Murder in the Name of Honor (16 page)

A UN committee noted that so-called honour crimes are on the increase in Pakistan even though the country passed a law banning these crimes in 2004. The committee questioned the sincerity of
the Pakistani government in ending these crimes and prosecuting people who are guilty of these murders, and charged the Pakistani government of being ‘lenient and tolerant' towards such crimes.
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It is impossible to know, but is the level of violence actually rising or is it just that the media are reporting such cases with greater frequency? The media boom is certainly instrumental in bringing more of these stories to light. There is little doubt that the vast majority of perpetrators go unpunished.

Recent cases include a woman who was axed to death by her cousin because he was suspicious of her relations with other people. Just before this murder, two bullet-riddled bodies of women were discovered in Gulli Garhi village with a note, which stated they were of ‘loose character'. Hundreds, if not thousands, of jirgas (village courts) have yet to be replaced by courts of law. The ‘edicts' ordained by jirgas and militants are in open violation of the laws of the land.

Mukhtar Mai, a thirty-year-old woman who lived in the remote hamlet of Meerwala, knows better than most the terrifying power that the jirga is able to wield. In June 2002, Mai's then twelve-year-old brother Abdul Shakoor had been seen strolling with a girl from the more influential Mastoi tribe; Mastoi villagers demanded Mai's rape to avenge their ‘honour'.

The village court sentenced her to be publicly gang-raped by four volunteers. Mai's family sat helplessly while she was dragged into a room. To further humiliate her, and make an example of those who would defy the power of local leaders, she was paraded naked before hundreds of onlookers. Afterwards, her father covered her with a shawl and walked her home.

Incredibly, Mai refused to leave it there and fought a public battle to bring her attackers to trial. She told reporters she would rather ‘die at the hands of such animals' than ‘give up her right to justice'. Incredibly, despite several threats, she not only brought them to trial, she won the case. Half-a-dozen of the men involved
in her rape have been jailed and two of them have been sentenced to death. Mai has used the money awarded to her by the court as compensation to open a school in her village where, according to Mai, ‘children will be taught the real meaning of honour'.
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In February 2008 an Islamic fundamentalist shot and killed a government minister because of her refusal to wear a Muslim veil.
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Zilla Huma Usman, the Punjab Provincial Minister for Social Welfare, was shot as she prepared to address a public gathering in the town of Gujranwala. The attacker, Malulvi Ghulam Sarwar, said that he was opposed to the participation of women in politics and the refusal of many professional women in Pakistan to wear the veil.

Speaking to a local TV channel, he said, ‘I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah's commandment. Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again.'

It is clear to me that as long as the government of Pakistan refuses to challenge fully the brutality of tribal law, along with outdated traditions and values, then all women will continue to suffer. People must be given a voice; it is only by hearing their stories and by public outcry that the legislators themselves will be shamed into doing something about it.

Things are even worse for women in neighbouring Afghanistan. One of the most famous murders in recent times took place in the middle of the night of 6 June 2007, as Afghan journalist Zakia Zaki lay sleeping next to her twenty-month-old son.

Three attackers sneaked into her house and shot her seven times, sparing her young son and five other children.
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One of the few female reporters to criticize the Taliban, thirty-five-year-old Zaki ran the US-funded Radio Peace, launched in
2001. Her colleague and head of the Afghan Independent Journalists' Association, Rahimullah Samander, said ‘She believed in freedom of expression, that's why she was killed.' Zaki's killers struck just days after a female newsreader at a TV station was shot and killed for reasons that remain unclear.
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On the day she was shot, the US Congress earmarked $45 million – twice the 2002 amount – for Afghan government groups and NGOs dedicated to empowering women. The country needs it. A weak judiciary, a lack of law enforcement and widespread discriminatory practices against women are fuelling a rise in so-called honour killings in Afghanistan, according to a 2006 report from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

Asma Jahangir, UN Special Rapporteur on religious freedom, said during an international conference in Sweden in December 2004 that approximately four hundred so-called honour killings had been documented in 2004, but only twenty men were arrested and were given mild sentences. Jahangir described so-called honour killings as the most hidden of all crimes: ‘The “deadly silence” among people at large is a major cause of the deaths of women, not only the open violence of the perpetrators.'
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But things are changing. Afghanistan's government, which says it is committed to human rights and ending discrimination against women, hopes to end the practice but admits there are challenges ahead. Dad Mohammad Rasa, an interior ministry spokesman, said honour crimes were prosecuted, but that the practice was so entrenched that stamping it out would take a long time: ‘We have created a commission in the interior ministry to try and eradicate such cases but it will take a long time to overcome such crimes as it has become a part of many people's culture.'

Women can participate in every walk of life, including politics. Of the 361 members of Parliament today, ninety-one are women. Women have also begun talking about forced marriages, honour killings, abortions and rape in this traditionally male-dominated
society. Local human rights groups are also now leading the way to change by documenting and exposing such atrocities.

Despite these advances, violence against women, such as immolation, forced marriages and rape, remains widespread in Afghanistan. The AIHRC documented over 1,500 cases of atrocities against women in 2006.

A third of these women were victims of domestic violence, simply called ‘beating' in the rights group report. Two hundred of them were married off forcibly, ninety-eight of them set themselves on fire, and over a hundred of them tried to end their lives by taking poison.

In Iraq, another war-torn region of the world, women's rights have deteriorated dramatically since the start of the US-led coalition's occupation of the country. Despite the horrific number of honour killings, the status of women may have a chance of improving in Kurdistan (the semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq) where the government is secular, in contrast to Baghdad where the religious parties hold power. The Kurdish police and courts are also more sympathetic than those elsewhere in Iraq to women whose lives have been threatened. There are currently no shelters for women in Baghdad or Basra.

Reliable statistics on honour killings are nonexistent; as in other countries in the Middle East where the tradition is tolerated, such as Egypt and Morocco, honour killings are largely treated as private family matters. Iraq is a tribal society where honour killings are an accepted practice and cases have been increasing because conservative attitudes have spread since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Under Saddam's laws, which are still in place, men convicted of so-called honour killings can receive up to three years in jail. But
because the crime is rarely reported, few are actually prosecuted. And since there is widespread sympathy for the killers among police and judges, those who are convicted rarely serve more than a few months.

When US forces overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration proclaimed that women's rights would be at the centre of its project to make Iraq a democratic model for the rest of the Arab world. But violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicide, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse (masquerading as marriage) of girls as young as nine are all on the increase – any woman who dares to protest will immediately find her life in great peril. Iraq is without question one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a woman.

Duaa Khalil Aswad, a seventeen-year-old student at the Fine Arts Institute in Bashiqa in Iraq, fell in love with her neighbour, Muhannad, who owned a local cosmetics shop. Like many young lovers they met whenever they could. On most days Muhannad picked Duaa up after her college classes.

In 2007, as their relationship intensified, Duaa tried to convince her boyfriend to elope with her so they could get married after she had converted to Islam but he refused, telling her that her family needed to approve their marriage as well.

Duaa's family were Yazidis, belonging to the smallest of the three branches of Yazdanism, a Middle Eastern religion with ancient Indo-European roots. Yazidis are primarily Kurdish-speaking and most of the religion's 350,000 to 500,000 members live in the Mosul region of northern Iraq. They have been persecuted by a succession of rulers, from the Ottomans to Saddam Hussein. Neither Christian nor Muslim, they worship a blue peacock known as Malak Taus. They are fiercely insular, opposing marriage to non-Yazidis, and it is virtually impossible for non-Yazidis to convert.

When Duaa decided to inform her parents of her decision, they weren't pleased but at the same time they didn't try to stop her. Her uncles and cousins felt differently, and when they heard that she had converted to Islam so she could marry the man she loved, they decided to take matters into their own hands.

Her father, worried for her safety, took Duaa to a cleric. She should have been safe under his guardianship; a tradition supposedly respected by all tribal members. On 7 April, Duaa's uncles arrived at the cleric's home and told him that the family had forgiven the girl and wanted her to return. Duaa, who was dressed in a black skirt with a red jacket, really thought they had forgiven her and got ready to go. As the cleric became suspicious the men stormed the house and dragged Duaa outside by her ponytails to meet her fate.

After just a few yards, Duaa was surrounded by thirteen cousins who started kicking her, punching her and pulling her hair before pushing her to the ground. As she shouted for help her father heard and raced to the scene but was forcibly and violently held back by some of the large crowd that had gathered. Some filmed what followed on their mobile phones.

Duaa's attackers tore her skirt, exposing her legs – an act intended to shame the girl who had damaged her family's honour. One man kicked her between her legs, another painful, degrading symbol. The brutal execution continued for almost thirty minutes. The cheering crowd threw larger and larger stones. Duaa gave up trying to cover her legs with her arms, using them instead to cover her head to try to deflect the dozens of rocks that flew at her.

When a large brick struck the back of her head, she stopped moving for a few moments. She then tried to sit up while screaming for help but her murderers chanted ‘Kill her, kill her.'

Finally, one of her cousins picked up a huge rock, struggling under its weight, and dropped it on her forehead. The mob continued kicking her to make sure she was dead. Finally, Duaa's killers
took her body to the outskirts of Bashiqa where they burned and buried her remains with those of a dog, to show how worthless she was.

According to the police chief in Mosul, most of the killers were members of Duaa's extended family – mainly cousins and their friends. A post mortem showed that Duaa died of a fractured skull and spine.

As the footage circled the globe, journalists started to arrive in Bashiqa and they interviewed several local people, most of whom expressed support for the stoning. Eyewitness Samir Juma, a teacher, said policemen as well as some Peshmerga soldiers belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party stood and watched the killing without attempting to intervene. News reporters also spoke of a small boy who was dragged to the front of the crowd and was made to watch Duaa being stoned to death.
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It was not the first love story of its kind, nor was it the first so-called honour killing in a region where women are subject to strong social restrictions and face severe punishment for disregarding family, tribal or religious traditions.

Such cases can no longer be covered up as easily these days, because of pressure from very brave local women's activists – but they rarely cause a stir. Duaa's case was different. This killing has had a much wider impact, thanks to the film footage from a mobile phone being broadcast around the world on the internet, providing horrific proof, finally, of the brutality of these murders committed in the name of honour.

The killing also unleashed new horror and conflict in what had been until then one of the only peaceful areas left in Iraq. On 21 April 2007, a group of gunmen dragged more than twenty Yazidi men off a bus in the northern city of Mosul, about twenty miles south of Bashiqa, lined them up against a wall and gunned them down. The next day, a Sunni insurgent group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bombing that targeted the offices of
a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, saying it was to avenge the death of Duaa.
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Journalists were told that the reason police did not intervene during Duaa's killing, or take action immediately afterwards, was that they believed Duaa was guilty of ‘immoral behaviour … breaking a taboo prescribed by social tradition, rather than changing faith.'

It was only when the police heard that Duaa might have been killed for abandoning Yazidism that they decided to issue arrest warrants. One of the results of the international outrage about her death was the reaction by the supreme religious leader of the Yazidis, Tahsin Saeed Ali, who publicly condemned Duaa's murder as ‘a heinous crime'. He sought to minimize the interfaith connection to her murder, saying that Duaa was killed because of ‘old traditions', implying that the motivation was social rather than religious.