Murder in the Name of Honor (3 page)

At the start of each week I'd arrive at work to find my own inbox filled with threatening letters. A typical one said, ‘If you don't stop reporting these murders, I will send someone to visit you at your home or workplace.'

Another memorable warning read: ‘I'm going to clean my hunting rifle; it's the season for hunting coloured birds.' Oddly enough, far from deterring me, threats like these made me all the more determined to carry on. I had found my life's mission.

As well as the threats, our postbags also began to fill with letters of support from readers, expressing their anger and outrage about the killing of innocent women and the leniency shown to killers for murder in the first degree.

But even some supporters, friends and colleagues were discouraging, and argued that we were wasting our time with a lost cause. ‘No one will listen to you,' one friend told me. ‘Nothing ever changes in this country.' Many urged me instead to write about politics because it was ‘more rewarding' and because achieving social change was next to impossible.

I listened, but simply followed my heart and my conscience. These women needed a voice. They were lost souls, buried without ceremony in unmarked graves; it was as if they'd never existed. People needed to know that they had lived, loved and died in the cruellest manner possible. They needed to know who had murdered them and why their killers had gone unpunished.

I first met Sarhan in 1999, when CNN decided to film a documentary about so-called honour crimes in Jordan and approached me to be part of it. The programme makers wanted to interview prisoners who had killed their female relatives to cleanse their family honour, or who were in prison awaiting a court verdict.

I agreed immediately. Back then it was almost impossible for a Jordanian reporter to be allowed to interview prisoners at all. This restriction, however, did not apply to the majority of foreign media representatives who were welcome to film inside prisons and interview any inmate they wanted. The double standards towards the two different media bodies still apply on occasion in other bureaucratic institutions around the country.

It was decided that the shoot was to take place at the Jweideh Correctional and Rehabilitation Centre, home to over a thousand men waiting to be tried for crimes ranging from robbery to first-degree murder.

After going through several security checks, the CNN crew and I were ushered into a small, windowless room filled with half-a-dozen prison guards and officials in civilian clothes. The crew began setting up their equipment and adjusting their cameras. I was directed to sit on a chair. The guards kept eyeing me, wondering what was so special about me that CNN wanted me on their programme.

A few minutes later, a well-built man in his late twenties entered the room, accompanied by several guards who seated him opposite me.

One of the prison officials said, ‘This is Sarhan, he killed his sister to cleanse his honour.'

Oddly, Sarhan had a wide smile on his face, apparently welcoming the attention.

His sister, Yasmin, had been raped by her brother-in-law. Knowing full well the consequences of such a crime, she had turned herself in to the police, rather than risk the wrath of her family.

Sarhan headed to the police station the following day and tried to bail out his sister. His request was refused; the police thought he might kill her because she had lost her virginity.

Sarhan went to a friend's house and stayed there for a couple of days. When he returned home, he found his sister in the living room. Without uttering a word he shot her four times with an unlicensed gun and turned himself in.

The minute we made eye contact, I felt rage beginning to boil inside me. I tried hard to suppress it; I wanted to remain professional. I didn't want to get emotionally involved, not now.

‘I killed her because she was no longer a virgin,' he told me. ‘She made a mistake, willingly or not. It is better that one person dies than the whole family of shame and disgrace. It is like a box of apples. If you have one rotten apple would you keep it or get rid of it? I just got rid of it.'

When I challenged Sarhan by pointing out that his act contradicted the teachings of Islam and was punishable by God, he said, ‘I know that killing my sister is against Islam and it angered God, but I had to do what I had to do and I will answer to God when the time comes.'

He added: ‘People refused to talk with us. They told us to go cleanse our honour; then we were allowed to talk with them. Death is the only solution to end disgrace ... Even if we had wed my sister society would not stop talking. They only stopped talking when she is dead.'

The story didn't end there. A few weeks later I was covering a high-profile case of a Jordanian teenager who killed his entire
family because, he said, of the pressure they were putting on him to pass his school exams.

I was at court when I noticed a familiar face among the crowd. It was Sarhan! I could not even guess why he was a free man after such a short time in prison.

I found a seat next to him on the bench. He flashed the same smile he gave me during our interview. When the court adjourned for a ten-minute break, I was able to exchange a few words with him.

‘What are you doing here? Who wants to be back in the courtroom where he was tried?' I asked him. He told me proudly that he had returned to offer support to a defendant with whom he had struck up a friendship during his incarceration.

I asked him how he ended up receiving such a lenient penalty when the facts of his sister's case were clear; it was a premeditated murder. Sarhan explained he took the advice of one of the officials who questioned him after he had turned himself in. Sarhan told the investigator in his initial testimony that he decided to kill his sister after learning that she was no longer a virgin. He said he asked his family to bail her out and that he waited for them to bring her home, which they did. The minute she walked in, he shot her to death.

The investigator informed him that if he insisted on this version then he might face life imprisonment and advised him to change his story to say he was taken by surprise by his sister's rape and the loss of her virginity, in order to get the lightest sentence possible. His lawyer gave him the same advice when the case was about to be heard in court.

Sarhan's confession meant that his father was an accomplice – a fact that was nowhere to be found in the verdict or in the charge sheet.

‘I took the stand and told the judges that I had to kill my sister, because if I did not kill her, it would have been like killing more than a thousand men from my tribe.'

I told him this was impossible. How could a court accept such an argument?

After the court session had finished, I followed Sarhan outside. Again, I asked him why he killed her. Again, I pointed out that she had been raped. She was not at fault. He repeated what he had already told me; that she had to die because she had lost her virginity.

He said that he sat with his father, his mother, his uncles and around eight hundred men of his tribe and they had reached this consensus together. ‘If I hadn't killed her, people would look down on me. Once she was raped, she was no longer a girl. My only alternative was to kill her. Death is the only way to erase shame.'

He also told me that his family and relatives visited him in prison to congratulate him on the act. Nevertheless, he did indicate that he was not entirely comfortable with what he'd done and told me he'd been ‘forced' to kill his sister, whom he grew up with and loved deeply.

‘I know my sister was killed unjustly but what can I do? This is how society thinks. Nobody really wants to kill his own sister,' he said.

I asked him why Yasmin's rapist was neither similarly punished nor questioned by his family. Sarhan said his brother-in-law had vanished. He insisted that if he found him he would kill him as well.

During the course of our conversation, I asked Sarhan how long his sentence was.

‘One month for possession of an unregistered firearm and six months for the misdemeanour.'

I sat in shock. Misdemeanour?!

Sarhan had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and possessing an unlicensed gun during the trial, but the court decided that he did in fact ‘benefit from a reduction in penalty because he committed his crime in a fit of fury.'

‘Sarhan lost his temper and killed his sister in a moment of
extreme rage after learning she was no longer a virgin. This was proven by the medical report,' the court verdict said. The court considered the girl's loss of her virginity a crime – even though it was clearly recorded by the court that she was raped. This lenience was made possible by Article 98 of the Penal Code which permits those acting in a ‘fit of fury' to benefit from reduced penalties.

I couldn't understand the verdict. I immediately sought out one of the tribunal's three judges. Many judges had already heard of me and I had managed to build up relationships with some of them, and so one of them agreed to an interview. I had to be extremely careful about how I discussed any issue with the members of the judiciary; as a rule, no doubting, blaming or questioning was allowed. Judges were and still are considered to be among the most respected authorities in the kingdom. It was going to be extremely difficult for me to hold my tongue.

The judge was welcoming, and ordered us some mint tea. As soon as it had been poured I took a deep breath and started the interview. ‘How do you explain that Sarhan received only six months when the case clearly does not qualify under the fit of fury clause as stipulated in Article 98 of the Penal Code? The girl was raped and it was not her fault,' I said. Yasmin had turned herself in to the police for protection. Before the authorities released her, her father signed a guarantee that she would not be harmed. Obviously – to me, at least – the ‘fit of fury' argument should not apply in the court's consideration of the case, since, plainly, the murder was planned and coldly executed.

The judge took a sip of mint tea. ‘The rape happened within the family, so it was clearly a family affair. Sarhan killed his sister after family encouragement, so this murder was a product of our culture.'

‘But what about Yasmin? Who should then defend her? She was also a victim. Was her life worth nothing?'

The judge looked at me and said nothing. For a fleeting second, I felt that my argument had had an impact on him. But it was time for me to leave; the judge told me he was a busy man. I had pushed too hard.

Inam Asha, a social worker and activist who had seen Yasmin at the police station, offered me further details. The head of the station told her about the interrogation that took place. Yasmin had arrived at the station with her brother-in-law, the rapist, and he had asked her to claim that someone else raped her to cover up his crime. Yasmin tried to obey but because she was scared she kept getting the story wrong. Finally, after one of the interrogators slapped her across the face, she collapsed and told the truth.

My courtroom encounter with Sarhan was not the last. He was repeatedly interviewed by many local and international media agencies, some of which I worked for as a mediator. On one occasion, after Sarhan had finished an interview, I asked him if he regretted what he had done. He said that the murder had ruined his life. Today, he said, no woman wants to marry him. He had tried to seek the hand of eleven women in marriage, but they all refused, including a cousin whose father had encouraged him to kill his sister.

‘They all refused for fear that I might kill them or my daughters one day. But if I were put in the same situation again I would kill my sister and any other sister who goes through the same thing. This is our society, this is how we are brought up and it will never change.'

He nostalgically told me he was treated as a hero in prison. ‘All the men who were with me for the same reason in prison were treated as heroes by everybody.' Once he was back in the real world, he was ignored and felt worthless.

Sarhan kept telling me how much he loved his sister, even though he ended her life. ‘She was so close to me. She was the one who resembled me the most. I had to kill her, I had no other choice.
This is what our society wants. It is better to sacrifice one soul than to sacrifice my whole family.'

But he insisted his sibling died unjustly. ‘I am sure of that fact. No one wants to be the one to kill his sister, but traditions and society inflict things on us that we really do not want to do. If society would not have shunned us after her rape, we would not have killed her and instead locked her inside the house until she died or someone married her.'

Sarhan's family's promises of rewarding him and helping him out for killing his sister were never fulfilled. He has been unable to find regular work and instead does odd jobs every now and then.

In one of our most recent interviews, he told me, ‘To be honest with you, Rana, I am scared to have female children because society is harsh and I have a feeling that I might want to bury my female daughter because this is what I would feel is right… I wish my other sister would get married quickly because women are a source of concern. If something goes wrong, they do not pay the price; we do.'

He also acknowledged that his lenient punishment would encourage him and other males to murder again in the name of honour.

‘If the state amends the law to execute men who kill their female relatives or lock us behind bars for good, I do not think that any family would venture and push her male relative to kill. No family wants to see its male relative executed or locked up for good.'

His final comment to me was, ‘I hope that the situation will change because I alone cannot change or fix things in my society. My whole society has to change.'

Even Khalid, who admitted to murdering Kifaya, received a lenient sentence of seven-and-a-half years and was released for good behaviour two years early. I only found out by accident when I returned to the scene of the crime to try and speak to Kifaya's father. They weren't there but the neighbours told me that Khalid
was living on the first floor of their three-storey building. Feelings of anger and excitement flowed through my veins as I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door.