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Killing for "Honor"
Forbidden romance or mere rumor of indiscretion can prove fatal in countries such as Jordan where "honor" crimes are legal.
By Laura Jamison
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Norma Khouri. |
Norma Khouri met Dalia when both girls were just three years old, playing on a swing set in their Amman, Jordan neighborhood. When Dalia, by then a young woman, fell in love, it was Khouri who helped her dearest friend arrange secret visits with the handsome suitor — transgressions that both women knew carried a potentially high cost.
The clandestine meetings Khouri describes in her powerful account, Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, evoke the danger and romance of fairy tales, but the ending is a horror story. When Dalia's father discovered that his 24-year-old daughter had met with a man behind his back (although the romance was entirely chaste), he stabbed her to death to restore the family's honor.
Khouri's tale puts Dalia's appealing face on the phenomenon of "honor killings," the practice of murdering women whose chastity has been tarnished — whether by rape or mere rumor. Speaking by phone from her home in Queensland, Australia, Khouri says she hopes the book — a best seller in her adopted country — will spark reform. "When I met women in Greece and I told them my story, they were shocked," Khouri says, recalling her early advocacy efforts after she fled Jordan in 2000 to fight against honor crimes. "I was like, how could you not know this goes on when Jordan is a 45-minute plane ride from where you are? I was naive. But it made me realize I had to bring some international attention to the issue."
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Some 5,000 Jordanians, including schoolgirls, demonstrate in Amman, February 2000, to press parliament to scrap an article of the penal code that allows men who kill women for "honor" to walk free. © AFP / Jamal Nasrallah |
Though such crimes are widely known to be under-reported, the U.N. Population Fund estimates that more than 5,000 women are killed for reasons of honor every year. These murders take place in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, the West Bank, and Gaza, as well as Jordan, according to published reports. Equality Now, an international women's human rights group, reports that honor killings also occur in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom.
In some countries, such as Jordan, where Dalia's story takes place, the acts are wholly legal or barely punished. Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code exempts from punishment those who kill female relatives found committing adultery and reduces committed in a "fit of fury" and is frequently used in defense of "honor killing."
The story of Dalia's downfall began in 1990 when she and Khouri, then 20 years old, convinced their fathers to allow them to open a beauty salon. Dalia's brother Mohammed, who also held a certificate to cut hair, would serve the male clientele, and more importantly, watch over Dalia and Khouri. But with few male customers, Mohammed was free to go out with his friends while the young women stole a few hours of delicious freedom: smoking, reading magazines bought on the black market, and quizzing their married girlfriends about sex.
The salon did draw one male client, Michael, a Catholic. It became clear he was drawn to Dalia, and she to him. But because Dalia would never be allowed to marry outside her religion, they took to subterfuge. Khouri often accompanied the couple to give the appearance of two girls with their chaperone brother. "A date could take three to six weeks to arrange," Khouri says. "We had to know where my brothers were, where her brothers were, where our brothers' friends were, where our fathers were, and where our relatives could possibly be — Middle Eastern families are huge."
Both women knew the risks. One of their clients, a 17-year-old who had been molested by her uncle, was murdered in the name of honor.
Jordanian society not only forgives the killing, it celebrates the killers. In 1998 Sarhan Abdullah murdered his sister because she had been raped — by her brother-in-law, as it turned out. "I shot her with four bullets in the head," he told the Ottawa Citizen three years later. "I was treated as a hero in prison." When Sarhan was released after six months, his family gave him a ceremonial sword and he rode home triumphantly on a horse. "My horse was white because I had cleansed my family's honor."
The tradition underlying honor killing defines a woman's chastity as her family's property. It "comes from our ancient tribal days, from the Hammurabi and Assyrian tribes of 1200 B.C.," Khouri explains. (In Pakistan, it is said to be a Baloch and Pashtun tribal custom). "This practice predates Islam and Christianity. Christian women are being killed this way, too."
Honor killings seem to be on the rise, according to Khouri, but data are scarce. Pakistani human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, a U.N. special investigator on extra-judicial execution, told Newsday that researching honor killings is so dangerous "we can't even do it in two (of four) provinces." Still, using available data, Pakistan's Human Rights Commission documented a 25 percent increase last year.
Ironically, the fact that Jordan today is one of the more progressive Arab countries may be contributing to a rise in honor killings. "Years ago, nursing was an acceptable job for women," Khouri explains, "but that's when hospitals were segregated [by sex]. Now they've integrated hospitals, which puts female nurses at risk, because if they are touching men, and seeing men who are half-naked — which is part of their job — they are open to rumors of being, well, not a good girl. And they can be killed for that." She adds, "Until the laws change to protect women from honor killings, any freedoms women win are just going to put them at risk."
Dalia and Khouri's beauty parlor created that same risky freedom, and after six years, the tiny space that had opened up for them snapped shut. Dalia's brother Mohammed found pine needles in his truck, and grew suspicious. "There are only two places in all of Amman that have pine trees, and he knew that neither he nor his friends had been there," Khouri says. After months of spying, Mohammed spotted Dalia holding Michael's hand and told their father.
By then, Michael was trying to get a passport for Dalia so they could flee together. They were thwarted by a rule requiring females to present their "family book," an item usually held by the patriarch. Meanwhile, Dalia "wasn't sleeping, wasn't eating. I thought she was just nervous about leaving the country. I didn't want to accept that her father had found out," Khouri says.
One evening, Khouri spoke by phone to Dalia, who was in a panic because Mohammed had become inexplicably hostile toward her. The next day Dalia never appeared to pick up Khouri at her home, as she normally did. Frightened, Khouri ran to Dalia's home — without asking permission, "a first for me" — and spotted an ambulance driving away. Inside the house, she found all of Dalia's family members, except her dear friend.
"I lost control and confronted [Dalia's father]. I said things to him that, as a woman in Jordan, you don't say. I told him that he was a murderer, and that he brought dishonor to the family, not her," says Khouri.
Such insolence could have earned Khouri a death sentence, but her father chose, instead, to publicly cast doubt on Dalia's guilt — thus shielding Khouri from the charge of abetting a sexual liaison and himself from the shame that complicity would have brought on his family. When an autopsy found that Dalia was indeed a virgin, Dalia's father was not exempt from punishment. He was sentenced to three months for killing his youngest child — a term authorities declared served by the time he spent on bail in the comfort of his own home.
As for Khouri, it took four years for her to obtain a passport, leave Jordan, and begin fulfilling her vow to oppose honor killings. Since the publication of her book, she has traveled the world on speaking tours and has donated a portion of the book proceeds to human rights groups. She is collecting letters opposing "honor" crimes at honourcrimes@lycos.com.
"I made a promise that Dalia's death would not be in vain, and this is the only way that I can do that," she says.
Correction: The above text corrects the printed magazine article and reflects amendments to Article 340 of Jordan's penal code.
Editors' note: Khouri's statement tracing the roots of the killings to Hammurabi and Assyrian tribal codes is disputed by other experts. For example, Jordanian diplomat Merissa Khurma says the majority of the killings "occur among the poor, in urban centers where people are removed from knowledge of traditional tribal and Islamic values" and are the result of a misinterpretation of tribal codes.
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