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Rural Kurdistan, where choosing a husband
can be the death of you
6.12.2005
By Steve Negus, Published: December 6 2005
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Khonja, a 25-year-old Kurd, lives in the Nawa Centre
for threatened women in the north Iraqi town of
Sulimaniya, fearing her family will come to kill
her.
''I came here because of a love affair,'' she says
with the hint of a smile, beginning a story that is
all too common in Iraq.
In one sense, Khonja is lucky. She lives in
Kurdistan, a part of the country known for its
secular-leaning government and active women's rights
movement.
Nonetheless, that she must live in danger, her
future prospects bleak, indicates that even a
post-Saddam Hussein government professing a
progressive agenda has difficulty tackling
conservative tribal society.
Honour killings, the murder of a girl or woman by
her family for an unsanctioned relationship with a
man, are endemic throughout much of the rural Middle
East, and Iraq in particular, and are traditionally
ascribed to a value system that considers a woman to
be an asset of her family.
Most estimates put the number of women killed by
their families in the northern Kurdish self-rule
zone, whose population numbers 5m, at several dozen
a year.
The Sulimaniya-based Women's Media and Education
Centre, which operates mainly in the eastern third
of the region, documented 22 probable honour
killings between 2001 and March 2003.
The figure does not take into account murders that
are covered up in tight-knit villages, nor cases in
which young girls commit suicide, usually by setting
themselves on fire, because of hopelessly
irreconcilable conflicts with their families. The
WMEC recorded 245 instances of women who attempted
suicide in this way for various reasons in 2001
alone.
Khonja's story is typical - she fell in love with a
young guerrilla, whom she said approached her family
no fewer than 16 times to ask for her hand. Her
brothers, however, turned him down - a common story
in the countryside, where some families often want
to marry girls to their cousins for the sake of clan
solidarity, while others find fault with suitors of
lower social status. Still others, says Khonja, "do
not like girls to choose who they marry."
Offended by her persistence, Khonja's family locked
her in her room, and gathered in the tribe to
discuss what to do with her. Her prospects were not
good. Other women in her village had been killed for
similar transgressions - in one infamous case, shot
and dumped by her family down the village well.
Luckily for Khonja, there was a power outage, and
when the family went to fix the generator she
escaped. She found her way to the police, who then
turned her over to the centre. This is unusual. In
many other parts of the Middle East the police would
have been more likely to send her back to her
family.
Khonja blames village social pressures for her
plight. If a household allows a daughter to disobey
them with impunity, she says, other families in the
village will mock their leniency. "'Your girls are
living in a whorehouse,' they will say. If they do
kill her, they will praise them, describe them as
strong brave men," she explains.
Very often in such cases, the girl's immediate
family will be torn, and a cousin or uncle will
insist on the need to act ruthlessly to uphold the
clan's honour. In Khonja's case, it was a cousin who
pressured her little brother, the oldest male in the
house, to act.
Bayaan Mahmoud, a psychologist who has intervened to
try and talk families out of killing their
daughters, tries to catch relatives in their first
flush of anger. They may rage at the girl's
"betrayal" but they may ultimately be willing to
forgive her and try to find a "solution," usually by
allowing her to marry. Once the tribe has handed
down a judgment, however, the girl's fate is usually
sealed.
The government of Kurdistan has taken some steps to
stamp out the practice. The Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, the party that runs Sulimaniya, prides
itself on championing progressive causes - opposing
the death penalty, espousing secularism and pushing
for women's rights.
But even when the centres intervene to save a
woman's life, Kurdistan's pervasive social
conservatism makes it almost impossible for her to
return to a normal life. The women at Nawa describe
the network of shelters in which they are confined
as a "prison." Some say their only hope is to go
abroad. Others claim to be considering suicide.
Khonja is now hoping the centre can track down her
peshmerga sweetheart, and convince him to marry her.
Khonja's family, however, is demanding three to four
girls in "compensation" from the young man's family,
a common demand in such disputes.
She does not see much of a solution for women facing
situations like hers. She wants all involved in such
tragedies to suffer equally -- men, too, "should be
humiliated like we are".
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