Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

Her crime was being ‘raped’ by her first cousin on her father’s side. The cousin was twenty-nine years old and married, with three children. The girl’s uncle told the Al Raida reporter that when the teenage girl told her story at a family meeting and said she was pregnant, ‘blood rose in the male member’s eyes, and no one can utter a word when there is blood in men’s eyes.’

  The uncle said everyone present decided that the ‘rapist’ should marry the teenage girl, since ‘her cousin was supposed to save the family honour’. The cousin’s father asked one of his sons to slaughter a lamb for the occasion and invited everyone to lunch to celebrate the peace that had been reached. But the teenager’s eldest brother grabbed a gun that had been concealed in his pocket and emptied the bullets into his sister, declaring, ‘You do not have to slaughter a lamb. Have this one for lunch.’

  Three Lebanese women activists and scholars conducted a study of many of the so-called honour crimes that were handled by the courts. They listed quotations from some of the killers and their motives behind the murder.

  In one instance they quoted a man who had killed his divorced sister as saying, ‘Her repeated absence from home and not obeying me, as well as the fact that the neighbours would tease me about her bad conduct … All that made me kill her out of honour, especially as she was pregnant by someone other than the man who divorced her.’41

  They also quoted a mother who said, ‘I confirm that it was I who slit my daughter’s throat without anybody else’s help, to wash away the shame her illegitimate pregnancy had brought on us.’42

  These murderers relied on Article 562 of the Lebanese Penal Code:

  Whoever surprises his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a witnessed crime of adultery (flagrante delicto) or in a situation of unlawful intercourse and proceeds to kill or injure one of them, without deliberation, shall benefit from the excuse of exemption. The person who kills or injures on surprising his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a suspicious situation with another person shall benefit from the excuse of mitigation.

  As is no doubt clear from the cases just described, Article 562 was widely abused – it depended on the element of surprise, catching the offenders in the act and the immediate carrying out of the crime, without thought or reflection.

  In 1998, under pressure from women’s groups, in particular the Lebanese Women’s Council, the then Justice Minister announced that he had referred a draft law to Parliament to amend Article 562 to repeal the ‘excuse of exemption’ because it encouraged ‘private justice’ or revenge crimes.

  The amended Article 562 read: ‘Whomsoever surprises his spouse or one of his ascendants or descendants or his sister in a crime of observed adultery or in a situation of unlawful intercourse and kills or injures one of them without deliberation shall benefit from the excuse of mitigation.’

  Of course, this amendment did not relieve women from the burden of being the sole carriers of honour. It is a ‘blind acceptance of the assumptions that any sexual relationship outside marriage is a shame and sullies the woman’s honour, that her honour is the property of her husband or male relative only, that the woman bears immediate and full responsibility for sullying her honour, whether it happened in her positive or negative will and subsequently deserves the maximum physical penalty.’43

  The amendment was passed in February 1999. Oddly, it is superseded by Article 7 which states that ‘All Lebanese are equal before the law’ (men and women alike), and Lebanon has also agreed to be bound by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which rejects all discrimination on grounds of sex. Meanwhile, Article 522, which pardons any rapist who marries his victim, remains firmly in place.

  The Lebanese Council to Resist Violence against Women (LCRVW) worked on a study of twenty-five so-called honour crime court cases in Lebanon between 1998 and 2003. There were many hundreds of honour killings during this time. However, few made it to court and, of those that did, these were the only cases for which the trial record was complete.

  Most of the cases were clearly premeditated – including that of a man who, having divorced his first wife and taken on a second, was unable to support two households, so killed his first wife. Another case concerned a husband who beat his wife for years before killing both her and her sister when she complained to her family. A father killed a daughter when she refused to have an abortion. Another killed his daughter-in-law because his son refused to grant her a divorce. A brother killed his sister because he did not approve of her marriage.

  Incredibly, Article 562 was not used in any of these cases. Instead, the defence relied on Article 253, which allows the judge to pass a mild sentence if convinced that the accused had mitigating reasons (as opposed to the ‘excuse of mitigation’).

  Article 562 seems to be redundant, so why such a discriminatory piece of the Penal Code is still allowed to exist is a mystery. All it does is encourage the murder of women, as the perpetrators know that they can rely on this get-out clause if necessary. Even though the courts generally give the perpetrators lengthy sentences, this is doing nothing to stem the tide of killings – so, while the repeal of Article 562 remains essential, it is extremely important to work towards changing the mindset of society as a whole. A promising step forward came in August 2007 when the Associated Press reported that a top Shiite cleric tackled the issue of so-called honour murders in Lebanon by issuing a fatwa banning the practice, describing it as ‘a repulsive act’.

  Saudi Arabia

  In the majority of the Gulf countries, there are no accurate statistics on so-called honour crimes, but cases are starting to be reported regularly in the news media. For example, in August 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported a story about a young Saudi girl in Riyadh who was killed by her father after he walked into her room and found her chatting to a man on Facebook. The father reportedly beat up his daughter and then shot her to death.

  The case remained unreported in Saudi Arabia until April 2008 when Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki strongly criticized Facebook and called on the Saudi government to ban the internet site because it was corrupting Saudi youth.

  ‘Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the internet than they are spending on food,’ he said. The story was written up in the local press as an example of the ‘strife’ that Facebook was causing in Saudi Arabia. Ali al-Maliki said women were posting ‘revealing pictures’ and ‘behaving badly’ on the site, which has become very popular with young Saudis.

  Saudi Arabia imposes a strict form of Sunni Islam which prevents unrelated men and women from mixing, bans women from driving and demands that women wear a headscarf and cloak in public. Facebook is used by many Saudi women as a vital outlet which allows them to discuss women’s rights and to share their thoughts and experiences with people across the world. One suspects that it is this sudden freedom of expression that worries the senior patriarchy. The Saudi authorities block access to websites they deem sexual, pornographic, politically offensive, ‘un-Islamic’ or disruptive because of controversial religious and political content. At the time of writing, Facebook is still online in Saudi Arabia – for now.

  In an echo of the Facebook murder, in August 2008, the father of a young Saudi woman cut out her tongue before setting her alight. The crime? Converting to Christianity and writing about it on a blog. The woman wrote on the ‘Al Ukdoud’ website, a few days before her death, that the discovery made her family life unbearable, according to a Gulf News report.

  The father was arrested and an investigation has been launched as to whether this was considered to be an honour crime, which would make it very likely that the man, if found guilty, would be sentenced to between six months and three years in jail. What makes this case all the more remarkable is that the accused is a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and against Vice, which is responsible for the monitoring of moral behaviour and for the full compliance with the law of the rigid Wa
habi doctrine.

  Just a month before the Facebook murder, a meeting of experts at a seminar entitled ‘Therapy of Abuse Cases and Social Adjustment’ in Jeddah revealed that a woman had been taken from a shelter and murdered. This happened because she had been seen on her own with a man who was not her husband or a relative, which is a crime under Saudi law.

  Dr Ali Al-Hanaki, Director of the Social Affairs Ministry in the Western Region, said the woman’s relatives had not been charged, adding, ‘We received news about her death off the record. Such “honour killing” crimes happen secretly and the bodies are buried in the desert. The families usually say that the women in question are travelling or have run away.’

  In February 2008, the Independent reported a new and disturbing development – forced divorce. They described the case of Fatima al-Timani, sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to be separated from the man to whom she had been happily married for the past four years and with whom she has two children. Fatima was the latest victim of this growing practice, when disgruntled relatives have used hard-line Islamic courts to dissolve matches against the will of the married couple.

  Fatima was pregnant when court proceedings began in 2005 and was jailed with her newborn baby. Fatima is now forbidden from seeing her husband, Mansour al-Timani, who now looks after their two-year-old-son, Noha. Noha has only been allowed occasional visits to see his mother. Fatima’s relatives have accused Mansour of lying about his tribal background to win their father’s approval for the marriage and want it annulled so she can have an arranged marriage to a man of their choosing.

  Dr Irfan Al Alawi, a British Muslim and Director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism based in London, said that the case was not an isolated incident and that as many as nineteen forced divorces were working their way through the courts. Meanwhile, Dr Al-Hanaki was at least optimistic that the situation would change one day: ‘even if it takes us ten to fifteen years, we need to change their tribal attitudes toward women.’

  Kuwait

  Several honour-related murders have recently been reported in Kuwait, a country where women were granted the right to vote in 2005 but where Article 153 of the Penal Code reduces sentences in cases of honour killings. However, as yet, NGOs there have rarely talked about these crimes.

  On 11 April 2007, the Middle East Times reported that a father slit his thirteen-year-old daughter’s throat in front of her three siblings in 2005 because he thought she was no longer a virgin. Adnan Al Enezi, a forty-year-old government employee, blindfolded and handcuffed his daughter Asma and stabbed her repeatedly as she begged for her life. Forensic tests revealed that his daughter was a virgin. Two years later, a court ruled that Al Enezi was not responsible for his actions and he was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

  In a second case in 2002, three brothers tortured their sister for ten days, tied her hands behind her back and took her to the desert where they shot and then buried her. The girl had run away from home with a friend and was caught by the police, who turned her over to her family on the condition that they would not harm her. This was after the girl had attempted to commit suicide in police custody, telling a police officer that she feared a much harsher punishment from her family.

  The Arab Times reported on 10 August 1994 that a young man had killed his sister because she had left the house to look for a job in a commercial area. A man who suspected that the girl had run away from home informed the authorities of her whereabouts. When she was brought home, her brother handcuffed her, drove to the desert, slit her throat and buried her there. He then turned himself in to the police.

  Almost a year later, Reuters reported a story of a twenty-one-year-old Kuwaiti man who stabbed his sixteen-year-old sister to death after she told him that three men had raped her in the Kuwaiti desert. The suspect told interrogators that he persuaded his sister to come along with him to the desert by telling her he was taking her to the police station to report the incident. He stabbed his sister thirty-five kilometres north-east of Kuwait City while she was telling him the names of the rapists.

  Turkey

  According to a report from the Centre for Social Cohesion (a London-based think tank), the Kurdish regions of Turkey have some of the highest rates of honour killings in the world. ‘In Turkey Kurds make up more than a quarter of the population [and] carry out a disproportionate number of honour killings.’ Researchers and activists estimate the reported number of women and girls murdered annually at about two hundred. A 1999 survey found that seventy-four per cent of rural women in the south-east of the country believed their husbands would kill them if they had an affair.

  As we shall see, when Kurds move to European countries such as Germany and the UK they bring their traditional codes of behaviour with them and exact a terrible punishment if the women of the family do not provide total obedience.

  In Turkey the decision to kill the woman is taken at a family meeting, at which a young man within the family, a brother or cousin, is designated to carry out the crime. These crimes arise out of collective and deliberate decision and are carried out in public, reinforcing the fear in other women that they would face the same treatment from their own family members.

  One such incident that gave momentum to the powerful lobbying against so-called honour crimes in Turkey was the stoning of Semse Allak in the town of Mardin in November 2002, according to feminist and human rights activist Leylâ Pervizat.44 Allak was stoned with her husband, whom she had been forced to marry after he raped her and she became pregnant, according to a Reuters report. The stoning of the couple was ordered by a tribal council which ruled that ‘her shame was too much to bear’.

  Recently, thanks in part to its efforts to become more European with a view to joining the EU, the Turkish government has placed so-called honour crimes on its agenda. NGOs and Turkish women’s groups have been working hard to eradicate some of the laws that offered leniency to killers in such murders. Their efforts paid off. Certain articles in the Turkish Penal Code that used to grant sentence reductions to perpetrators of so-called honour crimes were removed.45

  Women activists in Turkey have had some success. They targeted the custom whereby men pick a male minor to commit the murder, in the belief that the minor will receive a light sentence. By lobbying Parliament, activists brought about an amendment to Article 38 of the Turkish Penal Code, with the result that any person forcing another to commit a crime will receive the same sentence as the perpetrator. If the person incited is a minor, then the sentence is increased.46

  Women’s movements also reported a positive change in attitudes towards these crimes among the public. They said the year 2004 witnessed a change in both public attitudes and judicial decision-making. Perpetrators of two so-called honour killings were given the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.47

  Unfortunately, there has since been an increase in so-called honour suicide. Yakin Erturk, a special envoy for the UN, was sent to Turkey to investigate suspicious suicides among Kurdish girls and was quoted by the New York Times as saying that some suicides in Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey appeared to be ‘honour killings disguised as a suicide or an accident’ in an effort to evade arrest.

  Even today, honour killing remains relatively common in Turkey. A June 2008 report by the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Directorate says that in Istanbul alone there is one honour killing every week, and states that there have been over a thousand cases during the last five years.

  Most recently and infamously, Turkey has prompted international newspaper headlines as a result of its first reported gay honour killing. Speaking to PinkNews.co.uk, the victim’s partner (who did not wish to be named as he was in fear of his own life) said, ‘Ahmet had been receiving threats for as long as I knew him. He told me this has been going on since his coming out a year ago. When he came out to his parents, who had always suspected, they made him feel guilty about it.’

  Had Ahmet Yildiz’s partner joined him for an ice cream, he is certain he wou
ld have been killed too. But it was late and he decided to go to bed. A few minutes later he heard shooting outside his flat and, rushing downstairs, saw Ahmet trying to escape his attackers by reversing down the street.

  ‘I fought through some onlookers just in time to see him with his eyes open,’ he said, ‘and begged him, “Please don’t die”; then he shut his eyes.’

  Many of Ahmet’s friends, including his partner, believe his family murdered him because he was openly gay. According to Ahmet’s partner, homophobia in Turkey is ‘unbelievably bad’, and he believes it has worsened over the last four years. He’s not optimistic about his chances of bringing Ahmet’s murderers to justice.

  ‘I know the Turkish system. I know I haven’t got a leg to stand on. Human rights are known and accepted in the west but are not freely available in Turkey. I have no claim to his estate and body and cannot even collect my personal belongings from his flat. I cannot even bury my loved one.’

  Egypt

  One of the most horrific cases of so-called honour killing to be widely reported in the local news media occurred in Cairo in August 1987, when a father decided to kill his daughter for eloping. Marzouk Ahmed Abdel-Rahim chopped off his twenty-five-year-old daughter’s head and carried it down the street saying, ‘Now, the family has regained its honour.’ He then surrendered to police.

  Studies of so-called crimes of honour are few and far between. One of the small number of fairly recent reports, published in 1996, came from Egypt’s National Centre for Social and Criminal Research. The study found that out of 843 murders committed in 1995, fifty-two were so-called honour killings. Activists have stated on several occasions since that the numbers are very likely to be much higher and in 1999 it was reported that ten per cent of all murders in Egypt were honour killings.48