[lit-ideas] British Honor killings
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:00:11 -0800
"In January 2002, a young Swedish woman named Fadime Sahindal, who'd become
a media star after refusing to submit to a forced marriage - and whose
ethnically Swedish boyfriend later died under mysterious circumstances - was
murdered by her father. On his arrest, he readily confessed and called his
dead daughter a whore. The story made headlines across Scandinavia. But
this and other high-profile cases are only the tip of the iceberg; most
honor killings in Europe, it's believed, never even come to the attention of
the authorities. In 2004, Britain's prosecutor began reinvestigating no
fewer than 117 suspicious deaths or disappearances to determine if honor
killings had taken place. Over a six-month period in 2004-2005, eleven
women were victims of honor killings in The Hague alone.
"Here's a sampling of representative British cases. In south London in
2002, a young woman who'd been raped was murdered by her family to restore
its honor. The next year, in Birmingham, twenty-one-year-old Sahjda Bibi
was stabbed twenty-two times in her wedding dress by a cousin for marrying a
divorced man and not a relative. In the same year, a Yorkshire teenager was
murdered by her father in Pakistan over a relationship the family hadn't
known about until her boyfriend dedicated a love song to her on
Pakistani-language radio. In London in 2003, a lively sixteen-year-old
London girl named Heshu Yones - who'd fallen in love with a Lebanese
Christian boy and planned to run away with him - was stabbed eleven times by
her father, who then slit her throat. In a farewell note to her father,
Heshu referred to the frequent beatings he'd given her: 'Bye Dad, sorry I
was so much trouble. Me and you will probably never understand each other,
but I'm sorry I wasn't what you wanted, butt there's some things you can't
change. Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick. I
hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me, it was fun being on the
receiving end. Well done.'
"At the trial, the prosecutor noted that Heshu's father 'didn't approve of
her more Westernized lifestyle - wanting to be with friends and having a
mobile phone.' Though the Muslim Council of Britain issued a statement
saying that it didn't condone Heshu's murder, Council spokesman Inayat
Bunglawala added that 'many Muslims would understand Yones being upset by
his daughter's apparent rejection of her faith' and by her 'growing up not
with his value system but someone else's. As a journalist Val MacQueen
noted in reporting this story, this was 'the value system of a country that
the father, a Kurdish refugee, had begged on his knees to get into.' It was
revolting, moreover, to see Bunglawala referring sympathetically to the
'value system' of a man who'd just hacked his child to death."
Lawrence
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