Murder in the Name of Honor (11 page)

A week after our march, the Senate reviewed the draft for the second time and upheld its previous decision, forcing a joint session of the Upper and Lower Houses to vote on the draft law once and for all. But after various delays, the joint session was never held and Parliament was dissolved for the summer vacation in June 2001. It seemed as though the opposition would, like us, never consider giving up for a moment.

This now meant that a joint session could be held only if the King summoned Parliament for an extraordinary sitting. According to the Constitution, in an extraordinary sitting, lawmakers are limited to the discussion of drafts specified in a Royal Decree.

On 22 February 2000, the Islamist weekly newspaper
Al-Sabeel
announced it was conducting what it claimed was a ‘comprehensive' three-day survey aimed at determining the public's attitudes towards the cancellation of Article 340.

The questionnaire asked:

Are you for or against the cancellation of Article 340?

Is honour killing a major problem and does it deserve all the attention it has received from the government?

Had you heard of Article 340 before the recent campaign?

Do you believe that these crimes happen because Sharia laws on adultery are not applied in the Jordanian Penal Code?

Do you believe the movement to cancel Article 340 was based on international pressure or internal political strategies?

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Assef Jolani, was very honest about expressing his bias. ‘Our position is clear on this issue. We
are against all this attention and we felt that this movement was not based on the needs of people,' he wrote in his editorial. He said most Islamists opposed the draft law because it was the result of international pressure.

He emphasized that Muslims are opposed to shedding the blood of innocent women and that the government was at fault because it did not apply the Islamic Sharia. ‘That is why some people take the law into their own hands, because they know there is no punishment for adulterers,' he explained.

The survey was conducted randomly in the cities of Amman, Zarqa and Irbid, as well as being available online. Two days later, the newspaper issued the results of the survey on its front page, stating that seventy-six per cent of the 163 respondents were against cancelling the article and nineteen per cent were in favour, while the rest were undecided. The survey found that seventy-eight per cent of the women and seventy-seven per cent of the men surveyed were in favour of keeping the article.

Fifty-eight per cent of those surveyed said the government's campaign was the result of international pressure and eighty-one per cent said so-called honour crimes take place in Jordan because the Islamic Sharia on adultery is not part of the Penal Code.
¹²

Other deputies, along with the local press, accused the Netherlands of blackmailing Jordan by threatening to cut aid if Article 340 was not changed. The Dutch ambassador to Jordan, Bernard Tangelder, denied these reports, claiming they were merely rumour based on misquotes. Others accused the government of succumbing to the USA, claiming that the USA was going to block a $25 million donation to Jordan.

Prince Ali brushed these accusations aside. ‘We are not a country that gets easily pressured by anybody. This is simply a ridiculous excuse. We are a small country and live in a tough neighbourhood. There are many times in our history when we have been besieged. We have been pressured by big and regional
powers. But we are not afraid of taking stands that no other Arab country has ever taken. Be it an Arab or foreign embassy, we are much stronger than that.'

Prince Ali went as far as to criticize some foreign missions for their interference, or at least for their bad timing when I interviewed him. ‘The US Embassy said a few days before the voting that the law should be changed. That helped the opposition, who used this as the excuse they needed to say they would not be forced to do something because the west wants them to.'

Many people concluded that we failed in convincing the Lower House to cancel Article 340. That is of course absolutely true, but as far as I was concerned, the battle had just begun and we had already succeeded in improving women's rights in many other ways. It was often brought home to me, however, that the opposition to change ran deep and moved in powerful circles.

The government began to promote the idea of introducing a quota so that women would have a voice in Parliament in the upcoming elections. My colleague Alia Shukri Hamzeh from
The Jordan Times
was the only female reporter who attended a debate with the Parliament Legal Committee to discuss the new draft election law with the heads of other women's organizations.

A deputy from Amman Fourth District strongly opposed the idea. He said that being an MP was a man's job; a woman can jeopardize her honour by going out late at night to take part in related social activities. If his daughter stayed out late at night he would shoot her himself, he added. He told the gathering that a woman's presence in Parliament ‘would be damaging, since a woman in the house would distract male deputies and stir trouble when male deputies instinctively look at her breasts.'

At that moment, several of his colleagues pointed out to him that there was a female reporter in the room. He later told Hamzeh that had he known she was in the room he would not have made
these remarks, but he did not apologize. He also pleaded with her not to mention his name in the article.
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But perhaps the most disturbing statement of all came from former Justice Minister and current Deputy, Abdul Karim Dughmi. He told foreign journalist Eliza Griswold in an interview published in
The Sunday Times
on 7 August 2001, entitled ‘Death and dishonour', on the topic of so-called honour crimes in the Kingdom: ‘All women killed in cases of honour are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.'

* * *

In June and July of 2000, we went back to the streets of Amman and other cities to collect more signatures and to evaluate the level of awareness among ordinary citizens. We headed to Wihdat neighbourhood and entered shops located on the main road, Madaba Street, asking owners and shoppers to sign our petitions. To our delight the result was very positive; the majority of people we spoke to this time had better knowledge of the issue. Many voiced their objection and immediately signed the petition. This time, we didn't find it as hard to convince anyone to sign, as people had already been informed about the subject.

Committee member Maha Abu Ayyash entered a shop in Wihdat where two men were getting ready for noon prayers. She said she was hesitant at first to enter because they seemed to be in a private conversation. But when she entered, one of the men looked at her and noticed the petitions in her hand. His first reaction was, ‘Where have you been? I've been waiting for you!' He explained that he had a business partner who had killed one of his female relatives only to use Article 98 to escape justice.

While many local NGOs, professional associations and political parties organized debates and workshops to discuss the issue and the efforts exerted in Jordan, opposing rallies continued. In a lecture organized by the Culture Committee of the Jordanian
Professional Associations, former female senator and practicing lawyer Na'eyla Rashdan accused us of running a ‘misleading campaign'.

‘The campaigners were calling for the cancellation of Article 340, claiming it was responsible for the killings of innocent women, when in fact the article addresses a certain condition when women are caught committing adultery,' Rashdan said.

‘What do people expect from a man who catches his wife committing adultery with another man? Smile for them and apologize for disturbing them? No one has the right to end the life of an innocent woman, who may be the victim of rumour or suspicion … But in Article 340, when a woman is caught committing adultery there is no innocence.'
¹⁴

Rashdan instead suggested that women benefit from the same exemption as men.

Our lawyer, Asma Khader, who dedicated her entire career to fighting for women's causes in Jordan, responded to Rashdan's suggestions by stressing that no one should have the right to end someone else's life. ‘The article is a dangerous clause imposed on women's lives because in almost all these crimes, women are the sole victims. The male partner, if there was any, is rarely harmed.'

The opposition had nothing new to say and simply repeated their old conspiracy theories – the west trying to destroy the east – and their belief in the need for women to preserve themselves in order to protect society from ‘moral deterioration'.

Almost two months later, Khader and Deputy Kharabsheh met face to face again at a lecture on Article 340 hosted by one of the Rotaract clubs in the Kingdom. Kharabsheh again accused the west and Zionists of being behind many campaigns aimed at destroying Jordan and exposing misleading information to the international community. He insisted the article remain because ‘the control over women prevents sexual diseases and mixed paternity'. He claimed he wanted women to be protected, respected and
afforded dignity, but added, ‘Jordan is still a male-dominated society and men are more capable than women are. Women have not developed themselves yet; they are not experienced enough, having not held high positions in authority as men have.'

In her speech, Khader said that the campaigns helped raise awareness. One such example of this was that two families whose daughters were murdered had come to her after hearing about the campaign, and had asked her to take legal action against the killers.

* * *

As a result of the increased campaign activity and pressure from so many groups, the government passed two new temporary laws in the summer of 2001.

First, Article 340 was expanded so that women received the same reduction in penalty as men. Needless to say, offering equal treatment for women in this particular case was not one of our aspirations. We were against the concept of pardoning a person for killing another in general.

The second new law, known as ‘Khuloe', granted women the right to file for divorce in return for monetary compensation without having to specify the reasons. Under this law, a woman had to return the dowry given to her by her husband before the wedding and waive all of the financial obligations listed in the marriage contract.

The government ignored Article 98 despite the efforts of the Royal Commission on Human Rights, which in November 2001 presented suggestions to the government to curb these crimes by lengthening the period of imprisonment for murderers. As it stood, a person who burgled a house or stole a car would spend more time in prison than someone who had taken the life of a female relative for reasons of ‘honour'.

Nevertheless, both temporary amendments were seen as a victory for the women's movement in Jordan, especially the Khuloe
law, which had been in demand for a long time. It normally took several years for a decision to be given to women seeking divorce through the Sharia Courts – and the decision was very often a refusal.

Islamist Ibrahim Zeid Kilani, who was the president of the IFA's Fatwa Committee, did not voice any objection to the Khuloe law when I contacted him for a reaction in December 2001, but he strongly criticized amending Article 340, saying it was ‘a step to protect unfaithful women and prostitutes'. Kilani said the amendments did not protect innocent women who were killed because of rumours, suspicion or inheritance reasons, and argued that the government should have amended Article 98 instead. Again, Kilani blamed the USA: ‘The government amended Article 340 because this is what Americans want. They want to destroy our families.'

Both temporary laws remained effective until a new Parliament was elected in 2003. In the first session of the Lower House on 3 August, MPs reviewed some sixty temporary laws, including Article 340 and the Khuloe law.

The deputies debated and voted on all these laws before referring them to various committees for consideration. When it came to Article 340, in contrast to the 1999 vote, this time there was a hand count. A total of fifty MPs out of the eighty-nine present at the session raised their hands to reject the new amendment.

Khuloe was also rejected outright in the same session. Their excuse this time was that Khuloe was against the Islamic Sharia and amending Article 340 was ‘dangerous and would be bad for society'.

Some one hundred protesters, including myself, demonstrated a week later in front of Parliament. We carried banners and handed out pamphlets and intercepted deputies' cars. Whenever I managed to stop one, I told the MP to remember their female relatives when they voted on both articles in future. Most drove on quickly, leaving their windows firmly rolled up.

MPs Mohammad Abu Fares and Mahmoud Kharabsheh stopped to talk to us. They assured us they would always work to see the Khuloe law rejected because it contradicted the ‘Islamic Sharia and women will destroy the family if divorce was in their hands'.

When I told Deputy Abu Fares that Egypt's Grand Mufti from Al-Azhar had approved Khuloe in Egypt as part of Sharia since March 2000, his answer was: ‘Al-Azhar's Mufti is an agent for the Egyptian government.'

Other liberal deputies, such as Dr Abdul Rahim Malhas and Ghaleb Zuby, promised that they would work hard to convince the deputies who opposed the law to change their minds.

What was most disappointing of all was that two of the six women who had won parliamentary seats, thanks to the new quota introduced by the government, voted against the law because ‘although the legislation had some positive aspects, its implementation only facilitated divorce'. Two of the remaining four did not show up for the session and the remaining two voted in favour of amending the law. None of the female deputies showed up for our protest and they all entered the Parliament building via the back door that day.

Lawyer and human rights activist Reem Abu Hassan, one of the organizers of the protest in which the National Council for Family Affairs was also involved, said that this organization planned to coordinate their efforts with other NGOs to debate the issue with the Senate's Legal Committee. The same scenario occurred; the Upper House upheld the decision to introduce Khuloe and change Article 340 twice. The Lower House rejected it both times.