[shahidulnews] Distances

[Shahidul Alam]

Full article at: http://shahidul.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/distances/

rahnuma ahmed

WHENEVER I approach her, I feel numb. I feel speechless. I want to  
know who she is. But I don’t know who to ask. How to ask.

This photograph has always haunted me. I don’t remember when I first  
saw it. Probably in a book of war photographs. And later in the  
Muktijuddho Jadughar, where I have gone many a times with relatives  
and friends, visiting from abroad.

‘She was pulled out. Dragged out from the Pakistani army’s bunker,’  
said Naibuddin Ahmed, the photographer.

.....

War fractures the lives of survivors, often in ways that cannot be  
repaired. War rape creates a war within a war. It can outlive war.  
Pre-war normalcy often eludes the survivors forever.

Thirty-eight years on and I look at myself. I look at us women. I  
look at our normal, peacetime lives. And I wonder, if justice had  
been done, if the war criminals had been tried, if women had returned  
to their families, to their parents, husbands, lovers, brothers, if  
they did not have to go to Pakistan, or to brothels, or to Mother  
Teresa’s in Kolkata, if those pregnant could have their babies if  
they had wished, would my life, would our lives have been differently  
normal? If justice had been done, would the rape of hill women have  
been a necessary part of the military occupation of the Chittagong  
Hill Tracts? Would the offenders have enjoyed impunity? Would there  
not have been independent judicial investigations? Would those guilty  
have gone unpunished? Would the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been  
militarily occupied at all?

Would we have been closer to freedom?

Shahidul Alam
http://shahidul.wordpress.com




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