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July 20, 2006
Special Report - UK: Killing For Muslim "Honor"
Between 1993 and 2001, there have been 109 cases of so-called "honour killings" in Britain. At the start of July, Diana Nammi, the co-founder of the International Campaign Against Honour Killings, which is based in London, stated that over the past year, her organization had received a fourfold increase of women seeking help, fearful that they too may become victims. She said: "The number of honour killings has gone up because more women are realising that they have rights." She said that all of the girls seeking help were Muslim, from Afghan, Iranian and Kurdish families.
She said: "Believe me, many of these women were in danger. Sometimes, families were paying for bounty hunters to look for them."
The International Campaign Against Honour Killings was founded in 2003. On its website is stated: "Over 5000 women and girls are killed every year by family members in so-called 'honour killings', according to the UN. These crimes occur where cultures believe that a woman's unsanctioned sexual behaviour brings such shame on the family that any female accused or suspected must be murdered. Reasons for these murders can be as trivial as talking to a man, or as innocent as suffering rape."
The report by the UN is entitled: "Living Together, Worlds Apart: Men and Women in a Time of Change", and was published in 2000.
Western Resistance reported in May on cases of honour killings from Pakistan, and also Palestinian, Turkish and Kurdish cases. The article argued that the practice is intrinsically linked with customs of arranged and forced marriage. Though dismissed as ethnic custom, honour killings are almost exclusive Muslim practices. The article noted that in Turkey, where recent changes in the law no longer permit a perpetrator of honour killing to receive a light sentence, girls in Kurdish regions were being forced into committing suicide.
In June, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Ms Yakin Erturk, reported on her findings from a visit to Turkey to investigate the rise in girls' suicides. She noted that these cases were linked to traditional pracices, such as forced marriage and domestic violence. She said: "The majority of women in the provinces visited live lives that are not their own but are instead determined by a patriarchal normative order that draws its strength from reference to tradition, culture and tribal affiliation and often articulates itself on the basis of distorted notions of honour. Diverse forms of violence are deliberately used against women who are seen to transgress this order. Suicides of women in the region occur within such a context."
A report from the International Herald Tribune notes that in Turkey, such forced suicides are called "virgin suicides." The report cites the case of Derya, a 17-year old girl from the Kurdish town of Batman. She received the order to kill herself from her uncle, via a SMS text message on her cellphone. The message read: "You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first."
Derya had had a relationship with a boy at school. She knew the risks, as her grandfather had killed her aunt for seeing a boy. Derya tried to kill herself, and failed. After receiving counseling she fled from her family. She said: "This region is religious, and it is impossible to be yourself if you are a woman. You can either escape by leaving your family and moving to a town, or you can kill yourself. In my village and in my father's tribe, boys are in the sky while girls are treated as if they are under the earth. As long as families do not trust their daughters, bad things will continue to happen."
In Britain, cases of honour killings have been shocking the public on a regular basis. The most recent case involved Samaira Aziz (pictured, top right), whose brother and young cousin were given life sentences on July 14. The killing of the bright 25-year old graduate happened in the family home in Southall, West London, when her family decided she had to pay for having an affair with a Muslim man, not of her family's choosing.
As her brother had been led away by police after killing Samaira, he had said: "There had been a problem with my sister. She does not wish to have an arranged marriage. We only allow marriage within the family. My sister wanted to run away from the house and was stopped."
The whole family witnessed the event, and Samaira's father had fled to Pakistan, where there is no extradition treaty, to avoid justice. Her mother had stood by and watched as Samaira was stabbed and then pulled back into the house by her hair as she tried to flee the house. Samaira was stabbed eighteen times, and her throat was cut three times. The two children of Azhar Nazir, her 29-year old brother, were so close to the scene of the killing that they were spattered with blood. The children were aged two and four.
Ann Cryer is the Labour MP for Keighley, a constituency with a high Muslim population. She has campaigned actively against forced marriages, and has commissioned a study which shows that Pakistani Muslim arranged marriages to cousins are increasing the incidence of illnesses caused by inbreeding. She says: "Think about what has happened over the past 30 years: many families have moved here from Pakistan and Kurdish countries and now their children are reaching marriageable age. The number of 'honour killings' is going up because the number of vulnerable women has increased. Often the triggers for these cases are marriages or relationships that the families don't agree with."
Diana Nammi's organization, the International Campaign Against Honour Killings, was founded after the case of Heshu Yones hit the headlines.
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CASE STUDY 1: HESHU YONES
Heshu Yones was murdered by her father on October 12, 2002. A young and vivacious 16-year old, she was killed by her 48-year old Kurdish Iraqi father, Abdalla Yones, because she had become too "westernised".
The family lived in an apartment in Acton, West London, on the third floor (US = fourth floor) of a housing block.
Her father had arrived in Britain 10 years previously, as a political refugee. He found out that Heshu had started a relationship with Samnizam Elkhouri, an 18 year old Lebanese Christian.
He stabbed Heshu eleven times, and cut her throat in the process. He left her to bleed to death. Her body was found with the blade still protruding from the teenager's throat. The knife had been wielded with such force that its tip had broken off when it smashed into bone in her neck.
Abdalla Yones was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 29, 2003. He had cut his own throat and tried to jump over a balcony after killing his daughter, but in court, he had used various ploys to exonerate himself.
Det Insp Brent Hyatt, of the Metropolitan Police's Serious Crime Directorate said of his defense: "After hacking his daughter to death, Mr Yones has attempted every defence, from psychiatric and diminished responsibility to extreme provocation, in order to save his own skin. As with every bullying perpetrator of domestic violence I have ever dealt with, Mr Yones turned out to be quite the coward."
He also stated: "There was nothing, nothing at all honourable about her murder."
DI Hyatt said: "Abdalla Yones killed her to shield his so-called honour. A few months before her death, she had been taken to Kurdistan to be married off. But the marriage didn't take place because the groom's family discovered she was not a virgin. Abadalla brought Heshu back and decided to eliminate her. The family approved of the crime."
Abdalla Yones was the first person to admit killing for "honour" in Britain.
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Many cases of honour killings and violence against young Muslim women occur when a girl chooses to have a relationship "outside the faith". As well as breaking the rule of marrying the person chosen by her parents, a girl in such a relationship transgresses against Muslim principle. Though a Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim, it is strictly forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim.
Abdul Fattah Idris, professor of comparative religious laws at Al-Azhar University in Cairo states: "Muslim women are prohibited by the Shari'a (Muslim law) from marrying people of the book (i.e., Jews and Christians)."
On May 26 Western Resistance reported on the case of Zena, a Muslim woman who married a British non-Muslim, Jack Briggs. The couple had eloped after Zena's family had urged her to marry a man from Kashmir.
As a result of their marriage, the couple had to remain on the run for 13 years. Zena's father hired a private detective and bounty hunter to track them down. Zena's brothers told Jack he would end up "in bin bags". The brothers hacked into social security computers to find their addresses - they even smashed the windows of Jack's mother's house.
The couple were forced to move from location to location around the British Isles, never staying in one place for too long. At every new apartment or home, Jack Briggs had to check if it would be easy to escape if they became attacked. He slept with a baseball bat under his bed.
The threats of violence against Muslim women for not conforming are sickening in their frequency. A report from the UK Daily Mail from Friday, June 9, tells the story of a woman who married a Christian, but had similar threats made against her. Inshana was expected by her parents to marry a Bangladeshi cousin, 30 years older than herself.
She wrote: "It was like a bad dream. He was 49, bald and weighed 19 stone (266 pounds). He waddled into the room, and the smell of stale body odour almost made me ill. He sat next to me, and I saw that he was sweating heavily. He kept wiping his face with a handkerchief, looking me up and down."
"My uncles were laughing and joking, and when they all started to talk about the "marital bed" I felt physically sick. As soon as my cousin left, I threw myself onto the floor and begged my uncles not to make me marry this man."
"Their answer was to drag me into my bedroom and stub out a cigarette on my foot, for being disobedient. They were both upstanding members of the Asian community, yet they treated me like dirt. My virginity was a mere bargaining point for them - while my happiness and future was irrelevant."
She was rescued from the forced marriage by an aunt, and tore off her hijab and adopted a new name. She became an apostate and adopted Christianity within a year, and soon became engaged to a Christian. Before the wedding she telephoned her family. Inshana says: "My mother didn't want to know, She called me an infidel and said I'd be roasted on a spit for choosing Christianity over Islam."
Inshana had to prevent her family knowing her address, and told no-one of where the wedding would take place, for fear of her family's revenge.
Cases of arranged marriages are often indistinguishable from forced marriages, and when a girl does not agree to marry someone of her family's choosing, she is at risk of violence being used to persuade her, and when that fails, then she becomes vulnerable to honour killing.
Parents will often use all available forms of emotional blackmail to force a girl into an arranged marriage. I know of three girls from Manchester, of Pakistani origin, all sisters, who were forced into arranged marriages. Their father said that if they did not go through with the marriages, then they would give him a repeat of his near-fatal heart attack. Their mother threatened suicide to force them into agreeing to marry.
In April 2002 a Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that a marriage which had been "arranged" in this manner is illegal. Aneeka Sohrab had been emotionally blackmailed into an "arranged" marriage at the age of 16, precisely because her mother Zahida had threatened to commit suicide. Aneeka had been given a week's notice before being married at a Glasgow mosque. Her husband, Raja Sulman Khan, forced her to cook and clean for his entire extended family, and Aneeka fled after a few weeks. Lord McEwan annulled the marriage.
On July 6 this year, a High Court judge ruled on the case of a girl who had been lured to Pakistan by her family on the pretext of a holiday, and then had been forced into marrying a cousin. The girl was told by both her parents that they would kill themselves if she did not go through with the marriage. They also took away her passport. Her husband admitted that he had only wanted the marriage to be able to live in Britain.
Mr Justice Munby annulled this marriage, and called forced marriage an "abomination". He said: "Her lips may have spoken, but not her mind. In my judgment she is not bound by the ceremony. She did not validly consent. She is entitled to the decree nisi of nullity which she seeks."
The pressure on young girls to marry against their will is intolerable, but forced marriages affect an estimated 300 girls a year. Many are taken to Pakistan, out of the reach of British law. A report on how girls are tricked into such arrangements can be found in Christian Science Monitor. Sometimes young Muslim males are also forced into marriages. A BBC Video Report describes how a boy was "betrothed" in a nikah nama ceremony at the age of nine, and later taken to Pakistan, where he was kept in a madrassa in chains until he agreed to marry.
Though forced marriage is intrinsically connected to many cases of honour killing, the British government announced in June that it would not make forced marriage illegal, after being pressured by the Muslim Council for Britain. The MCB claimed that outlawing forced marriage would see children made to give evidence at their parents' trials and could lead to the Muslim community being "stigmatised".
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CASE STUDY NUMBER 2: RUKSHANA NAZ
Rukshana Naz was made by her family to marry at the age of 15. She had been taken to Pakistan and forced to marry. Her subsequent murder by her mother and brother was famous, as it was the first time that the abominable treatment of girls in Muslim homes became widely apparent to a naive British public.
On Tuesday, May 25, 1999, Nottingham Crown Court sentenced Rukshana's mother, Shakeela Naz, and her 22-year old brother Shazad Ali, to life imprisonment. Although Rukshana had married the older man chosen by her family, and borne her husband two children, her marriage was unhappy.
Rukshana, aged 19, had taken up with a lover, and had become pregnant. The lover had been her childhood sweetheart, stated the Observer. Rukshana was pressured by her family to have an abortion, and she refused. She insisted that she wanted a divorce.
Her mother said that the child growing in her belly was "an insult to [her] husband."
Divorce has claimed many victims of honour killings, as it is viewed as something to bring shame upon a family. Rukshana was invited to the family home in Derby. There, her mother held her down by her legs, while her brother throttled her to death with a plastic cord.
She was seven months' pregnant when she was killed.
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The Guardian in 2000 described a litany of cases of abuse and killing, committed in the name of "honour" in Britain. In June 1995, 20-year old Tasleem Begum was killed by her brother-in-law (and cousin) Shabir Hussain. He ran her over in his car, reversed over her body and sped forward once, crushing her three times.
A supermarket worker from Bradford, Tasleem's crime had been to meet a man in the supermarket. She had fallen in love with him. She had been married while young to an older cousin who had gone to live in Pakistan. In October 1996, Hussain was given a life sentence, despite his pleas of "not guilty".
Some of the cases concern mere "suspicion", which can drive a man to kill.
Again in Bradford, in 1999 49-year old Jahangir Hussein was jailed for murdering his wife and two daughters as he assumed they were "having affairs".
Jaspal Sohal was hammered to death by her husband in west London because he was scared she would leave him and damage his "izzat" (personal honour).
A woman in Nottingham died after being kept in her house for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In Birmingham a woman was chained to her kitchen sink for months on end to prevent her leaving the home and behaving immodestly.
In August 2001, Nuziat Khan was found strangled to death in her home in south London. Her husband had been abusive, and it appears that he killed her because she had asked for a divorce to escape the beatings. Her three year old son was in the house when she was killed, and her 15 year old son discovered the body the following day. Her husband fled to Pakistan, knowing he would not be extradited.
Yasmin Akhtar, 35, was kidnapped, strangled and then set on fire in March 2002 after she filed for a divorce from her husband, Mohammed Jamil. Her stepson hired three men to track her down and they strangled her with parcel tape in Surrey when they decided she needed to be silenced. The four men were jailed for life in 2002.
In September 2002, Badshu Miah visited his estranged wife Nurjahan Khatun at her apartment in east London, suspicious that she might be having an affair. He even suspected that his wife was having lesbian liaisons with white women. When he got to the flat, he used a machete and a kitchen knife to kill his wife, her four-year-old daughter and her disabled brother. He received three life sentences.
In December 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service held its first conference on honour killings. Police had decided at the time to review 122 deaths and suspicious disappearances of Asian girls over the past 10 years in an effort to establish how many might be so-called honour killings.
Andy Baker, the head of Scotland Yard's homicide unit said: "We've had a number of incidents of young women being badly burnt where there is not a chip pan in sight."
In Pakistan cases of young women being immolated are common. Recently there has been an increase in acid attacks in Pakistan to settle issues of "honour". The Pakistan Human Rights Commission (HCRP) estimates that there are 1,000 cases of honour killing and 400 cases of acid attack every year. In Bangladesh, according to the Acid Survivors' Foundation, there were 268 cases of acid attacks, mainly upon women, in 2005.
The CPS conference was run by Nazir Afzal, who said: "Murder is the extreme, but we also see forced imprisonment, assault, sexual crimes, girls who are raped, then punished by their families because they've 'allowed' it to happen."
He continued: "My family is from Pakistan so I've seen it all my life. I was visiting my mother in Birmingham recently and a neighbour was attacked by a group of women armed with sticks and stones. The neighbour had refused to give her daughter in marriage to the other family, so they felt dishonoured and had come to take their revenge. It beggars belief."
Hannana Siddiqui coordinates the rights group Southall Black Sisters. She says: "For us, the concept of honour is being used as justification or mitigation for violence. It can often be used to judge women's sexual conduct or just general behaviour like refusing to be obedient, regardless of the reasons why they might be refusing. The consequences for women can be anything from social ostracism and harassment to violence and, in a few cases, murder."
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CASE STUDY NUMBER 3: Shahida Perveen Mohammed
On Monday February 18, 2002, 69 year old Faqir Mohammed (pictured) was jailed for life at Manchester Crown Court, for killing his 24-year old daughter, Shahida Perveen.
He had returned to his home at Swinton Grove, Longsight, Manchester on 28 June 2001, following a visit to the mosque. His daughter had been with a boyfriend in her bedroom. Shahida was warned by a cellphone message that her father was coming home, so she came downstairs, locking the room behind her.
Faqir Mohammed had a spare key and unlocked the bedroom door, and found student Bilal Amin, fully dressed, lying on the bed. Bilal Amin escaped out of the window, but Mohammed raced downstairs and attacked his daughter. He had her head in an arm-lock and stabbed her repeatedly. Her younger sister Majida told the court how she witnessed the old man plunging the knife into Shahida's stomach.
Majida Mohammed testified: "When she (Shahida) went into the hallway, I heard her say 'Dad, what's wrong? Dad, what are you doing?'...Her head was down and her hair was falling down over her face. She was trying to kick off and he was trying to get her on the floor. He was trying to look into her face. She was shouting 'Hit me. Go on, hit me'....He just carried on stabbing my sister."
Shahida died at Manchester Royal Infirmary. She had been stabbed 19 times in the head and stomach.
Mohammed, a father of ten, claimed in court that he thought each of his daughters should return to Pakistan to be married. He denied murdering Shahida.
What is shocking is that he told police: "According to the law it was not right, but according to religion it was right."
Last year, Faqir Mohammed attempted to have his conviction changed from murder to manslaughter, citing the grounds of provocation. He claimed that as a devout Muslim he believed his daughter should enter an arranged marriage and that sex outside marriage brought shame on his family. His discovery had caused him to lose self-control.
Mohammed had a history of violence. He had repeatedly beaten both his daughters and his wife. He claimed that as his wife had died five years previously, he had been suffering depression.
Though the ruling in the appeal stated that the test of whether Mohammed's state of mind and temperament for someone of his age had been judged in his trial by a wide interpretation (i.e. the grounds of excusability were set by general standards), it was decided that even with a narrow interpretation, Mohammed would still have been found guilty of murder.
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In the past year alone, Western Resistance has documented many cases of honour killings in Britain, such as the case of Manna Begum whose boyfriend Arash Ghorbani-Zarin was slain by her father and two of her brothers, of Shafilea Ahmed, murdered and dumped in a river, the case of Ahmed Bashir, stabbed 40 times for having a romance with a Muslim girl, "promised" to someone else, and the case of beautiful Banaz Mahmod Babakir Agha, murdered and dumped in a trunk.
In March 2003, the Metropolitan Police announced that they would be examining the scale of "honour crimes" in the Asian community in Britain.
As a result, Andy Baker, the head of Scotland Yard's homicide unit, set up an Honour Crimes Unit. A definition of "honour killing" was set up: "Honour killings are murders in which predominantly women are killed for their actual or perceived immoral behaviour, which is deemed to have breached the honour codes of community, causing shame. This behaviour can take the form of marital infidelity, refusing to submit to a forced marriage, actual/misconstrued flirting and being raped. The murders often take place with a degree of approval and support from family members and/or the community."
Andy Baker stated at the time: "There is absolutely no honour in murdering someone. I am passionate about saving lives......If any woman comes to us and says she has dishonoured her family, we will wrap her up."
But the conditions for honour killings, the "arranging" of marriages and forced marriage remain, and while these conditions are in place, helped on by the odious machinations of the Muslim Council for Britain to obstruct natural justice for young Muslim girls, honour killings will continue.
Sarabjit Ganger, Director of the London-based Asian Women's Resource Centre said: "Our experience shows that forced marriages can offer a perfect setting for honour murders."
Maybe if the government looked seriously at what an abuse to a person's rights forced marriage is, rather than listen to the vipers in the MCB, we would see less of these awful shabby crimes, which do nothing for anyone's honour.
There have been some cases of Sikhs being involved in honour killings in Britain, but these cases are few. The overwhelming majority of honour killing cases occur in Muslim families. Islam treats women as second class citizens, despite the fraudulent claims that Islam "respects women". A woman's testimony is worth half that of a man, a woman may be divorced, but cannot divorce a man without the approval of an imam. A man can have four wives, a woman can only have one husband, whom she may have to share with co-wives. And most insultingly of all, the Koran approves of the beating of women (darbah in Arabic).
Surah 4, verse 34 states: "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1, states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood."
Can someone please tell this to the Muslims?
Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at July 20, 2006 5:04 PM
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