Women in Dark Times (27 page)

Out of the 5,000 cases of honour killing per year estimated across the world by the UN, 200 are estimated to take place in Turkey. We can compare this with the UK, where the police and Crown Prosecution Service put the figure at ten to twelve a year. We need to be cautious about these figures – why, asks Lila Abu-Lighod, does the neat figure of 5,000 appear with such regularity year on year?
110
Nonetheless, if we place these figures in the general context of crimes of violence against women and the low overall level of reporting, we should assume that if anything these figures are likely to be gross underestimates. In February 2008, Commander Steve Allen, giving evidence at the House of Commons on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers, put the annual figure of forced marriages and honour killings in the UK at around 500 (an article in the
Independent
in the same month put the figure at 17,000).
111
Over the past fifty years, 75 per cent of the Turkish population has migrated to the cities, where the incidence of the crime is increasing. A number of Onal’s cases are such migrants, most typically to Istanbul, where they live in illegally constructed
gecekondus
to which they will gradually add storey after storey as the sign of their upward mobility (a
gecekondu
pardon, licensing this building, is issued after every election as the parties rely on this migrant vote). Honour killing today is therefore a facet of urbanisation, or, at the very least, of communities not static or frozen in time but on the move. For Nurkhet Sirman, honour in Turkey has become integral to the way the modern state regulates the passage into democracy by striking a pact with men in their households (nationalism, she reminds us, has been a mainly male discourse since its inception in the 1870s). ‘No Muslim country,’ writes Pankaj Mishra, ‘has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state.’
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‘To see [honour] as a traditional concept,’ writes Sirman, ‘is to render invisible the modes through which it regulates the identity and the life of all women.’
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This is to make honour killing not tribal, but a component in the complex political realities of our time. With a mix of pastiche and scientific precision, Lama Abu-Odeh lists the new sexual types – ‘sexy virgin’, ‘virgin of love’, ‘GAP girl’, etc. – which have burgeoned under pressure of modernity in the Arab world. A complete ‘nightmare’ for the nationalists, these forms of sexual identity are at once the product of and protest against their own modernising policies.
114
‘Unleashing periodic private violence’ against women’s sexuality, with the backing of the Arab judiciary, is one of the main ways of stabilising the system and keeping the nationalists in check.
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Thus honour becomes a pawn of nationalism in its struggle against, and accommodation with, the modern state. ‘This then appears to be the new social function of crimes of honour,’ a crisis of modernity played out across the bodies of the mostly poor women, Abu-Odeh insists, who are its Arab victims.
116
In Iraqi Kurdistan, where both Heshu Yones’s and Fadime Sahindal’s families were originally from, issues of honour have become meshed with the lack of a nation state and the struggle for self-determination. Yones’s father had taken part in the Kurdish uprisings of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a world where legal restraint has mostly been experienced as a foreign imposition, any attempt to curtail honour, writes Nazand Begikhani, is seen as ‘an assault on the nationalist cause’.
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‘Her roots’, writes Wikan of Sahindal’s mother, Elif, when she refuses to talk to the police, ‘are in a place where the state is regarded as an enemy.’
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Honour today is therefore part of the modern world of nations (a pathology of modernity, we almost could say). Migrant communities to the UK bring these histories with them. Often they entrench their conservatism, notably towards their daughters, when they arrive on foreign soil, first in response to Western sexual freedoms (the commercialisation, exploitation and display of sex), but also – we can assume – in response to inequality, discrimination and prejudice. The problem therefore belongs here. The hand that kills the daughter in Acton, West London, is not the same as the hand that would have done so in Kurdistan. The point is that it wants to be. That is the delusion, the killer, as we might say. In the passage from there to here, something has been lost, something else, worse even, has been put in its place. Honour killing can then be seen, metaphorically speaking, as a doomed attempt to bring the family home – even if in pieces.

‘The white police are interested in us Pakistanis,’ comments Kaukub in
Maps for Lost Lovers
, ‘only when there is a chance to prove that we are savages who slaughter our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.’
119
Racism in this country is, we could say, the sleeping partner of honour crimes. This is neither to excuse nor forgive unforgiveable violence against women but to situate it. In one of its asides, the novel mentions a family who decide to return to Bengal after their son dies in a racial attack by whites (the radio announcement of fifty-six Haitian migrants drowning on their way to Miami is another). Friends in Pakistan advise the family involved in the murder not to tell the truth: ‘The West is full of hypocrites, who kill our people with impunity and say it’s all a matter of principle and justice, but when we do the same thing they say our definition of “principle” and “justice” is flawed.’
120

It may then be right to read honour crimes in terms of a pull between the traditional values of a migrant community and life in the metropolis, but this does not have to involve giving the West a monopoly of the forward march of history, nor assigning immigrant communities to its backwaters. These are two halves of an equation that does not add up. How, in any case, one might ask, are you meant to distribute the values on either side of the divide? On the night Fadime Sahindal died, her mother went to meet her, reaching out to her against the edicts of her husband whom she had previously obeyed – she is also alleged to have grabbed his hand and cried out: ‘Shoot me instead, shoot me!’
121
After the death, she pulls back and refuses to testify against him (at the appeal she supports his story about the man in the woods). Elif Sahindal’s ultimate betrayal of her daughter is one of the hardest things to penetrate. But only prejudice, not to say racism, would read the kindness as a sign of her integration into Swedish values. ‘Elif would probably’, writes Wikan, ‘have done the same in Kurdistan.’
122

*

In the UK there is no question that the cry against honour crimes is part of an anti-immigration agenda which worsens by the day. It is precisely here, as we will see in the next chapter, that sculptor and video artist Esther Shalev-Gerz’s latest work begins. Following the 2001 race riots in northern cities in the UK, then Home Secretary David Blunkett called for tougher immigration controls. Specifically alluding to ‘backward’ views which perpetrate oppressive practices against women, he attributed the riots to failed integration on the part of young Asian males (he was supporting Labour MPs like Ann Cryer who had called for more immigration controls as a way of dealing with forced marriage).
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Immigration control then becomes a test case for women’s freedom. This is a bit like claiming that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was waged on behalf of women. An almost surreal example of honour killing doing service for such an agenda is provided by Norma Khouri’s best-selling
Forbidden Love
(2003), published as the true story of an honour killing in Jordan, whose image of Jordan, Islam and all Arab men as violently oppressive towards women by all accounts played a key role in swinging Australian opinion towards support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – at one point a character suggests that Arab men are raising their sons to be ‘the next Arab Hitlers’.
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Rana Husseini spends several pages discrediting the book, which was eventually withdrawn from sale by Random House. In the case of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin, the killing contributed to a purging of national memory. A free and civilised Germany, and an idealised German manhood, could walk away from the past – it is the Turks, not the Germans, who are concealing a secret world of horrific crimes. Across Europe today, the far right is using a ‘culture of fear’ – to use the title of an essay by Pankaj Mishra – targeted against Muslims to ‘repackage’ its foundational anti-Semitism.
125
In which case we can fairly say that, at a deep level, hatred of Muslims has nothing to do with culture – honour killing in bed with terrorism, for example – whatsoever.

Needless to say, for those who have been at the forefront of campaigning to raise the profile of honour crime, none of this has been part of the aim. ‘The state was now using the demand for women’s rights in minority communities,’ writes Hannana Siddiqui with reference to Blunkett, ‘to impose immigration controls and justify a racist agenda.’
126
Violence against women is easily co-opted into such an agenda, which leaves women more vulnerable. This has been clearly demonstrated by responses to the sexual grooming of young women by Asian men in a case which first came to light in 2012: ‘An excessive focus on some kinds of sexual exploitation with a primary focus on ethnicity rather than the exploitation itself,’ commented Marai Larasi, chair of the End of Violence Against Women Coalition, ‘is misleading and fuels racist attitudes which ultimately won’t help women and girls.’
127

The discrimination is part of a pattern. In his famous speech in March 2008 to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, David Cameron praised the chair Trevor Phillips for his critique of multiculturalism and concluded that Britain should become ‘a cold place’ for those refusing to integrate (for many this speech is seen as laying down the race agenda of the Coalition).
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For good measure, we could also add from the 2009 Tory party conference the recruitment as military advisor of General Sir Richard Dannatt, who immediately called for a national Christian revival to combat Islamic fundamentalism; the proposal to cut the benefits of those fleeing persecution from £42 to £35 per week; and the 2013 proposed cuts in benefits to asylum seekers, which provoked an outcry and cross-party opposition.

‘Integration’ is not, of course, an innocent term. It can be, as Wikan puts it, ‘misleading, bewildering, deceiving’, driving a wedge between public behaviour and feeling (an empty performance breeding resentment underneath), or calling on minorities for a complete makeover.
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What does it mean, for instance, when Philip Balmforth, vulnerable persons officer for Asian women for the Bradford police, talks of ‘the completely different type of Asian person’ he encounters in London as the way forward: ‘I see them causing little if any problem to anyone in the establishment.’
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Should that be our criterion for a better, more integrated world?

In the UK, a ‘no recourse to public funding’ ruling prevents women suffering domestic violence from claiming benefits, including housing and the use of publicly funded refuges, unless they have been resident for two years. Southall Black Sisters have long campaigned to overturn this rule, which increases the vulnerability of immigrant women to their men. In its recommendations,
Crimes of the Community
suggests that language training should be a condition of its abolition. Wikan criticises Sweden for not making language learning a condition of asylum. In April 2013 the UK Home Office announced tougher language requirements for British citizenship. ‘British citizenship is a privilege, not a right,’ stated immigration minister Mark Harper. ‘We are toughening up language requirements for naturalisation and settlement to ensure that migrants are ready and able to integrate into British society.’
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The requirement to speak English (or Swedish) is, however, no more neutral than anything else. It all depends on the climate, on who is asking for it and why. In
Maps for Lost Lovers
, the mother of the alleged murderers goes to visit her sons in prison: ‘The prison guard kept telling me not to talk to them in “Paki” language each time I felt like saying what I truly feel. “Speak English or shut up,” he said.’
132

It is not always easy to avoid these vocabularies.
Crimes of the Community
is the most informative and meticulous source I have read on honour-based violence in the UK. Nonetheless its title –
Crimes of the Community
–
could be read as implying, against the evidence of the document itself, that the community, rather than consisting of individuals – some condoning, others hating these hideous acts carried out in their name – harbours such crimes in its very nature.

*

The question remains how to think and write about honour killing, what form, or style, is best suited to the task. Throughout this book I have suggested that only an intimate vocabulary – not severed from public life but its indispensable companion – is equal to the complexities of politics and the mind (honour killing would be another stunning instance of how the lines between the two are blurred). Towards the end of
Maps for Lost Lovers
, we discover that one of the two brother killers, Chotta, had discovered his lover, Kiran, in bed with another man on the night that he murdered his sister and her lover for living openly with each other. Kiran, who had never married, had spent most of her life mourning a lost love she had been prevented as a young woman from marrying by his family because she was a Sikh. It is this love, returned to England to seek her out after an absence of decades, who she has taken into her bed the night of the killing. ‘He saw us and went away, shouting abuse, pulling off and shattering all those mirrors I have hanging in the staircase. A thousand broken mirrors: there was an eternity of bad luck in his wake.’
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Kiran has no doubt that it is this rage that Chotta then unleashes on his sister.