Murder in the Name of Honor (27 page)

Hirsi Ali and psychiatrist Carla Rus blame the Dutch, whose ‘misplaced respect' for different cultures has allowed honour-based violence and killings to flourish. When, in 2003, a thirty-six-year-old Afghan woman was murdered by her estranged husband in Maastricht, along with her ten-year-old daughter, law-makers struggled to find an appropriate response. Should the killer be prosecuted according to standards of Dutch law or Islam? As yet, they still haven't made up their minds and the debate is reignited every time a killing takes place.

As a VVD (Libertarian Party) MP, Hirsi Ali has demanded much more thorough investigations of suspected honour killings, including the prosecutions of all of those involved, not just the actual killer. A register has since been introduced whereby honour crimes will be monitored and then investigated by specially trained police.

Thanks to an initiative by the Turkish Islamic Cultural Federation (Turks Islamitische Culturele Federatie, TICF), Turkish imams in Dutch mosques now declare their aversion to honour killings during prayers. Eighty per cent of Dutch mosques belong to the TICF. This sort of support is absolutely crucial to ending so-called honour killings. When people regularly hear their spiritual leaders preaching against these crimes, the message gets through, making it much harder for an individual to kill in the name of honour.

In Paris, thirty thousand sympathizers marched on International Women's Day in 2003 to protest about violence committed against migrant women. Over sixty-five thousand people also signed a national petition. The march came about in the wake of the brutal murder of a nineteen-year-old woman, who was burned alive in her housing estate.
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According to Sihem Habchi, vice president of Mouvement Ni
Putes Ni Soumises, most of the violence against women, including rape and murder, occurs among frustrated migrant communities living in the suburban ghettos that surround large cities. Immigrants, mostly Arabs from the Maghreb countries, had been placed in housing projects that segregated them from the rest of the community and created a ‘physical separation that resulted in building a wall that is very hard to break'.
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In Spain, the government has so far ignored violence in the immigrant community. Women's groups have reported that three hundred women have been murdered in suspected crimes of honour between 2000 and 2004.
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Hatin Sürücü was a twenty-three-year-old German-Kurdish woman originally from Erzurum in Turkey. Hatin was forced to marry her cousin when she was sixteen. She gave birth to their son in 1999, and in October of the same year she fled her home, found sanctuary in a women's shelter in Germany and divorced her husband. She rebuilt her life and studied to become an electrician. Hatin was about to graduate in 2005 when she was shot dead as she waited for a bus.

A few days later, at a high school near the scene of the crime, some male students of Kurdish and Turkish origin applauded the crime. During a class discussion on the murder, one allegedly said that she ‘only had herself to blame', while another remarked, ‘She deserved what she got – the whore lived like a German.' The director of the school, Volker Steffens, sent a strongly worded letter to students of the school and their parents, warning that the school would not tolerate inciting statements.

Ayhan, Hatin's youngest brother, confessed to the murder. ‘It was too much for me. I grabbed the pistol and pulled the trigger,' he told the German court. ‘I don't even understand what I did any more.' He was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison. Hatin's murder was the sixth honour killing in Germany since October 2004.
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Berlin-based Muslim leaders were at pains to stress that there is no basis for honour killings in the Quran. But they've also been criticized for not expressing clear condemnation. ‘We've preached twice in the last year on human rights, saying that it is forbidden to kill, and so on,' Huseyin Midik, a representative of Germany's largest association of mosques, told the BBC. ‘Our job is to explain Islam. That's what has a permanent effect – clearing up certain false ideas about Islam in people's minds.'

But the killings continue among Germany's Turkish and Arab minorities. The police have pointed out that there have been forty-five cases between 1996 and 2004, including thirteen in Berlin. One woman was drowned in her bath, and another was stabbed to death by her husband in front of their three-year-old daughter.

A social worker, who runs a centre for runaways and who wanted to remain anonymous, said:

Some were raped – by an uncle, by a cousin, even by the father – and when they should get married they are worried that someone will find out they're not a virgin anymore. They are afraid that they will be murdered.

All these girls who come to us are locked up, in the house, by their families. They only go to school because they have to by law – otherwise they wouldn't be allowed. They have to stay at home and cook, and care for the sisters and brothers. The parents don't accept that the girl decides anything by herself.

Berlin's Turkish community numbers 200,000. Despite protests and much debate, the killings continue at the same rate. An Iraqi who repeatedly stabbed his twenty-four-year-old wife dead in a Munich street and then, in front of her five-year-old son, set her body on fire, was given a life sentence in 2007. Hours before the attack, a court had granted the couple a divorce. The killer told the court he had no regrets because he believed his wife had cheated on
him. ‘I am very happy that I did it. She betrayed me, she deserved it,' he said on the first day of the trial.

The debates started again after the honour killing of a sixteen-year-old Afghan immigrant by her brother in 2008 in Hamburg, which is home to more than twenty thousand Afghan immigrants, more than any other European city. The girl, Morsal Obeidi, was ambushed in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant by her twenty-three-year-old brother Ahmad, who stabbed her twenty times.

Morsal Obeidi had long experienced a tug-of-war between her desire to live like her friends in Germany and her family's desire to preserve their Afghan lifestyle. Obeidi's arguments with her brother and father, over things like her appearance, smoking and drinking, often turned physical. She reportedly sought the protection of a child and youth welfare agency to escape the violence on more than one occasion.

Ahmad reportedly told police that he had killed his sister because she had become too comfortable with western life, as shown by her uncovered hair, makeup and short skirts.
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While there is excellent (but limited) support from NGOs in Germany (such as Papatya, established in 1986 in Berlin for female immigrants, which offers excellent security and social support), the government still needs to make a massive effort to end so-called crimes of honour.
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Today, there is now widespread concern across Europe about how many young immigrant women have disappeared and how many of these women have in fact been murdered, abused or forced into marriage. Perhaps most worryingly, the female suicide rate among immigrant communities in Europe is currently three or four times higher than among the native population. Some of these may have been successful attempts to disguise murders, or forced suicides, or actual suicides where women were so desperate to escape abuse that they took their own lives.

In April 2003, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe acted against so-called honour crimes, adopting a report by the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, entitled ‘So-Called Honour Crimes'. In its resolution, the Parliamentary Assembly expressed its concern regarding the increasing number of crimes committed against women in the name of honour ‘which constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights based on archaic, unjust cultures and traditions'. The resolution also stressed that it was important and urgent to ‘make a distinction between the need to protect minority cultures and turning a blind eye to unacceptable customs that amount to torture and/or a breach of human rights'.

On the basis of this resolution, recommendations were made for the member states to work actively to end honour-related violence. The Council of Europe called on members to amend national asylum and immigration laws to allow women the right of residency or asylum on the grounds of needing to escape from so-called crimes of honour. It was suggested that all crimes committed in the name of honour should be penalized and that the sentences should reflect the seriousness of the crime.

Most importantly, the Council called on courts to refuse ‘honour in mitigation, or as a justifiable motive of the crime'. The Council also recommended preventive measures to be adopted by its members, such as awareness campaigns and the provision of special educational programmes for women and men from communities where such crimes occur.

It also recommended providing support for victims and potential victims who request asylum and personal protection and other services, as well as offering support to NGOs that provide such services. These recommendations remain just that, however, and Europe still has a very long way to go – and action is imperative if we want to save countless young women from a senseless and horrific death in the future.
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The Parliamentary Assembly acknowledged that the majority of cases in Europe were reported among Muslim or immigrant Muslim communities, but there are a few exceptions.
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One such example of non-Islamic honour-based patriarchal society is found in Italy where, until 1981, the ‘honour' argument was an admitted legal defence. Men were offered a reduction in penalty from three to seven years if they killed their wives, sisters or daughters to cleanse their or their family's honour. In Sicily there is still a minimum penalty of three years in prison for murders of ‘honour'.
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Giovanni Morabito, a twenty-four-year-old member of the Mafia, turned himself in to police in Reggio, Calabria, after shooting his older sister Bruna four times in the face in March 2006 because she became pregnant out of wedlock. He told police calmly that he wanted to kill her because she had a son two weeks before the murder with a man who was not her husband. ‘It is a question of honour. I would have shot her in the back, but she turned round. I am not sorry. On the contrary, I am proud of what I did.' Investigators believe that Morabito had in fact shot Bruna because she tried to distance herself from the Mafia. Morabito insisted that his actions were based on the ‘dishonour' his sister brought on his family. Miraculously, she survived.
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More recently, in 2006, Italy's highest court ruled that it was a less serious crime to sexually abuse a teenager if she was not a virgin, a sign that chastity is still a serious concern in Italy. The court ruled in favour of a man who appealed his forty-month sentence for forcing his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter to perform a sex act. His mitigating circumstances were that the victim was not a virgin; he ended up receiving a lower sentence, according to a report that appeared in
Ms
magazine in the summer of 2006.

In April 2008, a Sardinian who came to Britain to kill his wife's lover was jailed for life. The killer stabbed RAF Flight Lieutenant Stephen Keen, aged fifty-four, four times in the throat and neck in front of his wife, Susan Matta, aged fifty-three, at the home they
had moved into days earlier in Tiverton, Devon. Stephen bled to death within minutes.

Prosecutor Martin Meeke QC said that when police arrived Matta calmly told them, ‘I came here to kill the man. I have done what I needed to do. I have done my job. He added that it was an ‘honour killing – that is what I am, an executioner'. Matta denied murder, claiming diminished responsibility, but was convicted by the jury and must now serve at least eleven years before being considered for parole.
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When police arrived at a St Louis family home on the evening of 6 November 1989, they found a mother and father distraught. In the living room, covered in blood, was the body of their sixteen-year-old daughter Palestina, known to all as Tina. A nine-inch knife lay by her side.

Tina was most parents' dream daughter. She was a popular, straight-A student with ambitions to become an airline pilot. Her parents told the police that Tina was working for a fast food restaurant and had arrived home at about midnight. Her father, Zein Isa, said that she had recently become rebellious. That night, he said, Tina had come home late and told her parents that she wanted to move out, demanding that they give her five thousand dollars.
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When they refused, Zein said, Tina pulled a knife from her backpack, and threatened and then attacked him. Zein said he turned the knife on his daughter in self-defence, killing her. His wife Maria supported her husband's statement.

News of Tina's death stunned her classmates. They told the police that Tina had often rebelled against her parents and their ‘old-world traditions'. They also said Tina's family objected to her choice of boyfriend, a popular honours student – an artist who painted and wrote poems. He was also black, but the trouble arose, her friends said, not so much as a result of his colour but because she had a boyfriend and they felt they could no longer control her. Her friends also said that the daughters of the family were only supposed
to work for their parents and they were not supposed to date outside the Muslim faith, nor leave their home without permission.

Tina was their last daughter who was still living at home and was the most American of the family. She played football at high school, despite her father's objections. She also defied him to go to the junior prom, from which family members later removed her.

When the police pointed out that Zein was covered in blood and had cuts on his hands, he said they were defensive wounds. Although the police clearly suspected Zein of murder, they needed to secure proof if a jury was going to be convinced.