Murder in the Name of Honor (20 page)

In February 2008, the
Independent
reported a new and disturbing development – forced divorce. They described the case of Fatima al-Timani, sentenced to six months in prison for refusing
to be separated from the man to whom she had been happily married for the past four years and with whom she has two children. Fatima was the latest victim of this growing practice, when disgruntled relatives have used hard-line Islamic courts to dissolve matches against the will of the married couple.

Fatima was pregnant when court proceedings began in 2005 and was jailed with her newborn baby. Fatima is now forbidden from seeing her husband, Mansour al-Timani, who now looks after their two-year-old-son, Noha. Noha has only been allowed occasional visits to see his mother. Fatima's relatives have accused Mansour of lying about his tribal background to win their father's approval for the marriage and want it annulled so she can have an arranged marriage to a man of their choosing.

Dr Irfan Al Alawi, a British Muslim and Director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism based in London, said that the case was not an isolated incident and that as many as nineteen forced divorces were working their way through the courts. Meanwhile, Dr Al-Hanaki was at least optimistic that the situation would change one day: ‘even if it takes us ten to fifteen years, we need to change their tribal attitudes toward women.'

Several honour-related murders have recently been reported in Kuwait, a country where women were granted the right to vote in 2005 but where Article 153 of the Penal Code reduces sentences in cases of honour killings. However, as yet, NGOs there have rarely talked about these crimes.

On 11 April 2007, the
Middle East Times
reported that a father slit his thirteen-year-old daughter's throat in front of her three siblings in 2005 because he thought she was no longer a virgin. Adnan Al Enezi, a forty-year-old government employee, blindfolded and handcuffed his daughter Asma and stabbed her repeatedly as she
begged for her life. Forensic tests revealed that his daughter was a virgin. Two years later, a court ruled that Al Enezi was not responsible for his actions and he was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

In a second case in 2002, three brothers tortured their sister for ten days, tied her hands behind her back and took her to the desert where they shot and then buried her. The girl had run away from home with a friend and was caught by the police, who turned her over to her family on the condition that they would not harm her. This was after the girl had attempted to commit suicide in police custody, telling a police officer that she feared a much harsher punishment from her family.

The
Arab Times
reported on 10 August 1994 that a young man had killed his sister because she had left the house to look for a job in a commercial area. A man who suspected that the girl had run away from home informed the authorities of her whereabouts. When she was brought home, her brother handcuffed her, drove to the desert, slit her throat and buried her there. He then turned himself in to the police.

Almost a year later, Reuters reported a story of a twenty-one-year-old Kuwaiti man who stabbed his sixteen-year-old sister to death after she told him that three men had raped her in the Kuwaiti desert. The suspect told interrogators that he persuaded his sister to come along with him to the desert by telling her he was taking her to the police station to report the incident. He stabbed his sister thirty-five kilometres north-east of Kuwait City while she was telling him the names of the rapists.

According to a report from the Centre for Social Cohesion (a London-based think tank), the Kurdish regions of Turkey have some of the highest rates of honour killings in the world. ‘In
Turkey Kurds make up more than a quarter of the population [and] carry out a disproportionate number of honour killings.' Researchers and activists estimate the reported number of women and girls murdered annually at about two hundred. A 1999 survey found that seventy-four per cent of rural women in the south-east of the country believed their husbands would kill them if they had an affair.

As we shall see, when Kurds move to European countries such as Germany and the UK they bring their traditional codes of behaviour with them and exact a terrible punishment if the women of the family do not provide total obedience.

In Turkey the decision to kill the woman is taken at a family meeting, at which a young man within the family, a brother or cousin, is designated to carry out the crime. These crimes arise out of collective and deliberate decision and are carried out in public, reinforcing the fear in other women that they would face the same treatment from their own family members.

One such incident that gave momentum to the powerful lobbying against so-called honour crimes in Turkey was the stoning of Semse Allak in the town of Mardin in November 2002, according to feminist and human rights activist Leylâ Pervizat.
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Allak was stoned with her husband, whom she had been forced to marry after he raped her and she became pregnant, according to a Reuters report. The stoning of the couple was ordered by a tribal council which ruled that ‘her shame was too much to bear'.

Recently, thanks in part to its efforts to become more European with a view to joining the EU, the Turkish government has placed so-called honour crimes on its agenda. NGOs and Turkish women's groups have been working hard to eradicate some of the laws that offered leniency to killers in such murders. Their efforts paid off. Certain articles in the Turkish Penal Code that used to grant sentence reductions to perpetrators of so-called honour crimes were removed.
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Women activists in Turkey have had some success. They targeted the custom whereby men pick a male minor to commit the murder, in the belief that the minor will receive a light sentence. By lobbying Parliament, activists brought about an amendment to Article 38 of the Turkish Penal Code, with the result that any person forcing another to commit a crime will receive the same sentence as the perpetrator. If the person incited is a minor, then the sentence is increased.
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Women's movements also reported a positive change in attitudes towards these crimes among the public. They said the year 2004 witnessed a change in both public attitudes and judicial decision-making. Perpetrators of two so-called honour killings were given the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
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Unfortunately, there has since been an increase in so-called honour suicide. Yakin Erturk, a special envoy for the UN, was sent to Turkey to investigate suspicious suicides among Kurdish girls and was quoted by the
New York Times
as saying that some suicides in Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey appeared to be ‘honour killings disguised as a suicide or an accident' in an effort to evade arrest.

Even today, honour killing remains relatively common in Turkey. A June 2008 report by the Prime Ministry's Human Rights Directorate says that in Istanbul alone there is one honour killing every week, and states that there have been over a thousand cases during the last five years.

Most recently and infamously, Turkey has prompted international newspaper headlines as a result of its first reported gay honour killing. Speaking to PinkNews.co.uk, the victim's partner (who did not wish to be named as he was in fear of his own life) said, ‘Ahmet had been receiving threats for as long as I knew him. He told me this has been going on since his coming out a year ago. When he came out to his parents, who had always suspected, they made him feel guilty about it.'

Had Ahmet Yildiz's partner joined him for an ice cream, he is certain he would have been killed too. But it was late and he decided to go to bed. A few minutes later he heard shooting outside his flat and, rushing downstairs, saw Ahmet trying to escape his attackers by reversing down the street.

‘I fought through some onlookers just in time to see him with his eyes open,' he said, ‘and begged him, “Please don't die”; then he shut his eyes.'

Many of Ahmet's friends, including his partner, believe his family murdered him because he was openly gay. According to Ahmet's partner, homophobia in Turkey is ‘unbelievably bad', and he believes it has worsened over the last four years. He's not optimistic about his chances of bringing Ahmet's murderers to justice.

‘I know the Turkish system. I know I haven't got a leg to stand on. Human rights are known and accepted in the west but are not freely available in Turkey. I have no claim to his estate and body and cannot even collect my personal belongings from his flat. I cannot even bury my loved one.'

One of the most horrific cases of so-called honour killing to be widely reported in the local news media occurred in Cairo in August 1987, when a father decided to kill his daughter for eloping. Marzouk Ahmed Abdel-Rahim chopped off his twenty-five-year-old daughter's head and carried it down the street saying, ‘Now, the family has regained its honour.' He then surrendered to police.

Studies of so-called crimes of honour are few and far between. One of the small number of fairly recent reports, published in 1996, came from Egypt's National Centre for Social and Criminal Research. The study found that out of 843 murders committed in 1995, fifty-two were so-called honour killings. Activists have stated on several occasions since that the numbers are very likely to be
much higher and in 1999 it was reported that ten per cent of all murders in Egypt were honour killings.
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The Centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance (CEWLA), formed in 1995, was created to assist women whose human rights have been violated, as defined by the UN. CEWLA published a study in February 2002, which said
suspicion
of indecent behaviour was the reason for seventy-nine per cent of all crimes of honour. Cases included girls with blocked hymens whose bellies swelled with menstrual blood, killed by their families who thought they'd fallen pregnant, and girls whose periods had been interrupted by illness and whose virginity was only discovered at autopsy.

Only nine per cent of honour crimes followed an actual discovery of betrayal, according to CEWLA, which documented all cases reported in the press from 1998 to 2001. These included Fathiyah, who was burned to death in front of her four children by her brother because she refused to abort her illegitimate child to avoid ‘scandalizing her family and husband who worked outside the country'. Khayri locked his sister in the bathroom and poured kerosene under the door before setting it on fire.
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Another case involved a thirty-seven-year-old married woman whose brother stabbed her 160 times and slashed her neck because it had been suggested she was dating her brother-in-law while her husband was out of the country.
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Meanwhile, according to a study conducted by researcher Mohamed Awad and published in
Al Ahram Weekly
in February 2002, 99.2 per cent of women interviewed in Egypt believed that a woman's honour lies in her virginity, while only 0.8 per cent said that it was based on her principles and values. This concept of honour continues to be reinforced in schools, according to a feature on so-called honour crimes that was published in the
New York Times
in June 1999. Abeer Allam, a young Egyptian journalist, recalled how his high school biology teacher sketched the female reproductive system. After he finished drawing he pointed to the entrance to
the vagina. ‘This is where the family honour lies!' the teacher declared.

The law in Egypt does not deal specifically with honour killings, but Article 237 of the Penal Code states: ‘Whosoever surprises his wife in the act of committing adultery and immediately kills her and the person committing adultery with her shall be punished with a prison sentence instead of the penalties set out in Articles 234 and 236.' This means a sentence of three to seven years for manslaughter and heavier penalties for premeditation (Article 237 allows the judge to provide a sentence of less than three years), but only for a man. If a woman catches her husband in the act of adultery and kills him, she would be sentenced to life with hard labour; mitigating circumstances would not apply. Khayri was only sentenced to three years for murdering his sister Fathiyah because she was allegedly pregnant with an illegitimate child at the time of her death – so her infidelity was proven.

Another two articles, 274 and 277, show the clear judicial difference in the treatment of men and women. Women can be sentenced for up to two years for adultery while the maximum penalty for men is just six months.

Despite being the first Arab state to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Egypt has yet to deal with inequalities in law between the sexes as well as to encourage the courts to hand out stiffer sentences to discourage so-called honour killings.

For example, in 2000, a man decided to kill a local woman who had fallen pregnant as the result of an adulterous relationship. Once he had found a group of men to help him, they decided to kill the woman's mother too as she had tried to hide her daughter's adultery from the village. They kidnapped the daughter and killed her with a meat cleaver. Then they killed the mother, cut up the bodies and disposed of them in a canal. Only one of the killers, a relative of the victims, was sentenced. He was given three years. In
another case, a man who tied up his pregnant daughter in a cattle pen and murdered her by setting her on fire was sentenced to one year – a sentence which was suspended for three years.

As yet, although some honour killings and ensuing trials are occasionally reported in the state-controlled press, there has been no real activity in the media to try and end honour crime, nor to point out how discrepancies in the law mean that men can get away with murder. Article 17 of the Egyptian Penal Code gives judges the authority to reduce sentences if they find that the condition of the accused requires it, without needing to provide any justifications. The article is often used to reduce punishments against perpetrators in cases of rape and so-called honour crimes. CEWLA has done a great job in identifying problems with the law and attitudes in the judiciary, and has called for the revision of Article 17 and for the government to help end so-called crimes of honour, but as yet the law and situation remain unchanged.