Turkish honour killings

A dishonourable practice

Apr 12th 2007 | DIYARBAKIR AND VAN
The Economist print edition

Despite a government crackdown, honour killings persist in Turkey

WITH his soulful eyes and timid smile, Murat Kara, a 40-year-old
stocking seller in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, is an
unlikely murderer. Yet 13 years ago he pumped seven bullets into his
younger sister. His widowed mother and uncles told him to kill the
17-year-old after she eloped with her boyfriend, staining the family’s
honour. Mr Kara resisted for three months because "I loved my sister
and didn’t believe she deserved to die." But then the neighbours
stopped talking to him, the grocer refused to sell him bread, the
local imam said he was disobeying Allah, and his mother threatened to
curse the milk she had breast-fed him. So he gave in.

The killing of women by male relatives who believe they have
dishonoured the family-eg, by getting pregnant outside wedlock or
wearing revealing clothes-has haunted Turkey for centuries. Bowing to
pressure from the media, feminist groups and the European Union,
Turkey’s mildly Islamist government has launched an unprecedented
campaign against honour killings, disarming even its fiercest critics.

State-employed imams now declare honour killings "sinful" in the
Friday sermons they deliver across the country. Tens of thousands of
army conscripts and police recruits are taught that violence against
women is bad. Brooking the ire of his conservative constituents, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, told a gathering of foreign
Muslims that "discrimination against women is worse than racism." Nor
is this mere talk. Turkey’s penal code has been tweaked to stiffen
penalties not only for those who commit honour killings but also for
those who plan them. Had Mr Kara, who got seven years thanks to a
judge who deemed he had been unduly provoked, killed his sister today,
he would in all probability be serving a life sentence.

The trouble is that, despite the government’s efforts, honour-related
crimes show little sign of abating. A parliamentary report last August
found that 1,091 such crimes had been committed in the past five
years-over four a week. Only three of 51 honour killers interviewed
for another study said they had any regrets.

In a society where female chastity is venerated and the motto "my
horse, my gun and my woman are sacred" is common among men, "this
should not come as a surprise," notes Zozan Ozgokce, a female activist
who runs an EU-funded project in Van to counsel abused women. Fatma
Sahin, a deputy from Mr Erdogan’s AK Party who drafted the
parliamentary report, blames the deeply entrenched patriarchal and
feudal system in the Kurdish provinces, where many of the murders
occur. Rampant poverty and illiteracy have been exacerbated by the
forced eviction of millions of Kurdish villagers by the army in its
war against PKK rebels in the 1990s.

With refugee families of up to 20 or more crammed into tiny slums,
incest and rape have shot up, says Handan Coskun, a social worker in
Diyarbakir who is investigating links between female suicides and
honour crimes. One survivor said she was ordered to take her own life
(and locked in a room with a bottle of bleach) by her father, who
sought to disguise his daughter’s failed murder as suicide. She
managed to escape; less fortunate souls have been found dead with
their wrists slit or hanging from a rope.

In Diyarbakir and elsewhere in the south-east, new efforts are being
made to protect vulnerable women through emergency hotlines and
shelters for abused women. The first government-run refuge opened its
doors outside Diyarbakir two years ago. Many of the residents are
pregnant teenage rape victims, who risk being killed by relatives who
blame them (and not their rapists) for their plight.

Still, male accomplices or perpetrators are often targeted, too. And
honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla
Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert. This is especially true of the
fiercely conservative Black Sea region where "after the men are
killed, their penises are cut off and stuffed in their mouths," she
adds laconically. What gives her hope is that the number of those
willing to tip off the authorities about a planned murder is
growing-so more lives are being saved. And many of the whistleblowers
are male

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress