‘Who hasn’t?’ he replied, pointing back in the direction he’d come. ‘Round the corner, close to Omar’s barbershop, you’ll find her family’s house; she was killed there.’
It seemed as though everyone knew. This was, after all, a very crowded neighbourhood where everybody knew everyone else’s business. A real-life murder was a sure attention-getter in the absence of other distractions like movie theatres, parks or libraries.
‘Do you know why they killed her?’ I asked.
He was already walking away. ‘Because her brother raped her,’ he said casually.
Assuming I’d misheard him (who kills rape victims?), I soon found Omar’s barbershop and parked my car. As I got out, a loose paving slab wobbled under the sneakers I’d decided to wear in case I had to run away – I was about to stick my nose in some very private business. My non-traditional baggy T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans also helped me feel more comfortable, although I stuck out like a sore thumb in this conservative part of town.
I pushed the front door halfway open; the smell of stale cigarettes and hair grease overwhelmed me. Through the haze, I saw there were two empty chairs to my left. A fat man, who I assumed was the proprietor from the way he straddled the chair, faced me. Two skinny middle-aged men were slouched on a brown hole-ridden sofa to his left. They were all smoking.
‘Assalamu Alaikum,’ I said.
‘Wa Alaikum Assalam,’ they chorused.
‘A young girl was murdered around here, have you heard about this?’
At this the two men looked at each other and both sat up. ‘Yes,’ one of the skinnier ones said. ‘Who told you?’ he asked, suspiciously.
‘It was in the paper this morning.’ I pulled out the page I had torn from the newspaper and showed it to them while I remained on the doorstep.
‘It’s already made the papers?’ This development was apparently unwelcome. The barber took a drag of his cigarette and asked, ‘Who are you and why do you want to know?’
I declared confidently that I was a crime reporter working for The Jordan Times. Inside I was a bag of nerves. Media coverage only serves to keep any ‘scandal’ committed by the victim of the so-called honour crime alive, which is why so few reporters – in fact, no reporters whatsoever – investigated honour killings.
They didn’t respond, so I stepped through the door and sat on the sofa next to the two men. Hoping to win their confidence and encourage them to speak to me about the murder, I chatted with them casually about my job, my education in the USA, journalism, the country and politics.
Our chat revealed that the two men on the couch were her uncles. ‘Kifaya was not a good girl,’ one of them said, as if killing a ‘bad girl’ was acceptable.
Kifaya. Suddenly, my story had a name.
I stayed and we talked some more. Every now and again I asked why Kifaya had been killed, until one of the uncles said, ‘She was raped by Mohammad, her brother. That’s why she was killed.’
I straightened my back, and placed my notebook on my lap, not sure what to say next.
Eventually I said, ‘Why was she punished and not her brother? Why didn’t Kifaya’s family discipline him instead?’
One of the uncles looked worried. ‘Do you think we killed the wrong person?’
Her other uncle answered quickly, ‘Relax. We did the right thing.’
I struggled to contain my fury. It was as if they were speaking about a sheep. These men were part of the conspiracy. Her body not yet cold, yet here they were – on a sofa in a barbershop chatting with the owner and smoking cigarettes.
‘She seduced her brother. She tarnished the family’s honour and deserved to die,’ the skinnier uncle declared.
I sighed at his stupidity. Jordanian society blames women for everything: for being raped, for being harassed on the streets, for philandering husbands, for husbands who divorce them, for bearing a child of the wrong gender – the list is endless.
‘But why would she choose to sleep with her brother? If she wanted to sleep with a man, surely, she would not choose to sleep with her brother.’
Instead of answering my question, the barber stood up and said, ‘Why do you care for such a story?’
‘Why are you dressed like this?’ one of the uncles asked, pulling an expression of disgust at my jeans and T-shirt.
‘Why are you in our neighbourhood?’ the other continued. ‘You do not belong here. You have become westernized in America. You forget where you are now.’
I was clearly ‘not a good girl’. I thanked them and quickly left.
Outside, I looked at the houses stacked haphazardly on top of and overlapping each other. Kifaya’s wasn’t hard to find. Even the kids playing in the street could point me to the three-storey house situated at the end of the road. I looked at it with pain in my heart.
‘Why did they kill you?’ I asked myself. ‘You were only sixteen.’
I headed towards her neighbours; a shabby house where a newly-wed couple lived. They offered me tea and told me what they saw.
They had heard Kifaya scream and beg for mercy. They had seen her brother Khalid standing outside his house holding the bloodstained knife and shouting, ‘I have cleansed my family’s honour.’
His family was waiting to congratulate him.
Khalid then went to the nearest police station and turned himself in, claiming to have killed Kifaya to cleanse the honour of his family.
I arrived back at the newspaper offices frustrated and exhausted. I needed to exorcize this experience from my system by telling my story to my editor, Jennifer Hamarneh. Jennifer had arrived at The Jordan Times a couple of years before me. She was a tough editor and would often get mad when I made mistakes. But she taught me so much; though at times it was tough, I took on board what she was telling me in a positive way; I certainly didn’t make the same mistake twice.
‘I don’t want Kifaya’s murder to be just another crime story; I want so-called honour killings to become a national issue.’
Jennifer looked at me like she was weighing me up. ‘Tell the story, we’ll make space for it.’
I think Jennifer knew then that Kifaya’s story was going to change my life for good. In order to maintain objectivity, I had to suppress my great anger and sadness as I wrote, hoping that someone important, that any of our readers, would read it and would feel inspired to take action.
The following day my story appeared on page three with a headline that read: ‘Victim of incestuous rape killed by second brother’.
The next morning George Hawatmeh, my former editor-in-chief, took a call from a Jordanian woman, who described herself as an intellectual who worked in an official position. George was also a strong believer in the fight against so-called honour crimes and was immediately thrilled at the thought that the caller was also outraged at this appalling murder and wanted to voice her objection. Perhaps she wanted to use her influential post to exert some pressure on the government to help prosecute all those involved in Kifaya’s murder.
But his hopes were immediately dashed. She shouted down the phone at George: ‘You should stop Rana Husseini from reporting these crimes because they do not exist in Jordan! This does not happen in our society!’
Luckily, George and Jennifer disagreed and supported me when I told them I wanted to become the voice of these women whose lives have been wiped out and every record of their existence destroyed by their family. I would expose each and every murder I heard about.
I didn’t realize then quite how busy I was going to be.
CHAPTER 2
Interview with a Killer
As I began to write more and more about honour killings, with the support of opinion writers and my editors, so our postbags began to swell. The readers of The Jordan Times are mostly the affluent English-speaking minority, many of whom were already aware of violence against women, but remained apathetic until we started reporting the cases in depth.
At the start of each week I’d arrive at work to find my own in
box 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 unlicense
d 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.’
Murder in the Name of Honor Page 2