Author profile – Pooja Pant 

Pooja Pant is a filmmaker, women’s rights activist and a video journalist. She is the founder and Director of Voices Of Women Media – a women’s rights organization that focuses on access to multimedia and technology as a tool for women’s rights. She has worked for various national and international media companies all over the world. She founded Voices of Women Media in Amsterdam in 2007 and recently founded Final Take Films in Kathmandu. Currently she is based in Nepal. 

About Voices of Women Media

VOW Media aims to build feminist leadership and effect changes in society's treatment of girls & women* to create a just world without discrimination. By providing access and opportunities to media, technology, art, and education, we work to enhance individual knowledge and skills so women can voice our own experiences and raise awareness about hidden and silenced issues within their own communities. VOW Media is driven by the idea that when women* are educated, given opportunities, their skills developed, their stories told and are economically strong, they gain knowledge and confidence to fight back against all injustices.

Chronicles of Silence: Resolute Utterance of Women from Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

In November 2006, after the end of the war, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between the warring parties – bringing the conflict to an end. An interim constitution was promulgated in 2007 and a new constitution in 2015. Many reforms were made in the constitution to protect women & ethnic minorities. A National Action Plan (NAP) was created to work on post-conflict issues and two commissions were created. But there was no mention of sexual violence or rape in war. Victims of sexual violence were not included in the first NAP. It has been over 15 years of the signing of the CPA and there has barely been any accountability for much of the human rights violations which occurred during those years. Some victims have received some form of financial relief - 100,000 rupees for some members of the families of the disappeared. Most other victims, including CRSV survivors have received nothing at all. Impunity for CRSV continues to contribute to the rise of sexual violence in Nepal where perpetrators in cases like the rape and murder of Nirmala Pant go unpunished. 

In such an environment of stigma, isolation and culture of impunity, VOW Media started the important work of documenting human stories of the conflict. We used multimedia as a tool to document stories, exhibited them nationally and internationally and began archiving the human loss of the conflict. VOW Media has been instrumental in advocating conflict related stories using photo exhibitions, video documentation and audio stories. While in the process of documenting stories of CRSV victims, we realized that we could not share many of these stories publicly. Because the women have not seen any political will to fight this issue further, they have remained silent. They are also silent because they are also fully aware of the socio-cultural consequences if they do speak on such a sensitive issue. Who are these women who have been silenced? How can we ask them to speak? This is a question that haunts activists like myself. 

Rina* was a 24-year-old mother of 2 boys whose husband worked as a seasonal migrant worker in India. One night a group of Maoist cadres came to her house. As was usual in the villages during the conflict, the Maoists would often hide in people’s homes as a warm refuge where the hospitable and simple villagers would offer them food and allow them to rest their weary bodies. The young men told Rina that there was a party program in a nearby village the next night that she would have to attend. Again, this was quite common. The next night, Rina left with the Maoist cadres after sunset to walk to the next village. On the way there, as they passed through a jungle, the cadres took her to a cowshed and raped her. They then ran away from there, leaving her in the cowshed. Rina came back home distraught. She told her family members what happened and when her husband came back home after his job, she shared what happened with him as well. He blamed her for what happened and left her and the kids at home. She has never seen him ever since and has been raising her two sons on her own. She has also never received any form of compensation until now. 

Almost two decades after such incidents took place, during the documentation of conflict stories, VOW Media met some women who were very eager to share their stories with the hope that their stories could be used to advocate for the issues they faced. However, we were faced with the dilemma of sharing their stories while they remained anonymous. We chose the creative writing form to share their stories and conducted a weeklong poetry writing workshop with 11 victims of conflict related sexual violence; Rina and Maya were two of them. The stories and poems that came out after intensive workshops with them spoke of the ongoing stigmas they face, the hopelessness and anger they deal with and their determination to seek justice despite all hardships. In the words of their poetry workshop facilitator, “They became poets with a purpose.”

We believed that giving women the space to speak, to share their stories, to create a safe space, where they will not be judged and will be supported will help them heal collectively. Keeping these thoughts in mind, I would like to share a poem here.

“Date, Day, Time, I remember a bit

But what happened that day

Is imprinted in me exactly as it was

I cannot forget that day.

 

I happily walked that road to meet my parents,

Not once, but many times,

That day too, I was walking unaware of what lay ahead.

That road – a passage through a jungle to reach the village – is 

Long gone,

But I cannot forget it.

 

A beautiful lake by that roadside is a silent witness.

In that lake,

I have played with water,

I have fished even,

But now, I cannot look at it.

 

A nightgown with a pattern of blue against green,

So elated I had been to stitch it,

It bore my wrath as I tore it into pieces and threw it away.

That nightgown I wore only once,

But I cannot forget it.

 

No, I cannot forget any of this.

When all that happened comes back to me,

My heartbeat still races

In fear and ire,

And goosebumps spring up all over.

In silence, I soak in the tears,

No, I cannot forget all of this.”

In 2019, VOW Media released a book of their poems “Chronicles of Silence”. Together with a visual temporary exhibition and a collaboration with 4 other Nepali poets we worked on advocating for some semblance of justice for the women who so bravely authored these poems and many others like them who we did not yet know. Many rights activists & conflict victim leaders worked together for years before the government decided to work on the second NAP. This is the first time the Nepali government has accepted that there has been sexual violence in Nepal. Under the leadership of the Home Ministry of Nepal, they have officially announced that sexual violence as an issue had not been addressed in the past and together with the victim leaders, they would work to create a mechanism to address sexual violence during conflict. The second NAP has made it mandatory for conflict victims' participation in forming committees on the local level which would then work on implantation of the plans. The current government of Nepal is also attempting to pass a TJ bill with new amendments which will provide reparations to the women who survived this ordeal. Currently, many organizations, conflict victim leaders and activists are working to create the committees which can raise the issues and, in the future, provide some financial respite and a semblance of justice to the women who were silenced in the past. This has been a major win for the women and a hope for the future.