holds, another harrowing reality, which deserves equal attention- the rape of Men.

2009: Congo

“Many, many, many bleeding. I could feel it like water.”

-Jean Paul. He along with the six other male prisoners were raped eleven times each night by the army until he escaped. He still bleeds when he walks. He can’t talk to anybody about what happened to him. He fears his brother may say- ‘Now, my brother is not a man’

“Men aren’t simply raped, they are forced to penetrate holes in banana trees that run with acidic sap, to sit with their genitals over a fire, to drag rocks tied to their penis, to give oral sex to queues of soldiers, to be penetrated with screwdrivers and sticks.”

-Salome Atim. Gender Officer of Makerere University’s Refugee Law Project

“It happened to me. I am in pain. I have to use this.”

-A husband whose wife complained that he can’t have sex, as he laid a puss covered sanitary pad. He was raped three times a day for three years by the captors.

Lara Stemple’s study, “Male Rape and Human Rights” cites the astonishing results of a study of 6000 concentration camp inmates in Sarajevo Canton- 80% of males reported that they had been raped in detention.

In spite of the gravity of rapes of men in war, the world is silent about it. What gives the perpetrators the power to rape men?

Our very ideas about masculinity.

The idea that men cannot be vulnerable, that men are supposed to be powerful, that masculinity lies in being the cause rather than the source of tears, is etched into the fabric of our society. The consequences aren’t delightful for anyone- they rape and impose power; they get raped and silently suffer. Their pain reminds them of their perpetrators each day, but do they have a place to go to? Will the society allow them their right to humane emotions of pain and distress?

The lack of acknowledgement that men too are raped during war, is very evident from the following review highlighted in Lara Stemple’s study. 4076 non-governmental organizations around the world address rape during wartime and other forms of political sexual violence. Of these, only 3% mention the experience of males in their informational materials, typically as a passing reference. How will justice ever be delivered to these men, if the patriarchy of the society bars it from acknowledging the very fact that men are raped?

War has detrimental consequences. Aren’t we perpetrators too, if we look down upon that sixteen-year-old who was raped by the military? Aren’t we perpetrators too, if we mock that man, whose painful screeches broke the silence of the night while he was being sexually abused?

We couldn’t help them while they were being raped. Could we be humane enough to support them and empower them? Could we for once, regard them as fellow beings before we entangle them in our barbed concepts about femininity and masculinity?

 

Feature Image Credit: Krystle Mikaere on Unsplash

 

Sara Sethia is a Research Associate (Gender Justice) at One Future Collective.

GBVRapeWar Crime

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice