During the World War II, rape, molestation and dishonouring of the women by the soldiers of advancing armies was so common a practice that the Western world took it as part of the game and noted it only when it was on a massive scale.
At the close of the war came to light the “Rape of Berlin” committed by the armies of “allies” after they had conquered and occupied Berlin. The gruesome happenings in Berlin have been described by a British agent who was posted there at the time. It has been reported that no girl from the age six to eight was spared. The young German women foreseeing the catastrophe offered themselves to German men so that they might not have to bear the children of enemy’s soldiers.
The allied powers, which always portray Hitler as an embodiment of evil and hold him responsible for the Holocaust, have never allowed their crimes in the war to be revealed to the world.
After the World War II, Muslim women have been the biggest target of rape in several parts of the world, including East Punjab, the occupied Kashmir, Burma, Bosnia and Bangladesh. During 1947-48, members of the armed force belonging to non-Muslim states of Maharajas in East Punjab themselves committed savage sexual crimes against Muslim women and also backed and incited non-Muslim civil population to perpetrate similar atrocities. Thousands of Muslim women were abducted. They were either killed after being subjected to the heinous crime or were kept alive as slaves. During the same period, Dogra armies of Maharaja of Kashmir mercilessly targeted Muslim women to appease their animal lust.
Hundreds of Hindu-Muslim riots have taken place in India after Partition. There are fist-hand testimonies to prove that Indian police and paramilitary forces have sexually abused Muslim women.
It is reported that during the centenary celebrations of Darul Uloom, Deobund, India, in the 1980s, a woman clad in a ‘chadar’ and standing in a dark corner of a lane, caught hold the hand of a “Maulana” who was returning after delivering a sermon on Islam before a big gathering. She said: “O Molvi, do you have any shame? I am a Muslim but being kept by a Sikh for the last forty years.” A learned scholar from Pakistan, who went to India to attend the centenary celebrations, while travelling in a train met a Sikh boy from East Punjab who told him that his mother was a Muslim.
One of the most horrible anti-Muslim riots took place in some districts of Bihar (India) in 1946. Those who visited the affected areas found large baskets full of amputated breasts of women.
The military government of Burma was reputed to bear a special grudge against the local Muslims during the early phase of its rule. There have been first-hand narratives and reports in the international media which prove rapes and gang-rapes of Muslim women by the Burmese soldiers.
After the fall of Dacca in 1971, there have been most brutal rapes, gang-rapes and molestation of women belonging to the Bihari community by the members of Muktibani, which is reported to include a large number of non-Muslims.
Most Urdu fiction writers of the 1940s have effectively narrated the ghastly events involving the molestation of women. Qudratullah Shahab, in one of his stories, writes: “He saw a queue of men having beastly looks and eagerly waiting for something. ‘What this queue is for?’ he enquired. ‘Don’t you know?’ came the reply from the men in queue. ‘Sex ration is being distributed.’ Instantly, he heard the heart-rending shrieks and cries of a woman on the other end of the queue. ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, I am your sister’.”
The rape of Muslim women in Bosnia surpasses in savageness any act of this nature committed anywhere in the world. However, the Muslim world was itself ignorant of these sordid happenings inside Bosnia at the hands of Serbs until the representatives of Western media discovered them.
Women now living in refugee camps speak about rape of young girls performed in front of fathers, mothers, and siblings — rapes that give birth to unwanted Serb babies. Rape was the ultimate act in Serb programme of annihilation.
The very recent atrocities, to which Muslim women have been subjected, have taken place in the Indian state of Gujarat. The Islamic Society of North America established the Indian Muslim Relief Committee to help the affectees of the Gujarat pogrom. Its News Bulletin of June 2002 carries excerpts of a report by a fact-finding mission:
“Once the resistance (of Muslims) was broken with the help of the police, the rioters stormed inside the settlement, burning and looting at will. Eyewitness after eyewitness in the relief camps described gory incidents of children being burnt alive and women being raped. One expectant woman’s belly was cut open, her fetus wrenched out and dashed to the ground.” Now where are the champions of human rights and torch-bearers of anti-terrorism? Are state-sponsored rapes not terrorism? Are killings and burning alive of pregnant women not acts of terror? Should not the perpetrators of these ghastly crimes be caught and punished?
