Anushay Hossain in Forbes:
The post- Liberation War generation of Bangladesh know stories from 1971 all too well. Our families are framed and bound by the history of this war. What Bangladeshi family has not been touched by the passion, famine, murders and blood that gave birth to a new nation as it seceded from Pakistan? Bangladesh was one of the only successful nationalist movements post-Partition. Growing up, stories of the Mukti Bahini, (Bengali for “Freedom Fighter”), were the stories that raised us.
My mother told me in 1971, you would send out the men in your family to look in large public parks for the bodies of loved ones who had “disappeared,” picked up by Pakistani soldiers. Despite the endless killings and torture, she still says, “There was a feeling in the air that you could do anything. Everyone knew Independence was only a matter of time.”
But the one thing we did not hear about as much as we heard about the passionate fighting that defeated the Pakistani Army were the rapes that took place in 1971. Many academics state that the first time rape was consciously applied as a weapon of war was during the Bangladesh War of Independence.
More here.