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Reforms come too late for some Iraqi
Kurdish women
7.10.2007
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October
7, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', -- She
is 18, unmarried and eight months pregnant. She
hates it when the baby shifts and kicks in her womb.
"I don't hate the child," she said. "But the
movements keep reminding me of my past."
After she gives birth in secrecy, she will give up
her child for what she describes as her family's
honor. Then she will travel home to the Kurdish area
of northwestern Iran to find a husband who knows
nothing of her story.
Secrecy is essential, because in her world, a child
out of wedlock can lead to an "honor killing" — her
murder by a relative to protect her family's honor.
So she is known in this city only as Banaz, a
nickname.
Tarza, 22, also uses a nickname. She sits on a sofa
and weeps, wiping her nose with her leopard print
head scarf. She gave birth out of wedlock in 2003, a
few months after the U.S.-led invasion that ousted
Saddam Hussein, and says her male-dominated clan
wanted to kill her for sullying their reputation.
Tarza, an Iraqi Kurd, said the threats persist. She
lives alone with help from a women's center that
arranged for an Iranian family in Sweden to adopt
her child.
"I don't want to see the child," Tarza said, her
face taut.
Honor killings, driven by the view that a family's
honor is paramount, are an ancient tradition
associated with Kurdish regions of Iraq, Iran and
Turkey as well as tribal areas in Pakistan and some
Arab societies.
While the rest of Iraq is preoccupied with the
violence that has followed the U.S. invasion of
2003, the more peaceful Kurdish enclave of the
country stands out in its attitude to honor
killings. Here, officials who long ignored this
explosive and deeply personal issue of family pride
are seeking to curb the murders.
Civic activists welcome the regional government's
condemnations of the custom and warnings of tough
penalties, but say much more education and law
enforcement is needed.
This year, the British government arranged for a
delegation of Iraqi Kurds to travel to Pakistan to
talk with officials there about their experience in
combating the brutal tradition.
Some reports cite several hundred honor killings or
related suicides a year in Iraqi Kurdistan, which
has more than 4 million people. But there are no
reliable statistics for a crime that is difficult to
prove without effective law enforcement and the
cooperation of tribal communities.
The number of women who committed suicide by setting
themselves on fire increased from 36 in 2005 to 133
in 2006, while the murder of women rose from four to
17, according to a report by Kurdistan's human
rights ministry.
The report makes no specific reference to honor
killing. But one theory circulating in Kurdistan is
that because penalties for murder have been
stiffened, more men are resorting to coercing women
into killing themselves.
In 2002, Kurdistan's parliament revoked Iraqi laws
that allowed defendants to be cleared or treated
leniently in the case of an honor killing. These
laws, it is believed, were instituted by Saddam
Hussein to curry favor with traditionalists.
"Killing under the pretext of protecting honor is
murder," the region's prime minister, Nechirvan
Barzani, said in July.
Another reason for the changing attitude could be
the Western influences that have taken root here
since the enclave — the Iraqi part of a historical
Kurdish homeland stretching from eastern Turkey to
western Iran — became a Western protectorate
following the 1991 Gulf War.
"Western culture is growing here and is in
contradiction with the old tradition that honor is
something sacred," said Runak Faraj, head of the
Rewan women's center in Sulaimaniyah, one of Iraqi
Kurdistan's two main cities.
She said the values of the young are clashing with
tradition, which maintains that pregnancy before
marriage or an extramarital affair can be grounds
for killing a woman, or pressuring her to commit
suicide. Even the hint of a teenage romance lacking
elders' approval can mean death.
Women in Iranian Kurdistan appear freer than in
Iraq, able to go out unchaperoned with boyfriends,
which suggests Banaz will have an easier time than
the Iraqi, Tarza.
Banaz got pregnant in Iran after her boyfriend
invited her to a party, and five months later she
told one of her four sisters.
They asked doctors to abort Banaz's child, but were
refused.
Banaz knew the stigma would stain her two married
sisters, and make it hard for her unmarried sisters
to find husbands.
She tried to commit suicide by throwing herself from
the top floor of her home, but a sister restrained
her. She overdosed on pills but vomited them up. She
considered dousing herself in gasoline.
"Burning was the final option. I was too scared to
do it," Banaz said in an interview at the Rewan
center. She spoke softly, but with confidence, and
smiled easily.
Her father found out and sent her to Iraqi
Kurdistan, ostensibly on a study trip, but the
doctor she consulted in Sulaimaniyah refused to
perform an abortion.
She found refuge in Faraj's center, and will give
birth by Caesarean section. Faraj will search for an
adoptive family.
Banaz's family calls her twice a month.
"I think more rationally than emotionally because
it's only one child. My home, my family, my history
is in Iran. I have decided not to think about the
child anymore," Banaz said. "I have to show that
nothing happened. I have to change what's in my
mind."
Many women turn up at hospitals with severe burns
that doctors suspect are the result of suicide
attempts linked to family honor, possibly coerced by
male relatives who don't want to kill the women and
face prosecution for murder.
"Before coming to the hospital, they will agree on a
story: 'While she was cooking, that happened. While
she was in the bath, that happened,'" said Dr. Ahmed
Amin, a medical director of Heartland Alliance, a
human rights group based in Chicago.
Cell phones are also part of the problem. According
to a columnist in Soma Digest, an English-language
newspaper in Kurdistan, there are cases of men
dialing randomly until they reach a woman, whom they
then harass with more calls or text messages. Saved
in the phone's memory, these raunchy calls can
endanger the woman's life if a male relative
discovers them and believes they are from a
boyfriend, the newspaper said.
Tarza, the Iraqi Kurd, has had repeated exposure to
the world of honor killings.
Last year, she said, one of her two sisters asked
for a divorce, and was later found shot to death.
The husband was detained for 15 days and released.
Tarza has no contact with her other sister, who was
also under threat of death because she became
pregnant by a boyfriend.
With help from activists, she married another man,
severing contact with her family for her own safety.
Her father was killed in a land mine explosion when
she was 3 months old. Her mother remarried, but it
is too dangerous for Tarza to meet her.
"If somebody learns about it, we could both be
killed," she said. She looked at the floor, her
expression hard, clasped her hands and ground them
together.
AP
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