HONOR

HONOR

IRAQ

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/world/middleeast/21honor.html?ref=world

DOKAN, Iraq — Serving small glasses of sugary tea, Qadir Abdul-Rahman Ahmed explained how things went bad with the neighbors. It was not true, he said, that his brothers had threatened to drown his niece if she tried to marry the young man down the street.

“We are not against humanity,” he explained. “I told my brother, if she wants to marry, you can’t stop her.”

But the couple should never have married without permission.

“The girl and the boy should be killed,” he said. “It’s about honor. Honor is more important for us than religion.”

Honor killing has a long history in Iraq and here in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan. But even here, this couple’s case stood out because the man was killed, not the woman, and because of the political clout of the warring families.

As some Iraqi lawmakers try to crack down on honor killing, the case — in which there have been no arrests — also illustrates how difficult it can be to uproot a deep-seated tribal honor code.

More than 12,000 women were killed in the name of honor in Kurdistan from 1991 to 2007, according to Aso Kamal of the Doaa Network Against Violence. Government figures are much lower, and show a decline in recent years, and Kurdish law has mandated since 2008 that an honor killing be treated like any other murder. But the practice continues, and the crime is often hidden or disguised to look like suicide.

It was in this climate that Mr. Ahmed’s niece, Sirwa Hama Amin, fell in love with her neighbor, Aram Jamal Rasool, in this village in northern Iraq.

On a recent afternoon in the home of Mr. Rasool’s father, Ms. Amin, 22, showed wedding portraits of herself and Mr. Rasool: a smiling young couple in formal dress, the bride showing none of the strain that marked the pale woman displaying the photographs.

Ms. Amin and Mr. Rasool, 27, grew up across the dusty road from each other, where each family had expanded in a string of houses so close together that their roofs nearly touched. Mr. Rasool’s father, Jamal Rasool Salih, 58, a retired general in the Kurdish military, or pesh merga, helped Ms. Amin’s family move to Dokan from Iran in 1993, and the two families became intertwined.

Like General Salih, Ms. Amin’s brothers and uncles joined the pesh merga and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the town’s dominant political party. One of Ms. Amin’s brothers married the general’s daughter and became his bodyguard; the general’s son Aram was a regular visitor in Ms. Amin’s home.

Still, when the couple fell in love a couple of years ago, they kept their passion secret, knowing their families would not approve. General Salih said he considered Ms. Amin’s relatives unruly soldiers and hellcats, always shooting people. Ms. Amin’s relatives mocked Mr. Rasool because he limped.

The problems started when Ms. Amin’s brother caught her sending a text message to Mr. Rasool on her cellphone. In socially regimented Iraq, cellphones and the Internet have enabled lovers to communicate outside the censorious eyes of their families. But this liberation has come at a price, said Behar Rafeq, director of the Shelter for Threatened Women in Erbil. Of the 24 women in the shelter on a recent day, 15 had encountered threats or violence because of their communications on cellphones or Facebook, Ms. Rafeq said.

Ms. Amin said her male relatives threatened to drown her and took away her phone.

Mr. Ahmed, Ms. Amin’s uncle, denied the threats. If the two wished to marry, he said, the appropriate way was for General Salih, accompanied by a delegation of tribal leaders, to ask for her hand. Instead, he sent surrogates.

“If someone doesn’t come and ask respectfully, how can you agree to that?” he asked.

General Salih said he did not want the marriage, either.

Ms. Amin became a captive in her home. One of Mr. Rasool’s brothers, Rizgar Jamal Rasool, 36, said that when he visited, he found Ms. Amin tearful and beaten, her face swollen.

Ms. Amin and Mr. Rasool became desperate, she said, and plotted ways to kill themselves.

On Sept. 2, 2009, she sneaked out of her parents’ house, walking across the roofs of the adjoining homes and down to a Toyota Land Cruiser. Mr. Rasool was waiting inside, with a grenade he had stolen from his father. “I said, ‘Let’s kill ourselves,’ ” Ms. Amin said. “He said, ‘No, let’s only do it if they find us.’ ”

Instead, the couple went to the police, explaining that they had been threatened because they wanted to marry. Mr. Rasool was held for possession of the grenade; Ms. Amin was sent to a shelter for battered women.

“He was arrested because I wanted him arrested for safety,” General Salih said. “The day they ran away, her uncle, a military captain, called me and said, ‘I’ll burn your house and kill you all if you don’t get the couple back today.’ ”

The couple appealed to the court, and two weeks later, after submitting their paperwork, they were married.

Though Ms. Amin’s family objected to the marriage, she said, they agreed to a truce: if the newlyweds promised to leave Dokan and never return, her relatives agreed not to hunt her down.

For three and a half months the couple lived in Sulaimaniya, an hour from Dokan. Then, on Jan. 2 around 9 p.m., Ms. Amin said, she was in the bathroom when she heard gunshots and her husband shouting her name.

She opened the bathroom door and saw her husband covered in blood and one of her brothers aiming a gun at her. “I saw only my brother, but someone else shot Aram,” she said. Before the smoke cleared, gunmen fired 17 bullets into Mr. Rasool’s chest and 4 into Ms. Amin’s leg and hip, General Salih said.

According to Mr. Ahmed, the brother who did the shooting was Hussein Hama Amin, a soldier in the pesh merga. Mr. Amin denied killing his brother-in-law but said he paid $10,000 to another brother, and to one of Mr. Rasool’s brothers, to kill the couple.

“Why should she live after she has been that irresponsible about the honor of her family?” Mr. Amin said.

Ms. Amin was two months pregnant at the time.

The authorities in Kurdistan have made great strides against honor killing, said Kurdo Omer Abdulla, director of the General Directorate to Trace Violence Against Women, a government agency. “Every year we see a decrease in the statistics of violence against women,” she said.

For the two families, the killing did not resolve the conflict.

The police arrested no one. Instead, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, tribal leaders and clerics brought the families together in a formal council session in front of more than 4,000 local residents.

General Salih said he was pressed by the party to forgive his son’s killers and promise not to kill them.

Ms. Amin’s family was required to promise not to kill her. The two families provide conflicting accounts on whether money was also exchanged.

Her relatives said they have disowned her but would not harm her. “May God kill her,” Hussein Hama Amin said. “We will not kill her.”

In General Salih’s living room, Ms. Amin dandled her 4-month-old son, named Aram after her husband. By Kurdish custom she is now disgraced and unsuitable for marriage.

She lives a few hundred feet from the family that cast her out, in a house filled with weapons, afraid that her relatives will try to kill her. When she leaves the house, she is escorted by armed in-laws.

General Salih remains bitter at his neighbors, the party and the tribal leaders, who have refused to make any arrests.

“I’m a powerful person,” he said. “I could kill them. But I don’t.”

“They should get arrested,” he said. “Instead they get salaries. There is no law.”

INDIA

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10honor.html

KODERMA, India — When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old India for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter.

Honor killings are most common in parts of northern India.

Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, her family began pressing her to change her mind. They warned of social ostracism and accused her of defiling their religion.

Days after Ms. Pathak returned home in late April, she was found dead in her bedroom. The police have arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, on suspicion of murder, while the family contends that the death was a suicide.

The postmortem report revealed another unexpected element to the case: Ms. Pathak was pregnant.

“One thing is absolutely clear,” said Prashant Bhushan, a social activist and lawyer now advising Ms. Pathak’s fiancé. “Her family was trying their level best to prevent her from marrying that boy. The pressure was such that either she was driven to suicide or she was killed.”

In India, where the tension between traditional and modern mores reverberates throughout society, Ms. Pathak’s death comes amid an apparent resurgence of so-called honor killings against couples who breach Hindu marriage traditions.

This week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered a cabinet-level commission to consider tougher penalties in honor killings.

In June, India’s Supreme Court sent notices to seven Indian states, as well as to the national government, seeking responses about what was being done to address the problem.

The phenomenon of honor killings is most prevalent in some northern states, especially Haryana, where village caste councils, or khap panchayats, often operate as an extralegal morals police force, issuing edicts against couples who marry outside their caste or who marry within the same village — considered a religious violation since villages are often regarded as extended families.

Even as the court system has sought to curb these councils, politicians have hesitated, since the councils often control significant vote blocs in local elections.

New cases of killings or harassment appear in the Indian news media almost every week. Last month, the police arrested three men for the honor killings of a couple in New Delhi who had married outside their castes, as well as the murder of a woman who eloped with a man from another caste.

Two of the suspects are accused of murdering their sisters, and an uncle of the slain couple spoke of their murders as justifiable.

“What is wrong in it?” the uncle, Dharmaveer Nagar, told the Indian news media. “Murder is wrong, but this is socially the best thing that has been done.”

Intercaste marriages are protected under Indian law, yet social attitudes remain largely resistant. In a 2006 survey cited in a United Nations report, 76 percent of respondents deemed the practice unacceptable. An overwhelming majority of Hindu couples continue to marry within their castes, and newspapers are filled with marital advertisements in which parents, seeking to arrange a marriage for a son or daughter, specify caste among lists of desired attributes like profession and educational achievement.

“This is part and parcel of our culture, that you marry into your own caste,” said Dharmendra Pathak, the father of Ms. Pathak, during an interview in his home. “Every society has its own culture. Every society has its own traditions.”

Yet Indian society is also rapidly changing, with a new generation more likely to mix with people from different backgrounds as young people commingle on college campuses or in the workplace.

Ms. Pathak had studied journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications in New Delhi before taking a job at a financial newspaper. At school, she had met Priyabhanshu Ranjan, a top student whose family was from a middle-upper caste, the Kayastha.

“The day I proposed, she said, ‘My family will not accept this. My family is very conservative,’ ” Mr. Ranjan recalled. “I used to try to convince her that once we got married, they would accept it.”

Ms. Pathak deliberated over the proposal for months before accepting in early 2009. Convinced her family would disapprove, she kept her engagement a secret for more than a year, until she learned that her father was interviewing prospective Brahmin grooms in New Delhi to arrange a marriage for her. Her parents were also renovating the family home for a wedding celebration.

Ms. Pathak called her oldest brother, Samarendra, who spent the next week trying to change her mind.

“What I told her was that the decision you have taken — there is nothing wrong with it,” he said. “But the society we live in will not accept it. You can’t transform society in a day. It takes time.”

Dharmendra Pathak, the father of Nirupama Pathak, at his home in Koderma, India. He argued in a letter to her that while intercaste marriages were allowed under India’s Constitution, Hindu religious beliefs against the practice should be observed.

The room in the family home Koderma, India, where Ms. Pathak died.

Officers escorted her mother, Sudha, on the left, inside a local police station. She was arrested on suspicion of murder. The family says that Nirupama Pathak’s death was a suicide.

When her father learned of the engagement, he wrote his daughter a letter and paid a surprise visit to New Delhi.

In the letter, the father acknowledged that such marriages were allowed under India’s Constitution, but argued that the Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years.

At one point, Ms. Pathak’s mother called, crying, asking if they had wronged her in a past life.

The death of Ms. Pathak remains under investigation. Her body was discovered in her upstairs bedroom on the morning of April 29, while her mother was the only person at home. Initially, neighbors and family members said she had died from electrocution, but then later changed their story to say she had hanged herself. The police arrested the mother after the postmortem report concluded that Ms. Pathak had been suffocated.

But Ms. Pathak’s father and her two brothers have argued that the postmortem was flawed and claimed that her death had been a suicide. The family produced a suicide note and persuaded a local magistrate to order an investigation into Mr. Ranjan, the boyfriend — which his supporters have described as politically motivated.

Ms. Pathak’s pregnancy has also complicated the case. Mr. Ranjan said that he had been unaware of her condition, and her family told the police that they, too, had been unaware. But in an interview, the father and brothers changed their story, saying that Ms. Pathak confessed her pregnancy to her mother on the morning of her death.

For now, the case has polarized opinion. In Koderma, supporters of the Pathak family have rallied for the release of the mother from jail. In New Delhi, former classmates of Ms. Pathak and other supporters have held candlelight vigils, calling for the case to be prosecuted as an honor killing.

“This kind of the thing is increasing everywhere,” said Girija Vyas, a member of Parliament and the president of the National Commission of Women. “There should not be these things in the 21st century. These things must be stopped.”

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2011



GUJRAT, Pakistan — A New Jersey resident whose daughter and son-in-law were gunned down while on a trip to Pakistan was named as the chief suspect in their deaths.

Muzaffar Hussain is suspected of murdering his New York native daughter Uzma Naurin, 30, and her husband, Saif Rehman, 31, in an “honor killing,” the Daily Mail reported.

Naurin and Rehman were shot dead Nov. 1 when their car was ambushed near the northeastern Pakistan city of Gujrat. The car’s driver and several other passengers were uninjured.

The couple — who were living in Scotland but planning to relocate to the US — were in Pakistan to attend a family wedding which Hussain was also attending. Hussain has since returned to his home in Jersey City, N.J.

Pakistani police spokesman Nasir Butt said that the 58-year-old cab driver is being treated as the chief suspect in the case.

Members of Naurin’s family were unhappy about her marriage to Rehman, a friend of the couple told the newspaper. Naurin was married previously, but her first husband committed suicide. Naurin subsequently refused to enter an arranged second marriage with her dead husband’s brother.