Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (20 page)

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discovered that gynecological infection was rampant. "Almost every rape victim tested had a venereal disease," an Australian physician told The New York Times.

The most serious crisis was pregnancy. Accurate statistics on the number of raped women who found themselves with child were difficult to determine but
2 5,000
is the generally accepted figure. Less speculative was the attitude of the raped, pregnant women. Few cared to bear their babies. Those close to birth ex pressed little interest in the fate of the child. In addition to an understandable horror of rearing a child of forcible rape, it was freely acknowledged in Bangladesh that the bastard children with their fair Punjabi features would never be accepted into Bengali culture-and neither would their mothers.

Families with money were able to send their daughters to expert abortionists in Calcutta, but shame and self-loathing and lack of alternatives led to fearsome, irrational solutions in the rural villages. Dr. Geoffrey Davis of the London-based International Abortion Research and Training Center who worked for months in the remote countryside of Bangladesh reported that he had heard of "countless" incidents of suicide and infanticide during his travels. Rat poison and drowning were the available means. Davis also estimated that five thousand women had managed to abort themselves by various indigenous methods, with attendant medical complications.

A Catholic convent in Calcutta, Mother Theresa's, opened its doors in Dacca to women who were willing to offer their babies for overseas adoption, but despite the publicity accorded to Mother Theresa, few rape victims actually came to her shelter. Those who learned of the option chose to have an abortion. Planned Parent hood, in cooperation with the newly created Bangladesh Central Organization for Women's Rehabilitation, set up clinics in Dacca and seventeen outlying areas to cope with the unwanted preg nancies. In its first month of operation the Dacca clinic alone reported doing more than one hundred terminations.

The Bangladesh Central Organization for Women's Rehabili tation, created by Bengali women themselves, proved to be an heroic moving force. In a country with few women professionals, those who had the skills stepped forward to help their victimized sisters. One, a doctor, Helena Pasha, who admitted that prior to the war she had thoroughly disapproved of abortion, gave freely of her

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time and services with little monetary compensation. Women so cial workers like Tahera Shafiq took over the organizational work and gave aid
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and comfort that the traumatized rape victims could not accept from men. Tahera Shafiq was adamant on one point. Rape or forcible prostitution were false, inadequate words to de scribe what the Bengali women had gone thraugh. She preferred in conversation to use the word "torture."

Rehabilitation meant more than comfort, tenderness and abortion. The women,s organization sought to train the homeless, rejected women in working skills. Handicraf ts, shorthand and typ ing were the obvious choices-small steps until one remembers that most of the women had never been outside their rural villages before. The hoped-for long-range goal of "rehabilitation" still re mained marriage. "An earning woman has better prospects of mar riage than others," one social worker said dryly. But for many of the tortured women, aid and succor arrived too late, or not at all. "Alas, we have reports of some who have landed in brothels," a male government official acknowledged. "It is a terrible tragedy."

As the full dimensions of the horror became known, those who looked for rational, military explanations returned again and again to the puzzle of why the mass rapes had taken place. "And a campaign of terror includes raper Aubrey Menen prodded a Ben gali politician. He got a reflective answer
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'What do soldiers talk about in barracks? Women and sex," the politician mused. "Put a gun in their hands and tell them to go out and frighten the wits out of a population and what will be th
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e first thing that leaps to their mind?" Fearing the magnitude of his
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own answer, the politi cian concluded, "Remember, some of our Bengali women are very beautiful." Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian novelist, was convinced of conspiracy. The rapes were so systematic and pervasive that they had to be conscious Army policy, "planned by the West Pakistanis in a deliberate effort" to create a new race" or to dilute Bengali nationalism, Anand passionately told reporters.

Theory and conjecture abounded, all of it based on the erro neous assumption tha the massive rape of Bangladesh had been a crime without precedent in modern history.

But the mass rape of Bangladesh had not been unique
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The number of rapes per capita during the nine-month occupation of Bangladesh had ben no greater than the incidence of rape during one month of occupation in the city of Nanking in
1937,
no greater

than the per capita incidence of rape in Belgium and France as the German Army marched unchecked during the first three months of World War I, no greater than the violation of women in every village in Soviet Russia in World War II. A "campaign of terror" and a charge of "conscious Army policy" had been offered up in explanation by seekers of rational answers in those wars as well, and later forgotten.
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The story of Bangladesh was unique in one respect. For the first time in history the rape of women in war, and the complex aftermath of mass assault, received serious international attention. The desperate need of Sheik Mujibur Rahman's government for international sympathy and financial aid was part of the reason; a new feminist consciousness that encompassed rape as a political issue and a growing, practical acceptance of abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancy were contributing factors of critical impor tance. And so an obscure war in an obscure corner of the globe, to Western eyes, provided the setting for an examination of the "unspeakable" crime. For once, the particular terror of unarmed women facing armed men had full hearing.

Among the secret documents concerning American involve ment in Vietnam that came to light with the publication of The Pentagon Papers was a report on a covert mission headed by U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward G. Lansdale in 1954-1955. Set into motion right af ter the fall of Dienbienphu while the French met with the Vietminh at Geneva, the broad purpose of the Lansdale mission was "to assist the Vietnamese in unconventional warfare" by undertaking paramilitary operations and by waging political psychological warfare-"psywar" for short in Pentagon ter minology.

"Psywar" consisted of carefully plantd rumor campaigns de signed to confound the forces of Ho Chi Minh and undermine Hanoi's relationship with the Chinese Communists. The first rumor campaign concerned rape. Mindful of Nationalist Chinese troop behavior in 1945 and seeking to play on Vietnamese fears of

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Chinese occupation under Vietminh rule, an American-trained

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Vietnamese Psywar C01npany was instructed to dress in civilian clothes, infiltrate Hanoi and spread the rumor that a Chinese Communist regiment had raped the women of a North Viet namese village. According to the Lansdale Team's report as printed in
The
Pentagon Papers, "The troops received their instructions silently, dressed in civilian clothes, went on their mission, and failed to return. They had deserted to the Vietminh."

The Vietnam war, not just America's twenty-year involvement but beginning with the original struggle for independence against the colonial French, has been a sociological crucible of rape in which certain groups of people have been observed to behave differently from other groups of people, and for this reason it sheds valuable light on the rape mentality. In one respect, of course, this war was no different from others-rarely, if ever, was rape con sidered newsworthy enough to find its way i_nto the dispatches of a foreign correspondent.
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In December,
1972,
when the Paris "peace" talks had finally reached an intensive phase, I had several long interviews in New York with Peter Arnett, Associated Press correspondent in Viet nam for eight years. Like the rest of the Saigon press corps, this Pulitzer Prize winner had never filed a rape story from Vietnam, but like the rest of the press corps he had certainly been aware of its inCidence. When he began to think about it, Arnett was able to delineate rape in Vietnam on many levels.

Before
1954
the foreign presence in Vietnam had been French, and it was Arnett's reading of history that the French paratroopers maintained a stricter discipline than their mercenary legionnaires who were permitted to rape and loot, or so he had heard from South Vietnamese for whom life "before the Ameri cans" was already folklore.

It
was Arnett's impression that the South Vietnamese Army, the ARYN, had participated in little raping at the beginning of the long war, but with the escalation of the conflict, concomitant with a growing brutalization, the incidence of ARYN rape increased. Disciplinary machinery within the South Vietnamese Army was always lax: but other factors militated against ARVN rape. In the government-controlled areas, the larger cities, an illegal act was always punishable and therefore dangerous: a raped woman might turn out to be a wife or daughter of a well-connected family. "The

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ARYN could not go through Saigon and rape, obviously," he told me, but the situation
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was different during military operations. "When· the government-controlled areas came under pressure remember the Tet offensive-anything could happen. There could be little redress by the population. Nongovernment-controlled areas, the free-fire zones, were always fair game."

South Vietnamese soldiers were allowed to keep their families with them at their base cainps. Arnett believed that the presence of the wives and a general availability of sex ( the brothel system has been a traditional part of Vietnamese society ) gave ARVN soldiers less
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cause to rape. Another possibility is that the presence of wives and children on the campgrounds would exert a moral force against the rape of other women. Also, the ARVN's mili
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tary operations were always in the neighboring vicinity and of short duration. Not only did the men understand that they were to soon return to their wives and/ or brothels, there was also a strong probability that they might actually know, or even be related to,

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the girls in the villages they passed through. 'A lot of casual rape was avoided because of family relations," Arnett had conduded.

• That family relations served as a deterrent is a point to give one pause. The American Civil War, like Vietnam, in some re spects a struggle of brother against brother, is considered a low-rape war by those few historians who have thought about it. Injunctions against assaulting one's sister or one's buddy's sister are part of the code of honor among inen; furthermore, anonymity between rapist and victim is an important factor in rape sin
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  Ce an unknown woman is
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  Il1:ore easily stripped of her humanity.
  

  • In contrast to the ARYN, the South Vietnamese Rangers elite fighting troops who were transported from one part of Viet nam to another-were commonly credited with a higher incidence of rape by the foreign press. Set down in an unfamiliar area, the Rangers were without family ties and less likely to know or care about the feelings of the local women. As the elite corps of the South Vietnamese, I might add, they may also have been influ enced by a swaggering, swashbuckling self-image.
    

Similarly, when the regular South Vietnamese forces were sent into ·camboda during the brief invasion of May,
1970
they freely looted and raped in every village they
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passed through-to such·an extent that the Lon Nol government ("our" Cambodian

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government) officially protested. "It must be harder to rape your own nationality" was Arnett's sudden insight when he put his own facts together.

Regarding this Cambodian invasion, the pro-Communist Prince Sihanouk later remarked in black humor that President Thieu actually had been "very useful" to him: "Yes, indeed," he told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, "Sirik Matak used to say that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong behaved badly in Cambodia. But when he saw Thieu's soldiers-those wild beasts who mur dered children, raped women, burned houses, destroyed temples, he had to admit: 'Sihanouk's Vietnamese were better.' In short, if Thieu had not sent his wild beasts, there wouldn't be so many Khmer Rouge; young Cambodians would not have flocked into the resistance groups in tens of thousands."

As the war dragged on, geographic and nationality considera tions diminished. "After being in a war and seeing your buddies killed, your intent becomes evil," Arnett believes. "It was true for all troops-all they'd think about was eating, drinking and screw ing." And so the South Vietnamese Army, which raped little at the beginning of the war, stepped up its activity. The "main molest ing"-Arnett's phrase-was done at the special interrogation centers. "Under the pretext of finding out Vietcong information they would pick out an attractive young girl in a village and march her along in their column to take her to the interrogation center. Sometimes the unit might lead her into the forest, and then we, the reporters, would hear screams. She could be raped down the line at stages before she was finally released. When she was brought before the commander even then it might turn out that he knew her family and then she'd be let go."

Arnett was among those reporters who heard screams when interrogation units led a woman into the forest, and like the others, he never investigated further. "The South Vietnamese are a private people and it was always done quietly. They were much less likely to have a public gang-rape scene than the Americans," he offered by way of sociological explanation. He also used the typical re porter's stand-by that rape was "hard to verify," although he ad mitted that "at the end of the war all women who came out of Army jails would say they had been raped."
Time
magazine, in a wrap-up on Saigon's political prisoners that appeared in Decemher,

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i972, stated with caution, "Horror stories abound and most Sai gonese accept them as true. One woman recently released from central police headquarters reported that her interroga tors shoved a rubber stick up her vagina."

Torture of female political prisoners traditionally includes rape or varia tions of genital abuse. Whether sadistic torture leads by its own logic to the infliction of sexual pain, or whether the motive of eliciting political information is merely a pretext for the commission of hostile sexual acts, the end result for a woman is almost inevitable. As German soldiers in i944 tortured and raped Maquis supporters, and as French paratroopers tortured and raped Algerian resistance leaders a decade later, so in the year i972 beyond the horrors of the interrogation centers in South Vietnam one heard of electric shocks and rape applied to female political prisoners in Argentina and severe beating and electric shocks ad ministered to the sexual organs of male and female prisoners in Brazil, including the doubly vengeful act, "a woman raped in front of her husband by one of his torturers." Six months later the pattern was repeated by the Portuguese in the colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and a year af ter that by the military government of Chile. Throughout much of the world the pretext of securing political information has led, in a woman's case, to rape.