In May 2007, nineteen-year-old Shawbo Ali Rauf was taken from her home in Birmingham to Iraqi Kurdistan where she was stoned to death. Her crime was having unknown numbers on her mobile telephone – which proved to her family that she was having an affair. The British police refused to prosecute her husband, despite protests carried out by Kurdish women’s groups.66
There are no figures that state how many of the young women that disappear from the UK are murdered. We don’t even know how many British girls are bundled off to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh each year, but according to Jasvinder Sanghera, writing in The Times, the figure is in the thousands. ‘Some three hundred girls aged thirteen to sixteen have disappeared off the school registers in Bedford alone,’ she wrote, ‘so many of these girls are intimidated or subjected to actual violence as they try to resist their parents’ wishes.’
There may be many other reasons for an honour killing. A twenty-seven-year-old Sikh woman fled her marital home because she feared that her in-laws were planning to kill her for failing to produce a child. She had passed fertility tests but still had fertility treatment forced upon her. She suspected that her husband was infertile and it was this that had sealed her fate.
A more typical British victim was Samaira Nazir, a twenty-five-year-old businesswoman and graduate of Pakistani origin. In April 2005, after refusing to marry a series of potential husbands, and embarking on a relationship with an Afghan asylum seeker, she was summoned to the family home. After an argument, her brother, her father and her seventeen-year-old cousin cut her throat and stabbed her seventeen times.
Nazir’s father was bailed and he seized the opportunity to flee to Pakistan. He’s still at large and unlikely to face British justice any time soon as there’s no extradition treaty between the UK and Pakistan. Thankfully, Samaira’s brother and cousin were both convicted of murder.67
In 1998, Bachan Athwal, a Sikh grandmother, arranged for her family to murder Surjit Athwal, her twenty-seven-year-old daughter-in-law. Surjit, a mother of two, was a customs officer at Heathrow airport. She was having an affair and was planning to divorce Bachan’s son, to whom she had been married for ten years – the result of a parental arrangement.
Soon after hearing this news, Bachan convinced her son Sukhdave, aged forty-five, that Surjit should die for shaming him – not only for having an affair but because she cut her hair short, smoked and consumed alcohol. Surjit was lured to India under the pretext of a ‘family wedding’. Her husband, who remarried after she ‘failed’ to return from India, took out a £100,000 insurance policy on Surjit the day she left.
After the murder, Bachan boasted to her family that her daughter-in-law’s body had been thrown into a river. Bachan and her son sent forged letters in an attempt to fool the police into thinking that Surjit had eloped with another man.
That the case was investigated at all was largely thanks to Surjit’s brother, Jagdeesh Singh, who spearheaded a campaign to get his sister the justice she deserved. He learned of his sister’s murder from two relatives while on a visit to India. ‘She was driven off in a car and taken to the banks of a nearby river,’ he said. ‘She was pulled out of the car, strangled, suffocated to death and then her body was thrown into the river with a view to it being lost for ever.’
The police travelled to India to investigate but drew a blank; a reward of £10,000 failed to persuade anyone to come forward.
‘With the greatest of respect to them,’ Jagdeesh said, ‘all the leading police investigators at the beginning were white, English officers who did not quite appreciate the subtleties and the unseen aspects of honour violence, the details around honour and family and practices within a Punjabi family culture.’
Singh also criticized the British Foreign Ministry for failing to exert pressure on the Indian government to intensify its investigations. He also made the point that a white British woman who vanished in Japan during the same period received a great deal of attention, not only from the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (who refused to meet Jagdeesh Singh and his family) but also from Prime Minister Tony Blair. It wasn’t until 2003, when Singh finally met the new Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, that the government promised to make a serious effort to catch the murderers and in 2007, nine years after the crime, Bachan and Sukhdave Athwal were tried at the Old Bailey.
Surjit’s seventy-year-old mother-in-law claimed she was innocent throughout the trial and wept as she was sentenced to life. Judge Giles Forrester told the pair:
How you could commit this unspeakable act I do not know. There was no motive worthy of the name. You did it because you perceived she had brought shame on the family name.
In reality you murdered her for no better reason than the existence of matrimonial difficulties and the likely breakdown of the marriage. You decided the so-called honour of your family name was worth more than the life of this young woman.68
Surjit’s daughter, Pavan, did not learn the truth about what had happened until August 2008, when she turned seventeen. She had accepted that her grandmother and father had been mistakenly convicted and that her mother had simply abandoned her. Her family hid newspaper reports from her and she even visited her father in Belmarsh Prison while trying to keep up with her schoolwork and looking after her younger brother.
In her first interview, reported in the Independent, Pavan said:
For years I was told that my mum didn’t love us any more and that we should just forget about her. My brother and I grew up hating her because we thought she’d just left us; why would we doubt our dad?
But after I moved out of my uncle’s house in April, they started to threaten me with violence and I began to realize what they were capable of. My aunt Sarbjit told me everything that had happened but it was when I read my mum’s diary that it really hit me. I felt terrible. I was so angry at my dad for telling such terrible lies but I also felt guilty. I wanted to tell my mum that I was sorry for hating her all these years. We used to have so much fun together, even though I know now that she was really unhappy.69
Her ten-year-old brother was placed in foster care by the authorities after Pavan found out the truth. ‘It’s such a relief to know that my brother is safe,’ Pavan told the Independent. ‘It feels like a huge pressure has been lifted from my shoulders. I know telling him the truth is going to be a huge hurdle but I can’t wait to see him again and start living our lives without all the lies.’
In December 2008, Pavan organized a memorial service at Heathrow airport (where her mother used to work) to mark the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. She is now waging a campaign to raise £10,000 to bring the Punjab-based killers of her mother to justice.
Sometimes, so-called honour killings can spark violent reprisals – perhaps as the result of the fear that the police are unlikely to bring the perpetrators to justice. In 1999 Haq Nawaz Khan from Walsall shot dead his half-brother ‘Big Ali’ Nawaz Khan. The two men had been close until Big Ali had shot dead Haq’s sister, Shanaz Begum, in Pakistan five months earlier in an honour killing.
On 23 September 2005, Mohammad Shaheen, the co-owner of a taxi firm in Chorlton, Manchester, was shot dead by Khyber Khan, his brother-in-law. Khan, aged twenty-eight, had flown to Manchester from Pakistan to kill Shaheen after his sisters told him that he’d sexually assaulted them. After the killing, Khan’s sisters helped him flee the country. He was eventually arrested in Canada and deported to the UK.70
Sometimes, children are also murdered, intentionally or unintentionally, as the result of an alleged affront to the family honour. On 2 November 2006, one of the most horrific incidents ever seen in the UK took place in Accrington, Lancashire.
Mohammad Riaz was an immigrant from Pakistan’s highly conservative North-West Frontier. He had arrived in the UK at the age of thirty-two after his cousin, Caneze, was sent from the UK to Pakistan to marry him. They had four children together, three girls and a boy.
Thirty-nine-year-old Caneze was confident and successful and was described by her fr
iends as bright and bubbly; she worked as a campaigner for women’s rights, helping women who felt suppressed by traditional values, and regarded herself as a role model. Caneze, whose mother was English, was highly sociable; she organized women-only swimming groups and had a wide circle of friends. Mohammad, meanwhile, was illiterate, spoke no English, undertook a wide variety of low-paid jobs and spent most of his spare time in the local mosque.
When Caneze’s father died, Mohammad tried to exert his patriarchal authority. He criticized the western dress of his wife and children, and demanded that their daughters finish their schooling as soon as possible so they could be married off in Pakistan. Caneze refused, and also refused to give up work. Mohammad was incensed. Then in 2006 Adam, their seventeen-year-old son, developed leukaemia. This failure of Mohammad to produce a healthy son only added to his rage; the final straw came when his eldest daughter told him she wanted to become a fashion designer.
On 31 October 2006, Mohammad, who had been drinking heavily, locked the doors and windows of the family home, sprayed the rooms with petrol and set it alight. Once the fire had taken hold, he poured petrol on himself and stepped into the flames. Caneze and their four daughters, aged sixteen, fifteen, ten and three, all died. Mohammad was pulled alive from the burning building by firefighters but died two days later. Adam was in hospital at the time, receiving chemotherapy. He died six weeks after being given the news.71
Caneze’s friend, Shahnaz Hussain, told reporters that the community was frightened that the murders would be labelled an honour killing – there was a fear that if it was labelled as such, then some people would feel that it was in some way justified.
A local police constable and Family Liaison Officer, Steve Cox, who knew Caneze’s family said, ‘There are men here in East Lancashire who are prepared – and I’ve seen it first hand – to subject their female children in particular to psychological abuse, physical abuse, forced marriages, and keeping them prisoner in the house.’ Barry Khanan, Caneze’s brother, said:
You can’t bring the old way of life from Pakistan to England and expect it to work. And I don’t think people should give any reason or excuse to this kind of action. It’s cold-blooded murder. There was no honour involved ... He was so selfish, and pig ignorant that he couldn’t see what he was doing to his family. He was closing himself off from his family. He was isolating himself, all because he wanted things his way. I’m the man; I shall have it my way. And yes it does come from his background, where he’s brought up to believe that he is dominant. He’s the male, he’s the husband, he’s the father. That right or wrong, things should be done his way. But where’s the honour in murdering five innocent people?72
PC Cox agreed:
Honour is completely the wrong word. It is a control murder. That’s what these are. It is not honour crime; it is ‘control crime’ and fear of losing that control.
It really is beyond belief that he felt this – the five graves – was the answer to losing control of his family. What is honourable about this? Caneze had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, she was doing so much that was good. Every one of those children there are testament to that, and they have all suffered because of one man and his completely twisted view on life. And I’ve got to say, that whatever twisted multi-version there was, it is about subjecting your own children to complete and utter brutality, whether it is physical or psychological, just because they’ve made you feel ashamed. Women are dying and being brutalized in this situation many times throughout Britain at the moment. Cultural sensitivity is absolutely no excuse for moral blindness, and there’s too much fannying about going on on both sides, from both communities, and as long as that remains the situation, then young women are going to keep dying. It’s as simple as that.
Another of Caneze’s friends and a colleague, Mussurut Zia, said:
This had something to do with all of us. It was Caneze who died in the end, but it had something that impacted on all of us. And we all had to rethink our positions within our families and within our homes. The heart of it is that it is a patriarchal society, a male-dominated society, and that dominance is extended to women. Women are chattels to be done with as the owner sees fit, and this type of behaviour that men indulge in is perpetuated from generation through to generation, so that each generation following on is going to think that is the right thing to do, and that is the only way to live.
This wasn’t the only case in the UK to involve the murder of innocent children. Thirty-two-year-old Uzma Rahan arrived in Manchester in 1992, thanks to an arranged marriage. She adopted an increasingly western lifestyle, making friends independently and dressing less conservatively. Her husband, Rahan Arshad, who worked as a taxi driver, found her behaviour increasingly frustrating. Uzma told her friends that she was afraid of her husband, that she would be the victim of an ‘honour killing’, saying, ‘Count the days before he kills me.’
Soon afterwards Arshad killed Uzma by hitting her twenty-three times with a baseball bat. He then beat his three children to death. At his trial, Arshad told the court that he had been angered by his wife’s decision to wear tight jeans and tops. He said, ‘It wasn’t right for a mother and someone who came from Pakistan to change the way she dressed all of a sudden. It wasn’t right at all.’73
On 14 May 2008, IKWRO held a conference in London on honour-based violence and honour killings. Diana Nammi, head of IKWRO, said, ‘Our policy is to never turn back any woman. In 2007 we rescued seventy women and two men. There are many more who need our help whom we never get to hear about. There are lots of missing women and many self-harm to try and escape their families.’
According to 1992 figures, South Asian women are three times more likely to commit suicide than white women in the UK. Some of these suicides may be murders disguised as such and in some cases the harassment by relatives/in-laws for alleged failings encouraged victims to commit suicide. Many figures relating to so-called honour crimes in the UK are unreliable as they do not account for cases where women have been taken to Pakistan and elsewhere to be murdered.
Nammi also said:
These women are all victims of family members, fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters. Bounty hunters and contract killers are paid to track them down. Once on they run they are never safe. One cab driver that knew a victim’s family took her home instead of to a refuge. There is still a great deal of work to be done. One sixteen-year-old who recently ran away from a forced marriage said: ‘If your family doesn’t get you then the British government will.’ Her father was arrested and held for two hours before he was released without charge.
Nammi argued that there needs to be better awareness and support from the UK government. Women on the run from their families should not be sent home, as has so often been the case. At the very least, the family should not be told until the woman is safe and her case can be properly investigated. It is hard for many people to understand that these women’s worst enemies are those who are closest to them.
A recent case that won a great deal of attention was that of the NHS doctor Humayra Abedin, aged thirty-three, who was held captive by her family in Bangladesh for four months while they plotted a forced marriage to a Muslim man she had never met.
A friend of Dr Abedin, who had lived with her in East London, raised the alarm after receiving a text. ‘Please help me. My life is in danger. They have locked me in house. My job is at stake. They are making my life hell,’ the message said.
Dr Abedin had a Hindu boyfriend in London, and it was this that had angered her Muslim family.
She was tricked into flying to Bangladesh in August 2008 when her family told her that her mother was seriously ill. Once she arrived she was allegedly beaten, drugged and held against her will. The doctor’s boyfriend, a forty-four-year-old Bangladeshi software engineer, said, ‘Her family told her they’d prefer her to die than return to London.’74
The High Court issued an injunction under the new Forced Marriage Act (2007), demanding that Dr Abedin be
allowed to return to Britain. Though the Act is not enforceable in Bangladesh it was hoped that it would place pressure on the Bangladeshi authorities. It worked. In December, Judge Syed Mahmod Hossain ordered Dr Abedin’s parents to return her passport, driver’s licence and credit card.75
In the west, the UK is at the moment leading the way in the fight against so-called crimes of honour and the Forced Marriage Act is a step in the right direction. It is aimed at protecting the victims of forced marriages and preventing these marriages from taking place. Courts will be able to make orders to protect the victim or the potential victim and help remove them from that situation. Anyone breaching the orders can, and most likely will, be arrested.
Bridget Prentice, a minister at the Ministry of Justice said, ‘This legislation sends out a clear message that forced marriage, a breach of an individual’s basic right to choose who and when they marry, is not acceptable in our society. It will enable us to make better use of civil court remedies to provide protection to those placed in this intolerable position.’
The joint Foreign and Commonwealth and Home Office Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) was launched in January 2005 as the UK’s ‘one stop shop’ for developing government policy on forced marriage, co-ordinating outreach projects and providing support and information to those at risk. The unit handles approximately 250–300 cases per year, fifteen per cent of which involve men. Officers from the unit have travelled abroad on many occasions to try and trace people who they think may have been abducted. In the first nine months of 2008, the FMU was contacted by 1,308 members of the public who alerted them to suspected cases.
Although the FMU sees cases from around the world – including East Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe – the majority are from South Asia. Approximately sixty-five per cent of cases involve families of Pakistani origin and twenty-five per cent involve families of Bangladeshi origin. Around a third of cases dealt with by the FMU involve children, some as young as thirteen. The unit also assists reluctant sponsors (those forced into marriage and subsequently forced to sponsor a visa application) and has dealt with over a hundred of these cases since May 2006.
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