Noted Bangladeshi author and activist Taslima Nasrin on Sunday raked up the incidents of abuse faced by women over the course of the 1971 Liberation war, after a United Nations official claimed on Friday that Russian soldiers are being supplied with Viagra to rape Ukrainian women and “dehumanize” them.
Pramila Patten, UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told news agency AFP that it was a “deliberate tactic” and part of a “military strategy”.
“When women are held for days and raped, when you start to rape little boys and men, when you see a series of genital mutilations, when you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” AFP quoted Patten as saying.
Reacting to Patten’s claim, Nasrin tweeted, “Russia giving soldiers Viagra to rape Ukrainians! Part of the Russian ‘military strategy’! ‘Deliberate tactic to dehumanize the victims’!Russian military raped & assaulted 100 Ukrainians so far with Viagra.But Pakistani military raped 200,000 Bengali women in 1971 without Viagra! (sic).”
HT could not independently verify the authenticity of Nasrin’s claim and whether Pakistani soldiers were provided with Viagra or not.
However, according to Human Rights Watchan international non-governmental organisation, rapes occurred on a large but undetermined scale (figures of 2 lakh-4 lakh victims are often mentioned in the literature, though some scholars claim that these figures are seriously inflated).
“Estimates of the number of people killed in connection with the 1971 war vary greatly from a Pakistani government commission’s calculation of approximately 26,000 to figures of about 3,000,000 cited by Bangladeshi historians,” it said.
