For Muslim women, a deadly defiance
Jan. 16th, 2006 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carocrowThis is from The Boston Globe. There really are no words for how I feel about this subject... I have long railed against the patriarchical tendencies of many religions and cultures to suppress women, demean them, control them. In many cases, they are not just deprived of freedom and happiness, but their lives.
Lest we think this is "a Muslim thing", bear in mind that this same thing happens in Brazil, in India, and many other countries where machismo and caste and religion rule. Women deserve to be equal and free in all countries. We also deserve to maintain the freedoms we have long fought for here.
'Honor killings' on rise in Europe
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | January 16, 2006
BERLIN -- Life was just starting to look up for 23-year-old Hatun Surucu when the bullets cut her down.
After four years of grueling courses in vocational school, coupled with the demands of single motherhood, she was only weeks away from receiving certification as an electrician, a trade that would give her the independence she desperately craved.
It had been a rough road: Eight years earlier, her parents, Turkish immigrants, had yanked Surucu from eighth grade, bundled her off to Istanbul, and forced her to marry an older cousin. Miserable in Turkey, she had fled her husband and returned to Berlin with her infant son, determined to make her own way as a modern woman in a secular society, according to friends.
For a Muslim barely out of girlhood, it was an act of extraordinary defiance against her family. And it cost Surucu her life.
As Europe's Muslims become increasingly conservative, growing numbers of women are being killed or mutilated in the name of ''family honor," according to law enforcement agencies, women's activist groups, and moderate Islamic organizations. These cases usually involve an attack on a Muslim woman by a close relative -- typically a brother or father -- angered by her refusal to accept a forced marriage or her insistence on leading a Western-style life.
There were at least eight such slayings in Berlin alone in 2005, and 47 honor killings of Muslim women across Germany in the past six years, according to police, media reports, and activist groups. Not coincidentally, activists say, tens of thousands of European-born Muslim women are annually forced into unwanted marriages, often to much older men, in their family's home countries. Refusal to submit to such marriages can bring a death sentence.
Following a spate of headline-grabbing cases, including Surucu's murder, European countries are slowly coming to recognize honor killings as a distinct crime.
In Great Britain, for example, a police review of 22 domestic homicides last year resulted in 18 being reclassified as ''murder in the name of so-called 'honor.' " Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Muslim women.
The violent trend, say authorities, reflects the strengthening grip of religious fundamentalism among the continent's 16 million Muslims, many of whom suffer from rising unemployment, inadequate education, and -- perhaps above all -- the sense of being unwelcome outsiders in their adopted homes. As Muslim men embrace radical Islam and return to age-old customs, women are paying a cruel price.
''There is a lost generation of Muslims in Europe," said Eren Uensal, spokeswoman for the Turkish Federation of Berlin. ''Ten years ago, Muslims here were more modern, more secular than those 'back home.' Now the situation has reversed. The younger men feel there is no place for them in Europe, but they also feel there is no place else for them."
Islamic radical groups are filling the vacuum. ''The most alarming thing they teach is that violence is an acceptable way to enforce religious views or social customs," Uensal said. ''Much of that violence is against women."
Hatun Surucu's murder was fairly typical of Europe's recent honor killings.
Her parents and brothers in Berlin were outraged when Surucu abandoned her husband and returned to Germany with her infant son, Can. Even deeper than the anger was the family's sense of disgrace at this display of female independence, according to court testimony and family friends.
But Surucu wanted to make her own way. She stayed at a Berlin women's shelter only long enough to complete middle school. Then she found a part-time job, moved into a tiny apartment, and enrolled in a vocational program.
Further enraging her family, she abandoned the hijab -- the traditional head scarf worn by some Muslim women -- in favor of earrings, makeup, and blue jeans. Her son, now 6, was the light of her life, friends say. But Surucu also loved movies and going out dancing.
''All she wanted, really, was to be an ordinary person, just a normal young woman," said Georg Neumann, a friend of Surucu's at the vocational school.
On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, at a bus stop two blocks from her apartment, Surucu was waiting under a street lamp when bullets tore into her chest and face at point-blank range.
The slaying, according to police, was a family affair.
Three of Surucu's five brothers have been charged with murder. One has already confessed in a chilling court statement. ''She wanted her own circle of friends" outside the family, Ayhan Surucu, 18, said of his sister. ''It was too much."
Ayhan, the youngest brother, is charged with pulling the trigger. An older brother is charged with acquiring the gun, and a middle brother is accused of luring his sister to the murder scene with a phone call in which he said the family wanted to discuss reconciliation.
''She was still so much wanting to be one with her family," Neumann said. ''She didn't want to be cut off from them. She only wanted them to accept that she could have her own life."
Britain opened a review of the suspicious cases after a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq, Abdullah Yones, held his 16-year-old daughter over a bathtub and slashed her throat in 2004 after discovering that she was trading love letters with a boy in her high school class in London. In court last year, Yones insisted that his daughter brought her fate on herself. On the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment, dozens of approving Kurdish men came to court to show solidarity with Yones, according to media accounts.
In a more recent German case, Goenuel Karabey, 20, the daughter of Turkish immigrants living in Berlin, refused a forced marriage last June and disappeared with her boyfriend, a Christian.
Humiliated, her father and brothers tracked her down in Wiesbaden, in western Germany, at the home of the boyfriend's mother. Karabey was shot dead in the garden after agreeing to speak with her family. Her brother, Ali, later surrendered the murder weapon to police, according to media reports.
Along with last year's subway bombings in London by home-grown Islamic zealots and riots in the Arab suburbs of France, the honor killings in Europe have horrified a continent that, until recent years, has paid little heed -- many politicians now concede -- to the religious fundamentalism breeding in its midst.
Moderate Islamic groups and some European leaders are warning that honor killings reflect a trend of fundamentalism that sneers at Western laws and values.
''There are two societies with two different value systems living side by side -- but wholly apart -- in Europe," said Seyran Ates, a Berlin lawyer of Turkish origin who often works with women trying to escape forced marriages.
The first two generations of immigrants, Ates said, found plentiful jobs and were generally content. But the generation of European-born Muslims now coming of age, Ates said, ''never integrated into Western society [and] are becoming more and more conservative, not less so."
A Berlin group, Wildwasser, provides hiding places for girls ages 12 to 18 who feel their lives are in danger, mainly because of their refusal to enter forced marriages or to quit school in favor of duties at home.
''So many cases we see involve young [Muslim] girls who are exposed to ideas of equality and freedom, and take to these ideas like flowers to the sun," said Mehriban Ozer, a social worker for Wildwasser. ''They want to go to school. They want a life. The violence comes from fathers and brothers . . . who now see the tiniest step toward freedom by a female to be a terrible break from tradition."
Although Muslims represent less than 5 percent of the German population, about half of the girls who come to Wildwasser fleeing violence at home are Turks, Arabs, North Africans, or West Asians from strict Islamic families, according to Trina Leichsenring, the group's director.
The rise of fundamentalism among Muslims in Europe can be blamed, at least partially, on the failure of countries to integrate the millions of Muslims who started arriving in large numbers in the 1960s. Two generations later, most lead lives largely segregated from the mainstream. ''It's been taboo to discuss integration. It offends those who say every expression of cultural difference is somehow wonderful," said Heinz Buschkowsky, mayor of the Berlin borough of Neukoelln, where more than a third of the residents are Arabs and Turks. ''But now, with culture being expressed by covering women's faces or killing a girl who refuses to marry some old man in the home village, perhaps it is time to break the taboo."
In Neukoelln's largely immigrant Thomas Morus school, not far from the place where Hatun Surucu was murdered, students greeted news of her slaying with loud approval. Her brothers were hailed as local heroes.
The principal, Volker Steffans, was so disgusted by the display that he sent a letter to parents, to be read and signed, explaining what he had always regarded as obvious -- that girls should not be harassed for refusing to wear head scarves; that girls should not be attacked for wanting to pursue careers; that women should not be murdered for expecting tolerance and equality in a Western society.
''A murder happened nearby; a young woman was killed. She died because she wanted to live freely," Steffans said. ''But we are shocked by the fact that students approve of this murder and say [Surucu] deserved to die because she 'lived like a German.' "
Petra Krischok, a news assistant in the Globe's Berlin bureau, contributed to this report.
Lest we think this is "a Muslim thing", bear in mind that this same thing happens in Brazil, in India, and many other countries where machismo and caste and religion rule. Women deserve to be equal and free in all countries. We also deserve to maintain the freedoms we have long fought for here.
'Honor killings' on rise in Europe
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | January 16, 2006
BERLIN -- Life was just starting to look up for 23-year-old Hatun Surucu when the bullets cut her down.
After four years of grueling courses in vocational school, coupled with the demands of single motherhood, she was only weeks away from receiving certification as an electrician, a trade that would give her the independence she desperately craved.
It had been a rough road: Eight years earlier, her parents, Turkish immigrants, had yanked Surucu from eighth grade, bundled her off to Istanbul, and forced her to marry an older cousin. Miserable in Turkey, she had fled her husband and returned to Berlin with her infant son, determined to make her own way as a modern woman in a secular society, according to friends.
For a Muslim barely out of girlhood, it was an act of extraordinary defiance against her family. And it cost Surucu her life.
As Europe's Muslims become increasingly conservative, growing numbers of women are being killed or mutilated in the name of ''family honor," according to law enforcement agencies, women's activist groups, and moderate Islamic organizations. These cases usually involve an attack on a Muslim woman by a close relative -- typically a brother or father -- angered by her refusal to accept a forced marriage or her insistence on leading a Western-style life.
There were at least eight such slayings in Berlin alone in 2005, and 47 honor killings of Muslim women across Germany in the past six years, according to police, media reports, and activist groups. Not coincidentally, activists say, tens of thousands of European-born Muslim women are annually forced into unwanted marriages, often to much older men, in their family's home countries. Refusal to submit to such marriages can bring a death sentence.
Following a spate of headline-grabbing cases, including Surucu's murder, European countries are slowly coming to recognize honor killings as a distinct crime.
In Great Britain, for example, a police review of 22 domestic homicides last year resulted in 18 being reclassified as ''murder in the name of so-called 'honor.' " Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Muslim women.
The violent trend, say authorities, reflects the strengthening grip of religious fundamentalism among the continent's 16 million Muslims, many of whom suffer from rising unemployment, inadequate education, and -- perhaps above all -- the sense of being unwelcome outsiders in their adopted homes. As Muslim men embrace radical Islam and return to age-old customs, women are paying a cruel price.
''There is a lost generation of Muslims in Europe," said Eren Uensal, spokeswoman for the Turkish Federation of Berlin. ''Ten years ago, Muslims here were more modern, more secular than those 'back home.' Now the situation has reversed. The younger men feel there is no place for them in Europe, but they also feel there is no place else for them."
Islamic radical groups are filling the vacuum. ''The most alarming thing they teach is that violence is an acceptable way to enforce religious views or social customs," Uensal said. ''Much of that violence is against women."
Hatun Surucu's murder was fairly typical of Europe's recent honor killings.
Her parents and brothers in Berlin were outraged when Surucu abandoned her husband and returned to Germany with her infant son, Can. Even deeper than the anger was the family's sense of disgrace at this display of female independence, according to court testimony and family friends.
But Surucu wanted to make her own way. She stayed at a Berlin women's shelter only long enough to complete middle school. Then she found a part-time job, moved into a tiny apartment, and enrolled in a vocational program.
Further enraging her family, she abandoned the hijab -- the traditional head scarf worn by some Muslim women -- in favor of earrings, makeup, and blue jeans. Her son, now 6, was the light of her life, friends say. But Surucu also loved movies and going out dancing.
''All she wanted, really, was to be an ordinary person, just a normal young woman," said Georg Neumann, a friend of Surucu's at the vocational school.
On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, at a bus stop two blocks from her apartment, Surucu was waiting under a street lamp when bullets tore into her chest and face at point-blank range.
The slaying, according to police, was a family affair.
Three of Surucu's five brothers have been charged with murder. One has already confessed in a chilling court statement. ''She wanted her own circle of friends" outside the family, Ayhan Surucu, 18, said of his sister. ''It was too much."
Ayhan, the youngest brother, is charged with pulling the trigger. An older brother is charged with acquiring the gun, and a middle brother is accused of luring his sister to the murder scene with a phone call in which he said the family wanted to discuss reconciliation.
''She was still so much wanting to be one with her family," Neumann said. ''She didn't want to be cut off from them. She only wanted them to accept that she could have her own life."
Britain opened a review of the suspicious cases after a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq, Abdullah Yones, held his 16-year-old daughter over a bathtub and slashed her throat in 2004 after discovering that she was trading love letters with a boy in her high school class in London. In court last year, Yones insisted that his daughter brought her fate on herself. On the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment, dozens of approving Kurdish men came to court to show solidarity with Yones, according to media accounts.
In a more recent German case, Goenuel Karabey, 20, the daughter of Turkish immigrants living in Berlin, refused a forced marriage last June and disappeared with her boyfriend, a Christian.
Humiliated, her father and brothers tracked her down in Wiesbaden, in western Germany, at the home of the boyfriend's mother. Karabey was shot dead in the garden after agreeing to speak with her family. Her brother, Ali, later surrendered the murder weapon to police, according to media reports.
Along with last year's subway bombings in London by home-grown Islamic zealots and riots in the Arab suburbs of France, the honor killings in Europe have horrified a continent that, until recent years, has paid little heed -- many politicians now concede -- to the religious fundamentalism breeding in its midst.
Moderate Islamic groups and some European leaders are warning that honor killings reflect a trend of fundamentalism that sneers at Western laws and values.
''There are two societies with two different value systems living side by side -- but wholly apart -- in Europe," said Seyran Ates, a Berlin lawyer of Turkish origin who often works with women trying to escape forced marriages.
The first two generations of immigrants, Ates said, found plentiful jobs and were generally content. But the generation of European-born Muslims now coming of age, Ates said, ''never integrated into Western society [and] are becoming more and more conservative, not less so."
A Berlin group, Wildwasser, provides hiding places for girls ages 12 to 18 who feel their lives are in danger, mainly because of their refusal to enter forced marriages or to quit school in favor of duties at home.
''So many cases we see involve young [Muslim] girls who are exposed to ideas of equality and freedom, and take to these ideas like flowers to the sun," said Mehriban Ozer, a social worker for Wildwasser. ''They want to go to school. They want a life. The violence comes from fathers and brothers . . . who now see the tiniest step toward freedom by a female to be a terrible break from tradition."
Although Muslims represent less than 5 percent of the German population, about half of the girls who come to Wildwasser fleeing violence at home are Turks, Arabs, North Africans, or West Asians from strict Islamic families, according to Trina Leichsenring, the group's director.
The rise of fundamentalism among Muslims in Europe can be blamed, at least partially, on the failure of countries to integrate the millions of Muslims who started arriving in large numbers in the 1960s. Two generations later, most lead lives largely segregated from the mainstream. ''It's been taboo to discuss integration. It offends those who say every expression of cultural difference is somehow wonderful," said Heinz Buschkowsky, mayor of the Berlin borough of Neukoelln, where more than a third of the residents are Arabs and Turks. ''But now, with culture being expressed by covering women's faces or killing a girl who refuses to marry some old man in the home village, perhaps it is time to break the taboo."
In Neukoelln's largely immigrant Thomas Morus school, not far from the place where Hatun Surucu was murdered, students greeted news of her slaying with loud approval. Her brothers were hailed as local heroes.
The principal, Volker Steffans, was so disgusted by the display that he sent a letter to parents, to be read and signed, explaining what he had always regarded as obvious -- that girls should not be harassed for refusing to wear head scarves; that girls should not be attacked for wanting to pursue careers; that women should not be murdered for expecting tolerance and equality in a Western society.
''A murder happened nearby; a young woman was killed. She died because she wanted to live freely," Steffans said. ''But we are shocked by the fact that students approve of this murder and say [Surucu] deserved to die because she 'lived like a German.' "
Petra Krischok, a news assistant in the Globe's Berlin bureau, contributed to this report.
