One morning she journeyed there. Thousands of innocent political prisoners were brutally tortured inside a housing complex initially built for local schools. Rebecca roamed through various torture chambers in various buildings, now adorned with the pictures of victims. Various instruments of torture were displayed in the final room of the last building along with the paintings of horrific torture scenes. They were created by a fortunate surviving artist, based on his memory. The painting that froze Rebecca was the torture scene of a young naked woman who was an intellectual leader of the youth movement. Both her arms and legs were tied in ropes attached to rotating pulleys at four corners of a room and the ropes were getting rolled toward the pulleys by four different torturers. Next to the woman, two men were standing with some rudimentary mechanical devices, attempting to pull out her nipples by force from the bare upper torso, blood running down on both sides.
Two days ago, on International Women’s Day, Rebecca had a plan to meet with her friends in the evening to celebrate the day. In the morning, while drinking her coffee, she opened her laptop to read the day’s news online from the New York Times. Two weeks ago, a war had broken out in Europe where a superpower mercilessly bombing a smaller nation to occupy it. Overnight, the fighter jets of the super power bombed a metropolitan city, especially targeting its main hospital that in turn destroyed the maternity ward. Several pregnant women and new mothers with their just-born babies perished in the aftermath. The news article carried a semi-dark picture, taken by a brave photographer, of a wounded pregnant lady being carted off to a safety zone by medical personnel. Her eyes were closed, while her both hands covering the belly as if to save her unborn child from any evil. But what caught Rebecca’s eyes, a red spot on her bare left thigh. She magnified the picture 10-times, when the nature of the red spot became apparent. It was a bleeding deep wound created by a fragment of shrapnel from the dropped bomb. The picture also revealed the blood flowing from the wound toward the ground.
Suddenly Rebecca remembered the painting of the tortured woman from Cambodia’s torture chamber. She froze. Her mind began to ponder why the world celebrates International Women’ Day in the first place, when the powers-to-be are not willing to offer the women respect and dignity?