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Sweden: Call to ban arranged marriages,
eight years after the 'Honour' killing of Pela Atroshi
21.6.2007
Rewritten by eKurd.net staff |
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June
21, 2007
A senior Stockholm politician is calling for a ban
on arranged marriages and for social services to be
allowed to investigate honour-related issues
involving young people without first contacting
their parents.
The proposals come from Ulf Kristersson, who holds
the Social Affairs portfolio on Stockholm council,
and Kickis Åhré Älgamo, who leads a Stockholm
project that combats Stockholm's honour-related
issues.
The pair, writing in Dagens Nyheter, said it was
"pure discrimination" for Sweden to allow arranged
marriages in cases where such unions are part of the
culture in the family's home countries.
"Forced marriages are naturally not allowed in
Sweden," they wrote.
"This provides little comfort to those young people
pushed every year into arranged marriages by their
relatives."
They also called for the government and education
authorities to ban schools from allowing pupils to
use cultural or religious background as a reason to
skip lessons such as physical education or sex
education. They cited a recent doctoral thesis in
which 27 percent of foreign-born girls interviewed
were banned from some lessons. |
Pela Atroshi, 19-year-old Swedish-Kurdish girl, shot
dead in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1999 |
The article's publication date comes eight years to
the day after a 19-year-old Swedish girl, Pela
Atroshi, was shot dead in Iraqi Kurdistan. She was
said to have dishonoured her family by wanted to
live in a western style.
Pela and her family moved in 1995 from Kurdistan
region (northern Iraq) to Sweden, at the age of 15,
learned to speak Swedish, made non -Swedish friends
and did all the things immigrants are supposed to
do.
Unwilling to accept the extremely oppressive rule
that her father exerted on her and her sisters, Pela
temporarily left the family home. When rumours
emerged that she had engaged in extramarital sex
with a boyfriend, a family council of male relatives
living in Sweden and in Australia decided that Pela
had to die to cleanse the family honour.
Under a pretext, Pela and her sister Breen were
lured to Iraqi Kurdistan in 1999, where one of her
uncles murdered Pela before the eyes of her younger
sister. Breen was only able to return unharmed to
Sweden due to high-level political manoeuvring and
the dedicated work of a special unit in the Swedish
National Criminal Investigation Department that has
unfortunately since been disbanded. She testified
against the perpetrators and the Stockholm City
Court was able to sentence two of her uncles living
in Sweden for murder since the crime had been
planned in Sweden.
The grandfather and another uncle, both in
Australia, as well as the father, who remained in
Iraqi Kurdistan region, escaped prosecution. Breen
lives today under a protected identity at an
undisclosed location as threats to her life
continue.
An Iraqi Kurdish court sentenced her father and an
uncle to just five months probation because their
motives were "honourable."
thelocal se
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