Dishonorable Killings

Published: 13/06/2007

Honour Killings
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Mahmod Mahmod says he loved his daughter Banaz, that he ‘could not harm her’. That is why he arranged for the spirited twenty year old to be strangled by his brother Ari and other family gangsters then folded and packed her corpse into a suitcase- all neat and ready to travel to paradise early. What love, what sacrifice. Now the men go to prison feeling unbeaten warriors, honour heroes, enforcers of female ‘virtue’ unto death, upholders of barbaric cultural values that legitimate female enslavement and submission. In their newspaper pictures you see flinty resolve. Their lips are sealed – what abominations must have passed through them as they plotted and threatened then slaughtered the poor woman. Their eyes shine bright. No shades of self doubt, you feel, ever dim the glint of absolute certainty and machismo.

Before he killed her Mahmod Mahmod had forced Bazan into marriage to an allegedly abusive husband. She rejected this life, refused her chosen destiny and left the spouse, finding love with another, like her family an Iraqi Kurd, though from another tribe. The lovers were seen kissing in a street in South London and that was the beginning of the end of her life. Bazan’s older sister Bekhal, 22, told the court of her own physical and mental torture inflicted on her by her extended family. She left home and alleges was beaten up for the shame she thus brought them.

The first time in our legal history when someone was convicted of an ‘honour’ murder was in 2003, and that case also involved a rigid Kurdish Iraqi father unprepared to accept that living in the west had made his child yearn for freedoms and rights. They lived in Acton, a mile from my flat. Heshu Yones was a gorgeous, bright sixteen year old hacked to death by her dad, Abdallah who couldn’t bear what she was becoming. Why, you wonder do they want to come to live in countries where their children cannot but absorb western values? Before she died Hesho wrote this letter:’ me and you will probably never understand each other, but I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted , but there’s some things you can’t change. Hey for an older man you sure have a strong punch and kick. I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me. It was fun being a sixteen year old at the receiving end. Well done’.

I can’t describe to you the fury and utter hopelessness I feel every time another such case comes to light. That the police once again failed criminally to provide protection to a young woman proves this institution still betrays women, and those from ‘alien’ backgrounds ( in their eyes) even more abysmally so.

Thirty years ago, Asian women started campaigning against the sanctioned brutalisation of girls and women. Then the big story was dowry deaths amongst Hindus and Sikhs– women being burnt to death or forced to kill themselves by in laws dissatisfied with the bridal dowry. There were some murders of the ‘disobedient’ but comparatively few as then the women and girls were still trapped in old values they never thought they could challenge. In the eighties and nineties, the second generation of Asian women got more feisty and so many more were beaten and killed. But attitudes also shifted, thanks to our ceaseless campaigns even when our own lives were threatened by community Alsatians. We barely hear of dowry deaths in Britain these days. In middle class Asian families working women have no interest in men who demand money for marriage.

The third generation came along, are more mouthy and conscious of themselves as individuals. The more permissive youth culture makes conflicts with older values more bitter and bloody, especially within enclaves with recent migrants from places where women have no autonomous existence, as was the case across the UK, remember, until Edwardian times. In my one woman show partly about fearful fathers and fearless daughters I quote Capulet:
‘An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend,
An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets
For, by my soul, I ‘ll ne’er acknowledge thee’

Those heinous values are today more, not less brazenly espoused in too many communities. Honour killings and assisted suicides are growing here, in every Arab country, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh, even among Muslims and Christians in Palestine ( how on earth do they find the time while struggling for economic and political liberation?) We only know of the ones we do. Countless more go unreported because families pretend the woman or girl is ‘back home’ And we know nothing of the scale of honour abuse. The two Kurdish families above were encouraged and protected by their own people, who will undoubtedly have congratulated the slayers for their high mindedness. Good lesson for any other wayward, shameless hussies they will say.

Now we know domestic violence is used against women and children in every society and community. Murders within families of ‘troublesome’ females too are widespread. You only need to look at the growing list of British men who kill their partners and sometimes children because they cannot accept the woman’s decision to end the relationship. Sometimes juries and judges do act as if the crimes are ‘understandable’ The difference though is that their communities and neighbourhoods don’t close ranks and provide cultural cover for the lawless desperados.

The group Kurdish Women Against Honour Killings ( KWAHK) asked a painter Rebwar Saeed to remember Heshu in his paintings. He taught her art when she was ten. At the launch of the works he said:’ In her beautiful eyes many hopes shone forth. Her drawings reflected her dreams of flying off to join the clouds and moon to tell them her secrets’. They dared to dream, these women, and they were snuffed out as more will be until we decide to make the crimes aggravated offences, as is the case with race. Anyone committing an outrage in the name of religion or cultural practice should get longer sentences and have their villainy named as unforgivable. Those who collude should also be tried and put away. One day we will end this vile domestic terrorism against young females. Not in my lifetime though.

Published in The Independent