Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  Action Alert criticized Judge Cahill, saying his statements in the Peacock case indicated a disregard for violence against women and a devaluation of the victim’s life, as well as perpetuating the notion that married women in particular were the property of their husbands who had the right to inflict violence on them or kill them. ‘When such statements are made by a judge acting in an official capacity, they represent state authority and are particularly dangerous to the rule of law and the fundamental right of all women to equality and equal protection of the law.’

  Hunt said, ‘It is the changing of perception from that of women as property with no rights to that of women as equal partners that is the biggest challenge in our work to stop these crimes.’

  The effectiveness of US law enforcement agencies is undeniable. In almost all of the cases reported, the perpetrators are in jail, but nothing has been put in place for the purposes of prevention. Immigrant community groups are seemingly reluctant to draw attention to a phenomenon they feel will further exacerbate the hostility already directed towards them since 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  This is despite the fact that the US media have woken up to the problem and have reported on scores of recent cases. For example, in January 2008 in Chicago, firefighters were called to a blaze at an apartment complex where more than seventy people were inside. Some people raced downstairs while others jumped from balcony windows. Remarkably, most escaped without serious injury.

  The culprit was Subhash Chander, who confessed he had started the blaze after his daughter, Monika Rani, and her husband, Rajesh Kumar, married without his consent, which he saw as ‘a cultural slight’. Kumar was from a lower caste than Rani.102

  Monika, aged twenty-two, her husband and their three-year-old son perished in the fire. The autopsy revealed that Monika was five months pregnant with their second child.

  Chander, aged fifty-seven, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, aggravated arson and intentional homicide of an unborn child.103

  Smita Narula, the faculty director of the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law who has studied the effects of the Indian caste system, said violence over caste differences and inter-caste marriages still occurred in India, although discrimination against the lowest caste has been outlawed for decades. ‘What is surprising,’ Ms Narula said, ‘is that it might happen here.’

  It is happening a lot more often than people realize. Also in January 2008, a double honour killing rocked the small town of Lewisville, Texas.

  ‘Ma’am, what is your address?’ the emergency line operator asked. A woman had just called in to report that she and her sister had been shot.

  ‘I‘m dying,’ she said, crying. Then the line went dead.

  The police spent the next hour trying to pinpoint the location of the phone signal when another call came in from a hotel employee to report a taxi in the hotel’s cab queue with no driver and a body slumped in the passenger seat and another in the back seat.

  At the scene, police found the bodies of seventeen-year-old Sarah Yaser Said and her eighteen-year-old sister, Amina Yaser Said. The car was quickly traced to their father, Yaser Abdel Said, a fifty-year-old Egyptian-born cab driver.

  Yaser Abdel Said has been on the run since that night. Police believe that he may have successfully fled the country.104

  The teenagers were inseparable and popular students. Their mother, Patricia Said, called for her husband to turn himself in to authorities. Their nineteen-year-old brother, Islam Said, simply said his father ‘messed everything up’.

  There had been conflict between father and daughters over their adaptation to western life, including relationships they may have had with non-Muslim boys. This clashed starkly with the strict Middle Eastern culture in which Yaser Abdel Said grew up. Said immigrated to the USA in 1983 and was granted citizenship in 1997.

  In 1998 the girls, still children, accused their father of sexual abuse, according to an investigation carried out by the Dallas Morning News. The charges were later dropped after the girls said they had made up the story. Fellow students described their classmates arriving to school with injuries consistent with abuse. One student said Amina told him about her father walking into her bedroom waving a gun.

  The month before he killed them, in December 2007, Yaser Abdel Said reported his two daughters and their mother missing to the Lewisville Police Department. According to a police report, the next day Patricia Said called police to say that she and the two teens were safe but that ‘she was in great fear for her life’ and that concern for their well-being had prompted them to flee.

  The missing persons’ case was closed. ‘We were able to verify that their welfare was no longer in question, so we closed that report,’ Captain Keith Deaver, a spokesman for the Lewisville police told ABC News. The three returned to Lewisville on New Year’s Eve, the day before the fatal shooting.

  Significantly, in October 2008, the FBI used the term ‘honour killing’ for the first time when it made Yaser Abdel Said the ‘featured fugitive’ on its website. This is the first official recognition that honour killings take place in the USA and represents a welcome and long overdue change.105

  Later that same year, on 5 July 2008, in Jonesboro, Georgia, Chaudhry Rashid strangled his twenty-four-year-old daughter Kanwal with a bungee cord. On 1 July she had filed for divorce from the man she had been forced to wed in Pakistan. Police found Rashid sitting behind a vehicle in the driveway. ‘My daughter is dead,’ he told police. He said he could not accept the ‘disgrace’ a divorce or affair would bring on his family, according to a police spokesperson. In court, a detective quoted Rashid: ‘God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter.’106

  A few weeks earlier in Monroe County, New York, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant from Afghanistan, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing his nineteen-year-old sister, Fauzia. Afterwards, he told Monroe County sheriff’s investigators that he attacked his sister because she had disgraced their family and was a ‘bad Muslim girl’.

  His lawyer said that Mohammad, who emigrated to the USA with his family from war-ravaged Afghanistan, may be suffering from a stress-inflicted mental disorder that could mitigate the attack on his sister. ‘It was getting to be quite a heated argument,’ he said. ‘I suspect that at least some element of this triggered something in him related to his past.’

  Mental illness first became a defence in a so-called crime of honour when, on 15 April 2004, Ismail Peltek, an immigrant from Turkey, stabbed and beat his wife to death and wounded two daughters at their home in Scottsville. He told investigators that he was attempting to restore family honour that had been lost when his wife and one daughter were sexually assaulted by a relative and the other daughter was ‘sullied’ by a medical exam. Peltek was allowed to plead not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect and was transferred to a psychiatric centre.

  The defence of temporary insanity, which in some ways parallels Article 98 in Jordan, is starting to be used in this context. Prosecutors need to be aware of the psychology of honour crimes, and in particular that perpetrators may have been plotting them for some time.

  Perhaps the most clear-cut case of premeditated honour killing was that committed by Chiman Rai, a sixty-nine-year-old businessman of Indian origin living in the USA. Rai emigrated with his family from India in 1970 and taught mathematics at Alcorn State University in Mississippi for a decade before opening a supermarket and a hotel in Kentucky.

  He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for paying two hitmen $10,000 to murder his son’s black wife as he felt shamed by their inter-racial marriage. The murder was carried out in April 2000, just weeks after his son Rajeev and Sparkle Michelle Rai had married, and a few months after Sparkle had given birth to their child.107

  Twenty-two-year-old Sparkle was home alone with their seven-month-old daughter when a hitman used a young girl as a decoy to get her
to open the door. He strangled her with electrical cord before fetching a knife from the kitchen and stabbing her thirteen times, while her baby was in the same room. Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before delivering the guilty verdict. Rai was sentenced to life without parole.108

  It is clear that when US law enforcement officers investigate an honour killing they make every effort to catch the killers. But they have been slow to recognize the problem officially and to take any steps towards prevention. When a woman complains to the police about being in mortal danger from her husband or parents, they need to take it seriously and employ similar tactics to those suggested at the end of chapter 12. Unfortunately, it seems as though we will see many more horrific honour killings in the USA before policy-makers get round to legislating for their prevention.

  Honour killings have also taken place in Canada, where again no reliable figures exist. Recent cases include that of a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped and strangled in March 2004 by her father and brother because she had tarnished the family name. The following month, a man brutally murdered his wife and daughter after finding out that his brother had molested them. A teenage girl with a Turkish background had her throat cut by her father after he found out she had a Christian boyfriend.

  Dr Amin Muhammad, a professor of psychiatry at the Memorial University of Newfoundland who has studied these killings in Canada, said, ‘We discovered through our different discussions with lawyers in Canada that it happens here ... When people come and settle in Canada they can bring their traditions and forcefully follow them.’ Presciently, he warns, ‘You will see, ten years down the road, this will not be very new even for a society like Canada.’109

  We need to act now.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Road to Real Honour

  ‘Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development, and peace.’

  Kofi Annan

  Today, many crimes of honour are fed by the clash of old and new. As the old world has migrated to the west, countless conflicts have arisen between adolescent children and their parents. In Middle Eastern countries, where concepts of honour have played a part in traditional life for thousands of years, sudden, headlong and rapid urbanization coupled with speedy population growth has meant that millions of people must adapt to a radically different, ever-evolving lifestyle, dependent on a highly volatile and competitive market economy.

  Part of this conflict comes from the ongoing worldwide transition in women’s status and roles, with women becoming a vital and fast-growing part of the labour force. This change in the status and role of women has been very rapid and the related empowerment it brings clashes with long-established conservative attitudes.

  Victimization of and discrimination against women happens at all levels worldwide, so it is important to understand the links between so-called honour crimes and other forms of discrimination against women. There is much work to be done here.

  In western Europe, activists have convinced some legislators and governments to alter laws to provide more protection for immigrant women and children. Amendments have included introducing stiffer punishments for families that force their daughters to undergo female genital mutilation and for perpetrators of so-called honour crimes regardless of the ‘cultural and traditional excuses’ that killers usually hide behind. Other amendments have been made to raise the legal age of marriage in order to prevent forced early marriages for migrant men and women alike. Changes in the law to remove various clauses that provide leniency, such as Article 98 in Jordan, are an essential part of ending so-called honour killings. Of course, education is another vital tool in ending so-called crimes of honour and I believe the Sharaf Heroes project in Sweden provides an important and successful model to follow. Including men in the drive to change cultural attitudes to and beliefs about these crimes is essential and will help many communities to question their acceptance of these murders. Governments need to follow this example and must work with groups like the Sharaf Heroes to change the attitudes and beliefs of those people who use outdated ideas of honour to stifle and control women. Governments must provide financial support for hot-lines and shelters for abused women. Far too much reliance is placed on overstretched and underfunded NGOs and charities, such as IKWRO in the UK, which saves the lives of dozens of men and women each year, but could do so much more with increased funding and support.

  The education and emancipation of women is of course also fundamental to change. A huge part of this comes about as women use the chances available in this changing world to fight to improve society – and to educate their sons and daughters. Women are now occupying more powerful positions in the workplace, not because of who they know, but thanks to their own merits. I hope this will help move the focus from women’s virginity and chastity to their skills and education.

  There also needs to be a focus on raising public awareness and I strongly believe that one of the most effective methods in reducing honour-based murder is to highlight and humanize each killing and crime and make it known to everyone, including legislators, the media, the public and the relevant authorities.

  NGOs need to start looking beyond the dismissive statements often fed to them by politicians; that ‘there are more important issues to tackle’, for example. The protection of every woman’s life should be a key issue for the government and community alike. Activists must question and hold officials in decision-making positions publicly accountable for the souls of murdered women and men.

  There also needs to be more in-depth research into the root causes of these murders, including the consequences for the entire family, the psychological and economic impact on the killer, close relatives and extended family members. Such knowledge could be used effectively as part of a preventative educational strategy in schools and other institutions. In traditional societies where family unity is strong, respected figures such as mothers, uncles and fathers should be enlisted to speak out publicly against the crime, especially to teenage boys who are all too often called upon to murder their siblings in the name of honour. Families know that their teenage sons will most likely be sentenced to spend a short period of time in a juvenile centre from which they will be released without a criminal record.

  It has become obvious to me, from all the cases I’ve reported on, that no relative, male or female, wants to kill or be involved in killing a wife, mother or daughter. It is absolutely against human nature. They do it because of a mis-defined concept of honour that has been nurtured since birth. All too often the psychological consequences of murder leave these young men and women deeply troubled, wracked with guilt and alienated by a community who cannot and will not help them come to terms with what they have done.

  A case in point is that of Sarhan, described in chapter 2, who wished the ‘solution’ to restoring his family’s honour were anything but the murder of his own sister. His wish was to be incarcerated for a long time so that other families would think twice before turning one of their family members into a murderer. Governments and NGOs need to utilize murderers like Sarhan who have expressed remorse or regret and encourage them to become advocates for this cause and publicly speak out against these crimes.

  Finally, governments and NGOs also need to be aware that what might work in one country might not work in another. On the surface, so-called honour murders in Pakistan may seem similar to those that occur in Turkey, for example, but the social, political and economic aspects of the crime in each country are quite different and require different solutions. Wherever possible, initiatives should be home-grown and supported by national organizations rather than being enforced or imported from other countries, a strategy that can often cause resentment.

  So-called honour killings are only just starting to receive the attention they deserve and I think any reader
can tell from this book, which only scratches the surface of the situation around the world, that there is still an enormous amount of investigation as well as political and social change needed to end these dreadful crimes.

  There are many countries across the world where the prevalence of honour-based violence has yet to be assessed, one prominent example being China. A Chinese billionaire placed an ad in a newspaper in Shanghai in January 2006 seeking a female virgin to marry and received six hundred applications. He interviewed twenty before finally choosing the ‘lucky’ bride. The New York Times noted in a January 2006 report that this kind of ad has been common since 2004, and they are usually placed by rich Chinese men seeking virgin brides. These ads and a report by a Chinese newspaper drew mixed reactions from the Chinese community, ranging from one woman who said the purpose of saving her virginity was to get a good price for it, to others who described the girls as selling themselves like merchandise. The obsession with female virgins in China prompted a forty-three-year-old man to purchase the virginity of seventeen schoolgirls in Nanyang, Henan Province, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily in May 2006. In China, suicide has become the main cause of death among people aged between twenty and thirty-five, with twenty-five per cent more women than men taking their lives. It is not currently known whether this has anything to do with honour.

  * * *

  While writing this book, I have often asked myself, ‘What is real “honour”? Can “honour” be attributed to a reputation, a social, financial or professional status? Is it the quality of being respectable and deserving of a good name and adhering to moral principles? Or is it exclusively dependent on the behaviour of female relatives?’

  It is clear that people across the world have very different definitions of honour. For example, these statements were published in a UN report in November 2005: