Murder in the Name of Honor (19 page)

In another case that was reported in
Al Hayat
newspaper in 2003, a twenty-eight-year-old woman was stabbed to death by her brothers after she started listening to Um Kalthoum (a famous Arab singer known for her love songs). The brothers believed that her musical taste was evidence of an illicit affair, and, acting on their suspicion, killed her and then turned themselves in to the police. Investigations later proved that the victim's husband had brought the tapes for his wife to listen to while he was away.

In Syria, Article 548 of the Penal Code states that if a man witnesses a female relative committing an immoral act and then kills her, he should not be prosecuted. Work by Syrian activists to combat these crimes and change attitudes has recently become more visible. A local organization named Syrian Women Observatory launched a nationwide campaign entitled ‘Stop killing women … Stop honour crimes' in 2006, demanding the abolition of laws that offer leniency to killers. The campaign called on religious leaders and decision-makers to take a stand against these crimes.

In 2006 the Syrian General Union of Women released the results of a field study on domestic violence in Syria. This comprehensive
report indicated that nearly one in every four married Syrian women were beaten by their husbands. More than seventy per cent of women's abusers were fathers, husbands and brothers, according to the report, published by
Ms
magazine in 2006.

Yumun Abu al-Hosn is a founding member of the Association for Women's Role Development, one of the few NGOs in Syria. The association runs the girls' shelter where Zahra took refuge in her final months. ‘We may not be able to stop honour killings overnight,' she told the
Christian Science Monitor
, ‘but at least if the crime is tried as premeditated murder, then Zahra and others like her will have some dignity in death.'

Amran, a bustling governorate of Yemen, seventy miles north of the capital, is home to almost 900,000 people. On 30 May 2008, a local resident, twenty-six-year-old Abdullah Saleh al-Kohali, carried his machine gun to the mosque where he hoped to find Belal Qassim al-Kohali, the man who had made his sister pregnant out of wedlock. He later said he planned to avenge the family honour by killing her lover. When Abdullah spotted his target, he opened fire, killing him – but he fired so wildly that he managed to shoot dead ten other worshippers and wounded fifteen more. In June he was sentenced to death by firing squad.
⁴⁰

It is rare that anyone is tried in Yemen for an honour-related crime. Abdullah's sentence was so harsh because he shot so many other people in his appalling attempt at revenge. Article 40 of the Personal Status Act No. 20 (1992) mandates a wife's obedience to her husband, including by restricting her movements outside the marital home, and by requiring her to have sexual intercourse with him. Article 242 of Law No. 12 (1994) says that a man who finds his wife in the act of committing adultery and kills her should receive a maximum of a year in prison or a fine.

In the rural, tribal areas, there is a definite absence of a functioning legal system, and so murderers go unpunished in all but the most extreme cases. There are very few villages where the judiciary is represented by a court and a prosecutor.

Around four hundred women are reported to be victims of so-called honour killings each year in Yemen, said Dr Sherifa Zuhur, Professor of Islamic and Regional Studies, during a conference in 2005. It is thought that many of the 1,211 cases of sudden female deaths presented as suicides between 1995 and 2001 are in fact related to honour.

A Yemeni women's rights organization conducted a study in the capital, Sanaa, in 2005. They quoted a police officer as saying that the number of honour killings has increased in recent years but the majority of cases are hidden and never even reach police stations.

Those cases that do come to the attention of the police are usually withdrawn and are rarely registered officially. In one instance, a woman was referred to the police; she'd been suffering from severe abuse and had escaped her family home, telling the officers that she had been imprisoned because she was in love. An officer was quoted as saying he received orders not to register the case. The woman's family had collected her from the police station and no one knew what had happened to her.

According to a report that was prepared by Sisters Arab Forum for Human Rights in 2005, most women in Yemen are killed only on the basis of suspicion or for marrying a man against their family's wishes. Doctors also said that many families hide the real reasons behind their female relatives' death.

Activists report that almost a dozen women die each year in Lebanon as a result of so-called honour crimes. In 2000,
Al Raida
magazine reported on several incidents, including the case of a nineteen-year-old girl from the Bekaa Valley who was shot by her brother in front of twenty-five men from her clan in 1990.

Her crime was being ‘raped' by her first cousin on her father's side. The cousin was twenty-nine years old and married, with three children. The girl's uncle told the
Al Raida
reporter that when the teenage girl told her story at a family meeting and said she was pregnant, ‘blood rose in the male member's eyes, and no one can utter a word when there is blood in men's eyes.'

The uncle said everyone present decided that the ‘rapist' should marry the teenage girl, since ‘her cousin was supposed to save the family honour'. The cousin's father asked one of his sons to slaughter a lamb for the occasion and invited everyone to lunch to celebrate the peace that had been reached. But the teenager's eldest brother grabbed a gun that had been concealed in his pocket and emptied the bullets into his sister, declaring, ‘You do not have to slaughter a lamb. Have this one for lunch.'

Three Lebanese women activists and scholars conducted a study of many of the so-called honour crimes that were handled by the courts. They listed quotations from some of the killers and their motives behind the murder.

In one instance they quoted a man who had killed his divorced sister as saying, ‘Her repeated absence from home and not obeying me, as well as the fact that the neighbours would tease me about her bad conduct … All that made me kill her out of honour, especially as she was pregnant by someone other than the man who divorced her.'
⁴¹

They also quoted a mother who said, ‘I confirm that it was I who slit my daughter's throat without anybody else's help, to wash away the shame her illegitimate pregnancy had brought on us.'
⁴²

These murderers relied on Article 562 of the Lebanese Penal Code:

Whoever surprises his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a witnessed crime of adultery (
flagrante delicto
) or in a situation of unlawful intercourse and proceeds to kill or injure one of them, without deliberation, shall benefit from the excuse of exemption. The person who kills or injures on surprising his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a suspicious situation with another person shall benefit from the excuse of mitigation.

As is no doubt clear from the cases just described, Article 562 was widely abused – it depended on the element of surprise, catching the offenders in the act and the immediate carrying out of the crime, without thought or reflection.

In 1998, under pressure from women's groups, in particular the Lebanese Women's Council, the then Justice Minister announced that he had referred a draft law to Parliament to amend Article 562 to repeal the ‘excuse of exemption' because it encouraged ‘private justice' or revenge crimes.

The amended Article 562 read: ‘Whomsoever surprises his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a crime of observed adultery or in a situation of unlawful intercourse and kills or injures one of them without deliberation shall benefit from the excuse of mitigation.'

Of course, this amendment did not relieve women from the burden of being the sole carriers of honour. It is a ‘blind acceptance of the assumptions that any sexual relationship outside marriage is a shame and sullies the woman's honour, that her honour is the property of her husband or male relative only, that the woman bears immediate and full responsibility for sullying her honour, whether it happened in her positive or negative will and subsequently deserves the maximum physical penalty.'
⁴³

The amendment was passed in February 1999. Oddly, it is superseded by Article 7 which states that ‘All Lebanese are equal
before the law' (men and women alike), and Lebanon has also agreed to be bound by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which rejects all discrimination on grounds of sex. Meanwhile, Article 522, which pardons any rapist who marries his victim, remains firmly in place.

The Lebanese Council to Resist Violence against Women (LCRVW) worked on a study of twenty-five so-called honour crime court cases in Lebanon between 1998 and 2003. There were many hundreds of honour killings during this time. However, few made it to court and, of those that did, these were the only cases for which the trial record was complete.

Most of the cases were clearly premeditated – including that of a man who, having divorced his first wife and taken on a second, was unable to support two households, so killed his first wife. Another case concerned a husband who beat his wife for years before killing both her and her sister when she complained to her family. A father killed a daughter when she refused to have an abortion. Another killed his daughter-in-law because his son refused to grant her a divorce. A brother killed his sister because he did not approve of her marriage.

Incredibly, Article 562 was not used in any of these cases. Instead, the defence relied on Article 253, which allows the judge to pass a mild sentence if convinced that the accused had mitigating reasons (as opposed to the ‘excuse of mitigation').

Article 562 seems to be redundant, so why such a discriminatory piece of the Penal Code is still allowed to exist is a mystery. All it does is encourage the murder of women, as the perpetrators know that they can rely on this get-out clause if necessary. Even though the courts generally give the perpetrators lengthy sentences, this is doing nothing to stem the tide of killings – so, while the repeal of Article 562 remains essential, it is extremely important to work towards changing the mindset of society as a whole. A promising step forward came in August 2007 when the Associated Press
reported that a top Shiite cleric tackled the issue of so-called honour murders in Lebanon by issuing a fatwa banning the practice, describing it as ‘a repulsive act'.

In the majority of the Gulf countries, there are no accurate statistics on so-called honour crimes, but cases are starting to be reported regularly in the news media. For example, in August 2007, the
Daily Telegraph
reported a story about a young Saudi girl in Riyadh who was killed by her father after he walked into her room and found her chatting to a man on Facebook. The father reportedly beat up his daughter and then shot her to death.

The case remained unreported in Saudi Arabia until April 2008 when Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki strongly criticized Facebook and called on the Saudi government to ban the internet site because it was corrupting Saudi youth.

‘Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the internet than they are spending on food,' he said. The story was written up in the local press as an example of the ‘strife' that Facebook was causing in Saudi Arabia. Ali al-Maliki said women were posting ‘revealing pictures' and ‘behaving badly' on the site, which has become very popular with young Saudis.

Saudi Arabia imposes a strict form of Sunni Islam which prevents unrelated men and women from mixing, bans women from driving and demands that women wear a headscarf and cloak in public. Facebook is used by many Saudi women as a vital outlet which allows them to discuss women's rights and to share their thoughts and experiences with people across the world. One suspects that it is this sudden freedom of expression that worries the senior patriarchy. The Saudi authorities block access to websites they deem sexual, pornographic, politically offensive, ‘un-Islamic'
or disruptive because of controversial religious and political content. At the time of writing, Facebook is still online in Saudi Arabia – for now.

In an echo of the Facebook murder, in August 2008, the father of a young Saudi woman cut out her tongue before setting her alight. The crime? Converting to Christianity and writing about it on a blog. The woman wrote on the ‘Al Ukdoud' website, a few days before her death, that the discovery made her family life unbearable, according to a
Gulf News
report.

The father was arrested and an investigation has been launched as to whether this was considered to be an honour crime, which would make it very likely that the man, if found guilty, would be sentenced to between six months and three years in jail. What makes this case all the more remarkable is that the accused is a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and against Vice, which is responsible for the monitoring of moral behaviour and for the full compliance with the law of the rigid Wahabi doctrine.

Just a month before the Facebook murder, a meeting of experts at a seminar entitled ‘Therapy of Abuse Cases and Social Adjustment' in Jeddah revealed that a woman had been taken from a shelter and murdered. This happened because she had been seen on her own with a man who was not her husband or a relative, which is a crime under Saudi law.

Dr Ali Al-Hanaki, Director of the Social Affairs Ministry in the Western Region, said the woman's relatives had not been charged, adding, ‘We received news about her death off the record. Such “honour killing” crimes happen secretly and the bodies are buried in the desert. The families usually say that the women in question are travelling or have run away.'