Murder in the Name of Honor (26 page)

These conferences were an important step in recognizing, facing and then dealing with the problem. People listen when someone like Anita Gradin, a member of the Swedish Parliament for twenty-four years and a cabinet minister for nine, refers to incidents of so-called honour killings in Europe as a ‘reality for us today' and as a ‘concern with deep ramifications for democratic Europe'.

Meanwhile, the County Administration of Sweden presented a study that showed that around 1,500 immigrant girls were exposed to honour-related violence between 2002 and 2004.
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In a paper on honour-related violence and cross-cultural encounters and power conflict that was presented to the conference organized by Kvinnoforum, Professor Mehrdad Darvishpour pointed out that there is a generational conflict among immigrant families in Europe. ‘Males in immigrant families tend to live in the past, women live in present and their children live in the future,' he said.
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Meanwhile, Hilde Bakker from Transact in the Netherlands who examined honour-related violence in Europe concluded that many immigrant communities strongly adhered to their traditions in their new country and sometimes even more fiercely than those back home for fear of losing their dignity. Bakker also pointed out that the second and third generations of immigrant families often do not have good knowledge of the traditional base of honour since most of them have never lived in their country of origin and thus (wrongly) think that certain behaviours are religion-based.
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According to interviews in Sweden, immigrant girls and boys expressed concern over a change of attitude in their parents' behaviour after arriving in Sweden, which sociologists attributed to the parents' loss of power over their children, who integrate quickly and become fluent in Swedish much faster than their mothers and fathers.
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Researcher and sociologist Muna Dahl, as part of her Master's degree research, interviewed four Muslim immigrant men from ‘traditional families' in Sweden in 2003. She asked them about their relations with their children and their view on honour. She concluded that those men who had adapted well to their new lives in Sweden had paid a high price. Some of them had to move away from the Muslim community to save their reputation and to avoid interference and gossip. One man said he chose to live in a Christian community because it would guarantee his daughter's freedom from the obligation of covering her hair and meant that he could live in peace without constant reminders that he was a ‘bad Muslim'.
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Fear of the new culture and fear of losing their children forced these men to compromise between their Islamic beliefs and Swedish law. Most did not want to break Swedish law by enforcing traditions related to so-called honour, which might mean losing their children if the authorities found out. Breaking the ‘Islamic law and their social bonds with their countrymen were sadly
necessary and painful sacrificial processes but a necessary step for those fathers to avoid gossip, bad reputation, and above all, to save “their faces”, to save “their honour”.'

Torn between their traditional community and the new country, many such immigrant families find themselves isolated. As Dahl puts it: ‘they are different than the minority and yet stranger than the majority.'
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The government of Sweden held a conference in December 2004, which concluded that there were men all over the world who distort the teachings of both Islam and Christianity to justify domestic violence, which results in thousands of ‘honour' killings a year internationally. Imam Abdal Haqq of the Swedish Islamic Society said that while traditional Islamic Sharia law does impose stricter dress codes on women and stresses their household duties, ‘We must free ourselves from these honour killings and the “Islamophobia” they create.'

In my opinion, one of the most important endeavours that has made a significant impact on the issue of so-called honour crimes is the Swedish project ‘Sharaf Heroes' (Heroes of Honour). It aims directly to influence boys and young men who ‘control girls, including their sisters and other female relatives' to question the ‘honour culture' and actively take a stand against it. They are then trained to talk to their peers. The project started in 2001 and also has a useful website and a telephone hotline, and provides meeting points for girls in need of advice and counselling.
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The Sharaf Heroes perform plays in schools where they also lead discussion groups. I saw this at a conference I attended in Sweden. They made the very salient point that young boys are also victims because they are forced to take part in a system that makes them watch over and oppress their sisters and cousins. They illustrated how young men can both be ‘beneficiaries' and victims of patriarchal structures; for example, in being able to take advantage of and
exploit their perceived ‘rights' to oppress their sisters and female cousins, but also being obliged to marry against their will.

Addressing the conference, they said:

We want you to understand that all the Sharaf Heroes love our culture. It is a wonderful culture. It is a culture unlike any other, but it is marked by a little black stain – the problems associated with the honour culture – and that stain must be washed away with our help – and with yours. Here in front of you are eight Sharaf Heroes who are full of willpower and ambition. But we need support. Support from people who work counts just as much as support from mothers on maternity leave. And support from university students is just as important as support from government ministers. Please give us your support and not just empty applause and false smiles. Open doors for us; do not slam them in our faces.
Nothing
is impossible if we work together.

Following the play, I spoke to the actors and they told me that although they faced strong opposition from other men in immigrant communities, they were able to win people over to their side – mainly men from the younger generation.

Sweden has continued to host numerous conferences on so-called crimes of honour and NGOs have found many ways to alert people to the plight of women in immigrant communities. For example, Kvinnoforum initiated a pilot project, as part of the European project on honour-related violence in 2005, producing a resource book from seven European countries (Sweden, Germany, the UK, Cyprus, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Finland) aimed at increasing and improving support for people suffering from such violence.

Awareness and activism in Sweden has borne fruit. Courts and the police, for example, have finally started to take these crimes seriously. But there is still a long way to go. Honour-related
violence is still rampant across Sweden. A study carried out by
Sveriges Radio
and published in June 2008 revealed that sixty per cent of the country's social services have helped victims of honour-related violence, or those threatened with it, to hide from their families.

And the killings continue. In April 2008,
The Australian
reported on the case of nineteen-year-old Pela Atroshi, a Kurdish Swede, who was executed in front of her sister and mother. The decision to kill her was made by a council of male relatives, led by Pela's grandfather, Abdulmajid Atroshi, a Kurd who lived in Australia, who decided Pela should be killed for moving out of the family home in Sweden. Pela, who had moved to Sweden with her family in 1995, was lured to Kurdistan. One of her uncles, Shivan Atroshi, helped pull the women away from Pela so his younger brother could get a clean shot. Shivan, too, lived in Australia.

This was the first time an honour killing with an Australian connection was officially reported in the media. It is likely that there have been other honour crimes connected to Australia that have been concealed by the tight-lipped Australian Kurdish community.

Pela Atroshi's murder, which took place in Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, was officially deemed an ‘honour killing' by both Iraqi and Swedish authorities. The Swedish detective inspector who investigated the murder, Kickis Aahre Algamo, said she had since heard of another honour crime with a connection to Australia, this time the attempted killing of an Australian Kurd that went awry when the girl escaped.

Two of Pelas's uncles living in Sweden were sentenced to life imprisonment. Her father and another uncle were tried and convicted in Iraq. They were given a one-year suspended sentence. The court referred to a medical report that said ‘her hymen was broken' and to the ‘defendants' honourable motivation'.

Bam, a Kurdish woman living in an undisclosed country in Europe, is another brave woman who shared her horrific experience, for the first time, at the 2004 Swedish conference. Speaking in Kurdish, Bam was accompanied by a translator.

She began her story by recalling her childhood. Continuously oppressed by her family for as long as she could remember, she was forced to marry her cousin at the age of fifteen. Her cousin turned out to be violent and beat her almost every day after accusing her of infidelity.

‘My life was about humiliation, oppression and abuse … on one occasion, he kicked me on my back. The beating was so bad it broke my backbone. I was hospitalized for three months. I went back to my husband. We had three children and I did not want to destroy my children's life, so I continued to accept what was happening to me,' she said.

One day he kicked her out of the house. She went to her family home but received little sympathy from her father and brothers. ‘They told me it was my fault, not my husband's,' Bam said. ‘I decided to take my husband to court to get my rights but his family threatened to kill me because I would bring shame to the entire tribe.'

Bam had reached the point where she knew it was simply impossible to continue living with her abusive husband. She sought the help of the head of the tribe, who told her she had no honour and that she had behaved in a shameful manner by coming to him. Then, incredibly, he beat her.

‘He dragged me by my hair in front of my father and brother and beat me up, banged my head on the floor and kicked me on my back. He did not stop even when I told him I had just had an operation on my back.

‘Twenty days later, there was a big gathering at my house. It seemed they were planning my death, when my father suddenly entered my room and asked me to prepare for the evening prayers,'
she said. She heard shouting near the house and asked her father what was going on. Her father told her to go out and look for herself.

‘I went to the front door and opened it. I saw my seventeen-year-old brother walking towards me; he was pointing a gun at me. I was shocked and could not say anything. He shot at me three times; I ran outside, he followed me and shot me once more.'

One of her sisters tried to stop him. She screamed at her father, asking him why they were doing this. ‘My father responded by claiming that my brother wanted to kill me because I had an affair with a man. He said that my husband was at the same moment killing the man I allegedly had an affair with,' Bam said.

As Bam lay injured, her brother was shooting at anyone who attempted to help her. It was only when the gun was empty that her mother was able to get near her. ‘I knew I was badly injured from the look on my mother's face. Then I saw blood on her hands … On the way to the hospital I was praying for God to save my life for the sake of my mother,' she recalled.

Bam's chest and stomach were riddled with bullets. Bam was placed under police guard, and with good reason. Some of her family members even attempted to enter the hospital to finish the job.

‘I was depressed and desperate and attempted to take my own life but was saved again. I stayed in hospital for seven months. Afterwards, a woman in the centre who had connections with foreign organizations helped me escape and seek asylum with my kids in a European country.'

Bam would not reveal the name of the country of her residence, out of fear that some of her family members would learn of her whereabouts and kill her. ‘I was told that my brother-in-law had promised to burn my body after I died. I dream of this every night, and every night I worry that someone will come and kill me.'

‘The seventh of December 1998 was the day my family tried to kill me to cleanse their honour. But this day has since become my birthday.

‘It is the day I became free.'

Despite there being much still to be done in terms of protecting women in immigrant communities, Sweden is ahead of most other countries on the European continent when it comes to dealing with so-called crimes of honour. Sadly, most of Europe is only just waking up to what is a very serious problem.

Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding after the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004. Van Gogh was shot eight times as he cycled to work. The attacker then cut his throat and stabbed him twice in the chest before attaching a five-page note to the body. The note threatened western governments, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had scripted the film
Submission
, directed by van Gogh, which was about the abuse of Muslim women.

The Netherlands is known for its tolerance, but Hirsi Ali believes that the price of this may be the murder of fifty women each year – the result of so-called honour killings. Hirsi Ali began speaking out in 2002, after she encountered several abused women while working as a translator at various women's refuges. Muslims only account for about six per cent of the Dutch population but Muslim women make up sixty per cent of those in women's shelters.

Hirsi Ali's claims were confirmed the following year when the media got hold of the story of eighteen-year-old Dutch-Turkish student Zarife, taken out of school and to Ankara ‘on holiday'. Her father shot her shortly after she landed. Zarife's crime was hanging out with Dutch girls and going outside without her headscarf.

Then it emerged that three women staying at a Dutch women's shelter were murdered in honour killings within just ten months of each other. Two of them were trying to divorce their violent
husbands. Suicide attempts among Dutch Muslim girls is five times that of non-Muslim girls.