Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  Berlin-based Muslim leaders were at pains to stress that there is no basis for honour killings in the Quran. But they’ve also been criticized for not expressing clear condemnation. ‘We’ve preached twice in the last year on human rights, saying that it is forbidden to kill, and so on,’ Huseyin Midik, a representative of Germany’s largest association of mosques, told the BBC. ‘Our job is to explain Islam. That’s what has a permanent effect – clearing up certain false ideas about Islam in people’s minds.’

  But the killings continue among Germany’s Turkish and Arab minorities. The police have pointed out that there have been forty-five cases between 1996 and 2004, including thirteen in Berlin. One woman was drowned in her bath, and another was stabbed to death by her husband in front of their three-year-old daughter.

  A social worker, who runs a centre for runaways and who wanted to remain anonymous, said:

  Some were raped – by an uncle, by a cousin, even by the father – and when they should get married they are worried that someone will find out they’re not a virgin anymore. They are afraid that they will be murdered.

  All these girls who come to us are locked up, in the house, by their families. They only go to school because they have to by law – otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed. They have to stay at home and cook, and care for the sisters and brothers. The parents don’t accept that the girl decides anything by herself.

  Berlin’s Turkish community numbers 200,000. Despite protests and much debate, the killings continue at the same rate. An Iraqi who repeatedly stabbed his twenty-four-year-old wife dead in a Munich street and then, in front of her five-year-old son, set her body on fire, was given a life sentence in 2007. Hours before the attack, a court had granted the couple a divorce. The killer told the court he had no regrets because he believed his wife had cheated on him. ‘I am very happy that I did it. She betrayed me, she deserved it,’ he said on the first day of the trial.

  The debates started again after the honour killing of a sixteen-year-old Afghan immigrant by her brother in 2008 in Hamburg, which is home to more than twenty thousand Afghan immigrants, more than any other European city. The girl, Morsal Obeidi, was ambushed in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant by her twenty-three-year-old brother Ahmad, who stabbed her twenty times.

  Morsal Obeidi had long experienced a tug-of-war between her desire to live like her friends in Germany and her family’s desire to preserve their Afghan lifestyle. Obeidi’s arguments with her brother and father, over things like her appearance, smoking and drinking, often turned physical. She reportedly sought the protection of a child and youth welfare agency to escape the violence on more than one occasion.

  Ahmad reportedly told police that he had killed his sister because she had become too comfortable with western life, as shown by her uncovered hair, makeup and short skirts.91

  While there is excellent (but limited) support from NGOs in Germany (such as Papatya, established in 1986 in Berlin for female immigrants, which offers excellent security and social support), the government still needs to make a massive effort to end so-called crimes of honour.92

  Today, there is now widespread concern across Europe about how many young immigrant women have disappeared and how many of these women have in fact been murdered, abused or forced into marriage. Perhaps most worryingly, the female suicide rate among immigrant communities in Europe is currently three or four times higher than among the native population. Some of these may have been successful attempts to disguise murders, or forced suicides, or actual suicides where women were so desperate to escape abuse that they took their own lives.

  In April 2003, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe acted against so-called honour crimes, adopting a report by the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, entitled ‘So-Called Honour Crimes’. In its resolution, the Parliamentary Assembly expressed its concern regarding the increasing number of crimes committed against women in the name of honour ‘which constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights based on archaic, unjust cultures and traditions’. The resolution also stressed that it was important and urgent to ‘make a distinction between the need to protect minority cultures and turning a blind eye to unacceptable customs that amount to torture and/or a breach of human rights’.

  On the basis of this resolution, recommendations were made for the member states to work actively to end honour-related violence. The Council of Europe called on members to amend national asylum and immigration laws to allow women the right of residency or asylum on the grounds of needing to escape from so-called crimes of honour. It was suggested that all crimes committed in the name of honour should be penalized and that the sentences should reflect the seriousness of the crime.

  Most importantly, the Council called on courts to refuse ‘honour in mitigation, or as a justifiable motive of the crime’. The Council also recommended preventive measures to be adopted by its members, such as awareness campaigns and the provision of special educational programmes for women and men from communities where such crimes occur.

  It also recommended providing support for victims and potential victims who request asylum and personal protection and other services, as well as offering support to NGOs that provide such services. These recommendations remain just that, however, and Europe still has a very long way to go – and action is imperative if we want to save countless young women from a senseless and horrific death in the future.93

  The Parliamentary Assembly acknowledged that the majority of cases in Europe were reported among Muslim or immigrant Muslim communities, but there are a few exceptions.94 One such example of non-Islamic honour-based patriarchal society is found in Italy where, until 1981, the ‘honour’ argument was an admitted legal defence. Men were offered a reduction in penalty from three to seven years if they killed their wives, sisters or daughters to cleanse their or their family’s honour. In Sicily there is still a minimum penalty of three years in prison for murders of ‘honour’.95 Giovanni Morabito, a twenty-four-year-old member of the Mafia, turned himself in to police in Reggio, Calabria, after shooting his older sister Bruna four times in the face in March 2006 because she became pregnant out of wedlock. He told police calmly that he wanted to kill her because she had a son two weeks before the murder with a man who was not her husband. ‘It is a question of honour. I would have shot her in the back, but she turned round. I am not sorry. On the contrary, I am proud of what I did.’ Investigators believe that Morabito had in fact shot Bruna because she tried to distance herself from the Mafia. Morabito insisted that his actions were based on the ‘dishonour’ his sister brought on his family. Miraculously, she survived.96

  More recently, in 2006, Italy’s highest court ruled that it was a less serious crime to sexually abuse a teenager if she was not a virgin, a sign that chastity is still a serious concern in Italy. The court ruled in favour of a man who appealed his forty-month sentence for forcing his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter to perform a sex act. His mitigating circumstances were that the victim was not a virgin; he ended up receiving a lower sentence, according to a report that appeared in Ms magazine in the summer of 2006.

  In April 2008, a Sardinian who came to Britain to kill his wife’s lover was jailed for life. The killer stabbed RAF Flight Lieutenant Stephen Keen, aged fifty-four, four times in the throat and neck in front of his wife, Susan Matta, aged fifty-three, at the home they had moved into days earlier in Tiverton, Devon. Stephen bled to death within minutes.

  Prosecutor Martin Meeke QC said that when police arrived Matta calmly told them, ‘I came here to kill the man. I have done what I needed to do. I have done my job. He added that it was an ‘honour killing – that is what I am, an executioner’. Matta denied murder, claiming diminished responsibility, but was convicted by the jury and must now serve at least eleven years before being considered for parole.97

  CHAPTER 14

  Honour in the USA

  When police arrived at a St Louis family home on the evening of 6 November 1989,
they found a mother and father distraught. In the living room, covered in blood, was the body of their sixteen-year-old daughter Palestina, known to all as Tina. A nine-inch knife lay by her side.

  Tina was most parents’ dream daughter. She was a popular, straight-A student with ambitions to become an airline pilot. Her parents told the police that Tina was working for a fast food restaurant and had arrived home at about midnight. Her father, Zein Isa, said that she had recently become rebellious. That night, he said, Tina had come home late and told her parents that she wanted to move out, demanding that they give her five thousand dollars.98

  When they refused, Zein said, Tina pulled a knife from her backpack, and threatened and then attacked him. Zein said he turned the knife on his daughter in self-defence, killing her. His wife Maria supported her husband’s statement.

  News of Tina’s death stunned her classmates. They told the police that Tina had often rebelled against her parents and their ‘old-world traditions’. They also said Tina’s family objected to her choice of boyfriend, a popular honours student – an artist who painted and wrote poems. He was also black, but the trouble arose, her friends said, not so much as a result of his colour but because she had a boyfriend and they felt they could no longer control her. Her friends also said that the daughters of the family were only supposed to work for their parents and they were not supposed to date outside the Muslim faith, nor leave their home without permission.

  Tina was their last daughter who was still living at home and was the most American of the family. She played football at high school, despite her father’s objections. She also defied him to go to the junior prom, from which family members later removed her.

  When the police pointed out that Zein was covered in blood and had cuts on his hands, he said they were defensive wounds. Although the police clearly suspected Zein of murder, they needed to secure proof if a jury was going to be convinced.

  Forensic pathologist Dr Philip Birch performed a wound-pattern analysis on Tina’s body. He found six stab wounds in close proximity in her solar plexus. He later told reporters, ‘She was supposedly involved in a wild, free-for-all fight with a knife and it seemed very odd that all of the injuries were tightly-clustered in a specific area of the body.’

  That’s because stabbing victims usually thrash about, moving their arms and legs. It was highly unlikely that Tina had stayed still and also highly unlikely that her father, who was smaller than her, would have been able to hold his daughter still and stab her at the same time.

  Investigators interviewed the paramedics who were first to arrive on the scene. They said Tina’s arms were stretched out above her head, as if she had been restrained. The only other person in the room who could have held Tina’s arms was her mother, Maria. Forensic analysis revealed Tina’s blood and hair on the inside of the jumper that Maria was wearing at the time.

  The prosecutors were convinced, but had a problem – would a jury believe that a father and mother could kill their own daughter, rather than their own claims that they had acted in self-defence?

  Then investigators were hit with a bombshell. The FBI called them to say that US intelligence had photographed Zein Isa attending a meeting in Mexico with individuals who were known to have ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The FBI suspected that Zein was maintaining a safe house for any Middle Eastern ‘terrorist’ who needed a place to hide.

  As part of their surveillance of Zein, the FBI had placed recording devices in the family home. The tapes had run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but because the Bureau did not consider Zein to be a serious player, they hadn’t yet listened to the recordings.

  The police then had to get the permission of the then Attorney General, Richard Thornberg, to release the recordings, as the publicity surrounding the case would alert others close to Zein and across the USA to the fact that they might be under surveillance.

  Thankfully, Thornberg immediately gave them permission. The seven-minute tape provided them with damning evidence. It appalled the jury of seven women and five men and shocked court officials, who thought they had seen and heard everything before.

  ‘It’s worse than any movie, any film, anything I thought that I would ever hear in my life,’ assistant prosecutor Bob Craddick told the New York Times. It was also totally unique. This was the first time that the entirety of an honour killing and its run-up and aftermath had been recorded in full terrible detail.

  The crucial part of the transcript started with Tina returning home from work.

  Maria: ‘Where were you, bitch?’

  Tina: ‘Working.’

  Zein: ‘We are telling you that if you want to marry that black guy we won’t accept that he marries you. Don’t you have a conscience? It’s fornication! What about your chastity, isn’t it a scandal? ... Here, listen, my dear daughter, do you know that this is the last day? Tonight, you’re going to die.’

  Tina: ‘Huh?’

  Zein: ‘Do you know that you are going to die tonight?’

  [There is a pause, then screaming from Tina.]

  Tina: ‘Mother, please help me! Mother, can’t you make him stop?’

  Zein: ‘Keep still, Tina!’

  Tina: ‘Mother, please help me!’

  Mother: ‘Huh? What do you mean?’

  Tina: ‘Help! Help!’

  Mother: ‘What help?’

  Maria: ‘Are you going to listen? Are you going to listen?’

  Tina: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes, I am!’ [coughs] ‘No. Please!’

  Maria: ‘Shut up!’

  [Tina continues to cry and scream, but her voice is unintelligible.]

  Zein: ‘Die! Die quickly! Die quickly!’

  [Tina moans, briefly goes quiet, then screams one last time.]

  Zein: ‘Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!’

  Tina was stabbed six times in the chest with a boning knife, which pierced her heart, a lung and her liver. The timing of the tape revealed that her parents waited for thirty minutes before calling the ambulance.

  Zein admitted on the witness stand that he put his foot on his daughter’s mouth to keep her quiet. His wife held her daughter’s arms so she couldn’t escape.

  Further analysis of the tapes in the weeks leading up to the murder revealed that Zein was planning the murder of his daughter during this time. ‘She threatened me,’ he told his wife, ‘and I’ll put the knife in her hand after she falls. Leave the story to me.’

  Soraia Salem, one of Tina’s sisters who no longer lived at home, said the system had failed her sister. She said the family sought help from the police in the months before the murder, even asking for Tina to be placed in a foster home. But prosecutors said they found only one police report.

  Her parents were both given the death sentence. Zein Isa died of diabetes while on death row on 17 February 1997. Maria’s death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

  After the verdicts were read, a friend of the family who called herself Mrs Abraham expressed her dismay at the jury’s failure to acknowledge the Palestinian culture. ‘I feel it’s not right. We follow our religion.’ She said the Isas had to discipline their daughter or lose respect. ‘They’d be embarrassed in front of everybody in the country like somebody when they go without their clothes outside.’

  Amazingly, the USA seems to be startlingly unaware of so-called honour killings. The UK’s Metropolitan Police and the Foreign and Commonwealth’s Forced Marriage Unit regularly receive calls from US law enforcement officers looking for information on these crimes. That officers feel obliged to search abroad for answers highlights just how little honour killings are understood in the USA, a country with more than its fair share of incidents of domestic abuse as well as one of the largest immigrant populations in the world.

  A UNIFEM report issued in 2003 stated that the health-related costs of rape, physical assault, stalking and homicide by intimate partners against their spouses in the USA amount to more than $5.8 billion e
very year. The US Department of Justice has found that women are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes committed by intimate partners than men, especially when a weapon is involved. Moreover, women are much more likely to be victimized at home than in any other place.99

  The Violence Policy Centre prepared an annual study detailing the reality of homicides committed against women and entitled When Men Murder Women. The latest study by the centre involved an analysis of the most recent Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data submitted to the FBI in the ten states with the highest female victim/male offender homicide rates in 2004.100 According to the centre, there were 1,807 females murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents. For homicides in which the victim-to-offender relationship could not be identified, ninety-two per cent of female victims (1,547 out of 1,689) were murdered by someone they knew. Of female homicide victims who knew their killers, sixty-two per cent (966) of were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.101 There are no known figures for murders within immigrant communities, or for honour killings. It is interesting to note, however, that there have been cases that seem to demonstrate an inequality in how men and women are sometimes treated by US courts.

  For example, Jacqueline Hunt of Equality Now said her organization adopted a case of a woman who was killed by her husband in Maryland on 9 February 1994 several hours after finding her in bed with another man. Kenneth Peacock, a trucker from Maryland, kicked the man out of his home at gunpoint and then shot his wife Sandra in the head with his hunting rifle a few hours later.

  Peacock fired once at his wife but missed her and he had to reload his rifle before fatally shooting her. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Judge Robert Cahill made some extraordinarily sympathetic statements when passing judgement: ‘I seriously wonder how many married men … would have the strength to walk away … without inflicting some corporal punishment, whatever that punishment might be. I shudder to think what I would do … I am forced to impose a sentence . . . only because I think I must do it to make the system honest.’ He sentenced Peacock to eighteen months.