BIAS IN THE REPORTING OF SUICIDE AND GENOCIDE
DAVID LESTER
Summary.
– Reports of suicide during two genocides (in Armenia in 1915 and in India
and Pakistan in 1947) are primarily of women committing suicide, often in mass,
to avoid abduction and rape. It is suggested that this may be biased reporting
of suicidal behavior during these genocides.
Previous
studies have reported high rates of suicide during the Holocaust, both in the
ghettos and in the concentration camps (Lester, 2005) This raises the question
of whether suicide was common during other genocides. Two genocides have some (albeit
limited) data available: that of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915
and during the partition of India in 1947.
Armenians
Miller and
Miller (1982) interviewed 35 survivors of the Armenian genocide, now living in
California. Their informants reported that many of those deported died of
thirst, hunger, disease and murder. Children were stolen, young women abducted,
and women raped and mutilated. Mothers abandoned their children or gave them
away to Turks, Kurds or Arabs and “not a few mothers and families committed
suicide together” (Miller & Miller, 1982, p. 55).
There are
reports of hundreds of young women committing suicide by drowning (Miller &
Miller, 1993, p. 96). One informant tried to drown herself in a river, but a
relative pulled her out. There are reports of girls linking arms or holding
hands and jumping off bridges or cliffs into the rivers. Miller and Miller
hypothesized that the girls were physically and emotionally exhausted, had
witnessed incredible violence, and had lost hope of survival.
Miller and
Miller documented three types of suicide. Altruistic suicide was evident in
mothers who starved to give their children the limited food available or who
died with their children rather than abandoning them. Despair-motivated suicides
had given up hope and either drowned themselves or simply sat down on the road
to die. In defiant suicide, the goal was to cheat the aggressors of the
sadistic pleasure of murder. One survivor reported an incident where those
escorting the Armenians were stripping the deportees of their clothes and
throwing them off a cliff into the river, whereupon one woman picked up her
four-year-old son and jumped with him into the river.
India and Pakistan[1]
The plan to
partition India (into India and a regionally divided Pakistan) was announced on
June 3, 1947. The movement of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to other territories
began in earnest in the August and September of 1947. There followed a massive
disruption as more than ten million people moved from one country to the other
across the western border alone. Villages were abandoned, crops left to rot,
and families separated by the new borders. The governments of India and
Pakistan were completely unprepared for this.
More than this disruption, there
was a genocide as members of one religion raped and slaughtered those of the
other religions. Estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million and
about 75,000 women were abducted and raped by men of other religions and
sometimes by men of their own religion. The torture of the women included
raping and disfiguring women in front of their relatives, tattooing and
branding them with ‘Pakistan, Zindabad” or ‘Hindustan, Zindabad,’ marking a
half-moon on their breasts or genitalia, and amputating their breasts.
To prevent
capture, torture and death at the hands of others or forced religious
conversions, people murdered their own children, spouses, parents and other
significant others. Some also committed suicide. Pennebaker (2000) mentions
women who jumped into wells or set themselves on fire, sometimes individually
but occasionally all the women in a family together.
Butalia
(2000) talked to and recorded the experiences of those in one region during
this crisis, the Punjab. She heard tales of hundreds of women jumping into
wells (and sometimes being forced to jump) to avoid capture, rape, abduction
and forced conversions. One informant reported watching more than ninety Sikh
women jump into a well in her village in Rawalpindi on March 15th
1947 when it was under attack from Muslims. The informant jumped in too with
her children, but survived because the water was no longer deep enough for her
to drown. When the well filled up, villages dragged the women who were still
alive out of the well (p. 35).[2]
The incident was reported in the April 15th, 1947, edition of The
Statesman, an English daily newspaper. The informant’s brother-in-law had already
killed his mother, sister, wife, daughter and uncle, and her daughter was
killed. Before they jumped, the women were given some opium mixed in water. The
brother-in-law poured kerosene on himself and jumped into a fire and later
perhaps his son also committed suicide.[3]
Another survivor interviewed by Butalia reported seeing a girl, who was being
dragged away, jump into a canal to escape and another who jumped off a roof to
avoid rape and abduction (p. 271). Later, India’s Prime Minister, Nehru, visited
the well, and the English closed it up.
This
incident has acquired iconic significance, illustrating the bravery and
manliness of the Sikhs, although Butalia points out that it was women who died.
The Statesman compared the “sacrifice” of such women to the mass
immolations of Rajput women when their husbands were killed in wars. Those
women who survived are typically seen as “inferior” to those who died. The
deaths of those who died are seen as “saving” those who survived these times.
It is likely that the villagers would have been killed, abducted and raped had
the attackers not backed off. Butalia, however, noted the failure of the men in
such incidents to defend their village and retaliate, but instead their acquiescence
in the murder and suicide of their family members.[4]
Butalia also questions the extent to which the suicides of these women were
“voluntary.”[5]
Menon and
Bhasin (1998) also noted that women jumped into wells or set themselves on fire
either singly or in groups. The Fact Finding Team set up by the Indian
government recorded that in Bewal Village (in the Rawalpindi district), many
women committed suicide by self-immolation on March 10, 1947. They put their
bedding and cots in a pile, set fire to it and jumped onto it. A school
teacher, whose family was in a camp that was attacked on August 26, 1947,
reported that his daughter had a man try to strangle her three times, but she
survived despite losing consciousness (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p. 42). Many
women carried vials of poison around their neck so as to have the means for
suicide easily available should it become necessary (p. 46).
One male
informant told Menon and Bhasin that his town of Muzaffarabad was raided in
October 17, 1947. The Hindus were overpowered and surrendered. Their money was
taken, and they were marched away. His three sisters swallowed poison, and then
several women jumped off a bridge to drown in the river. A female informant who
survived this incident recalled women committed suicide using opium first and
then taking a faster-acting poison. Another informant told of a woman who tried
to throw her 10-month old baby on a burning pile, but someone else saved the
baby. Later the mother and this baby escaped and hid in a cave. When the mother
heard that her husband had been killed (falsely), she swallowed poison and
died. Three women in this village refused to take the poison or kill their
children, and later they were accused of cowardice, their “lack of courage in
facing death” (p. 54).[6]
Menon and
Bhasin (1998), like many others, reject the term “suicide” for these deaths. In
their opinion, the women did not voluntarily endorse the honor code and choose
death. If they had not committed suicide, they would have been killed by their
own kin and neighbors to “protect their honor.” Menon and Bhasin note that
acquiescence does not imply consent, and submitting is not the same as
agreeing. Pandey (2001) prefers the term “martyrdom” to describe the suicides of
the Hindus and Sikhs.
On the
other hand, these women were caught in a horrendous bind. They faced rape,
mutilation and torture. Some individuals might choose suicide over this.
However, the role of the men in murdering their kin and forcing suicide upon
them took away the women’s freedom of choice. It is unknown what these women might
have done if the men had not exerted pressure. These women grew up in a culture
that held these values, and they may have been sufficiently enculturated so
that they would have chosen suicide “freely.”
In contrast
to the myth that has grown up around the suicides of Hindu and Sikh women
during this time, Pandey (2001) pointed out that some women did flee. He
reports that some boys were disguised as girls for these escapes in order to avoid
death if they were captured. Some have argued that it made sense to convert to
Islam in order to have their lives spared and, although some of those who
advocated this were murdered by their kin, some Sikh families did convert.
Pandey also noted that a few families, on both sides of the border, were
willing to sacrifice young women to the abductors in order to buy security for
the family (p. 195).
Discussion
The most
noteworthy aspect of these, admittedly brief accounts, is that the vast
majority of the suicides reported were of women. The women were, of course,
subjected to horrendous violence, but their suicides, especially in case of India,
are cast as heroic acts that denied the murderers satisfaction. In India,
emphasis is placed on the suicides as ways of avoiding defilement by the
murderers, thereby preserving the women’s purity. In India, too, many women and
men were murdered by their own group for the same purpose.
I located one
report of the suicide of a man. Butalia recounted one story from information
obtained from newspapers and memoirs. Zainab, a young Muslim girl, was abducted
as her family tried to move from India to Pakistan, and sold to a Hindu, Buta
Singh, who married her. They came to love each other and had children, but a
program was set up by the two governments to “rescue” abducted women and return
them to their new countries. Zainab was found and forced to leave Buta Singh. Buta
Singh tried to change the decision and then to go to Pakistan. He converted to
Islam and applied for a Pakistani passport. He was refused. He applied for a
short-term visa which was granted. When he arrived, he found that Zainab had
already been married to a cousin. Zainab, almost certainly under pressure from
her family, rejected Singh in front of a magistrate, and the next day Singh
threw himself under a train and died (Butalia, 2000, p. 103). His suicide note
asked to be buried in Zainab’s village, but the villagers refused this request,
and Singh was buried back in Lahore in India. This tale has not become a
legend, with books and a movie based on it.
The way in
which these accounts are written permits several speculations. First, there is
guilt on the part of the men that they could not protect their wives, sisters,
mothers and children. By raising the suicides of the women to heroic
proportions, they lessen the chance of being blamed for the tragedy.
Second,
there is the possibility that suicide is seen as weak and inappropriate
behavior and, by reporting only the suicides of women, the men themselves avoid
the stigma of suicide. Even in the present era, there is stigma attached to suicides
(and, by association, to their significant others), and this stigma was
stronger in previous centuries. To have reported the suicides of men during
these genocides would make the men seem weak too.
In other
situations, such as the Jewish ghettos and the concentration camps in the
Second World War, suicide by men was common (Lester, 2005). It is likely that
men did commit suicide too during the genocides in Armenia and India but, if
so, they have received less attention and documentation.
REFERENCES
Butalia, U.
(2000). The other side of silence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lester, D.
(2005). Suicide and the Holocaust.
Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.
Menon, R., &
Bhasin, K. (1998). Borders and boundaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Miller, D. E.,
& Miller, L. T. (1982). Armenian survivors. Oral History Review, 10,
47-72.
Miller, D. E.,
& Miller, L. T. (1993). Survivors: An oral history of the Armenian
genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pandey, G.
(2001). Remembering partition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pennebaker, M. K.
(2000). “The will of men”: Victimization of women during India’s partition. Agora,
1(1, Summer), unpaged.
Talbot, I.
(1998). Pakistan. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
[1] Only
reports of suicides among Hindus were found. No accounts of suicide among
Muslims could be located. This does not mean that no suicides occurred in
Muslims, only that reports of such cases are absent or difficult to locate.
[2] The
newspaper account reported that three women were saved.
[3] Most of
the accounts of this incident mention only women, but Butalia’s informant said
that boys jumped in also.
[4] Butalia
noted that women were sometimes traded to the attackers in return for freedom
for the rest of the community.
[5] Pandey
(2001) noted that the village had been under attack for three days, and the
Hindus and Sikhs had fought the attackers, but could no longer hold out.
