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Why are Kurdish women dying of burns in
Kurdistan ?
19.9.2007
By Kevin Peraino
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Why
are a growing number of young women in this
relatively safe corner of Iraq showing up in local
hospitals, dying of suspicious burns?
September 19, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq' -- The
doctor knows, just from glancing at the burns, that
someone is lying to him. Srood Tawfiq, a
reconstructive surgeon at Sulaimaniyah Hospital in
Iraq's northern Kurdistan region, buttons his white
lab coat and steps into the burn unit. "Busy day
yesterday," he says, pulling back a curtain to
reveal a sleeping 16-year-old girl with kerosene
burns over 90 percent of her body.
The mother of the young woman, hovering over the
hospital bed, tells Tawfiq that her daughter slipped
and scalded herself while carrying a portable stove.
The doctor listens sympathetically. But later, out
of the woman's earshot, he explains that he doubts
the mother's explanation. If it were really an
accident, he whispers, "you don't get this degree of
burn." Outside the hospital room he pulls off his
hygienic mask and shakes his head. "We never tell
them that they're going to die," he says quietly.
Kurdistan has long been considered the one
consistently safe and relatively prosperous region
of Iraq. So why, in increasing numbers, are the
territory's young women showing up at local
hospitals dying of suspicious burns? According to
the Women's Union of Kurdistan, there were 95 such
cases in the first six months of 2007, up 15 percent
since last year. |
A young burn victim lies in a Sulaimaniyah hospital
AFP |
A December 2006 report from the Asuda women’s rights
group in Sulaimaniyah says that the "phenomenon is
increasing at an alarming rate." Ninety-five percent
of the victims are under 30, and roughly half are
between 16 and 21. On the day before I stopped by
the emergency hospital in Sulaimaniyah, six young
women were admitted with major burns, three of them
telling suspicious stories. When I called Zryan
Yones, the Kurdish health minister, he said that the
trend among young women is more disturbing than a
recent outbreak of cholera. He provided a startling
statistic: since August 10, Kurdistan had had nine
deaths from its cholera epidemic; in the same
period, there were 25 young women dead of burns. "I
have one young girl lying in our morgues every
single day," he told me.
So what's going on? Most of the survivors tell
doctors that the burns resulted from a "cooking
accident." But surgeons told me they can tell that
the vast majority are not telling the truth.
Kerosene, the fuel used to cook here, is not
particularly volatile; if a woman comes in with
burns over the majority of her body, it is likely
intentional. Women's rights advocates in
Sulaimaniyah believe that the majority of the burn
cases are suicide attempts; the remainder are
suspected to be honor killings or other murders
disguised as accidents or suicide. ("Cooking
accident" has long been a euphemism for dowry
killing in India.) Doctors told me that it's
virtually impossible to distinguish between murder
and suicide based on the burns
and the women's stories. Still, anecdotal evidence
suggests that the trend may be aggravated by a
copycat effect among Kurdistan's teenagers. One
20-year-old woman, Heshw Mohammad, who briefly
considered burning herself after her father killed
her boyfriend two years ago, told me that
self-immolation has become a sort of fashion among
teenage Kurdish women. "They imitate each other,"
she says.
What's the motive—and why fire? Doctors, rights
advocates, and young women I spoke to described a
collision of local tradition with modern technology
and the fallout from the Iraq war. Death by
immolation has a long history among ethnic Kurds.
When someone is angry here, a popular interjection
is "I'm going to burn myself!" Locals I talked to
attributed the fire obsession to various local
cultural sources. The Zoroastrian religion uses fire
as a prominent symbol. The Kurdish new year, called
"Nawroz," commemorates the day a folk hero named
Kawa killed a tyrant named Zohak and then set a fire
on a mountaintop to tell his followers; Kurds
celebrate the day by burning tires and with other
pyrotechnic displays. "Burning, traditionally, has
been the way to die among the Kurdish people," says
Yones, the health minister.
Most of the burn cases in Kurdistan—whether suicides
or honor killings—revolve around love and dating.
Heshw Mohammad's case is typical. When she was 18
she fell in love with a local boy, and the two
started seeing each other, which is generally
frowned on in Kurdistan's traditional society. They
communicated secretly by text message on their
mobile phones to arrange meetings. But her father
had other ideas about his daughter's future; he had
already promised her to one of his friends. When
Heshw's boyfriend asked her father to let the girl
marry him, her father gunned the boy down with an
AK-47, she says. She later attempted suicide by
overdosing on medication, but she acknowledges that
burning herself "crossed my mind." After the
killing, her boyfriend's father took her to a
women's shelter in Sulaimaniyah, where she now says
she sleeps late and spends her time watching South
Korean soap operas on satellite TV. "I have no plans
for the future," she told me. "I'm quite sure I will
be killed in the end."
Rights advocates explain that the introduction in
the past several years of inexpensive mobile phones
and e-mail to Kurdistan have made dating and casual
sex easier, even as the old patriarchal social
structures remain in place. "The explosion of
technology has alienated people from themselves,"
says Samera Mohammad of the Rassan women's rights
center in Sulaimaniyah. She says that a disturbing
number of the suicides involve boys who take
pictures of their girlfriends with their camera
phones and then show their friends. But rights
advocates say that even something as simple as bad
grades can be a motive for self-immolation.
The Iraq war only made things worse. Refugees from
Iraq's cities, some of whom have turned to
prostitution to earn a living, have flocked to
Kurdistan from elsewhere in the country, challenging
rural sexual mores and the religious beliefs of the
mostly Sunni Muslim Kurds. Kurdistan's lakeside
resorts are said to be a popular destination for sex
workers in search of easy income. "With the arrival
of prostitutes, men have become more suspicious of
their daughters," says Paiman Izzedine of the
Women's Union of Kurdistan. Economic factors have
also aggravated the problem, according to locals.
The price of kerosene, for example, has tripled
since the war began, its price swinging wildly,
black-market dealers told me. That means households
now stockpile the fuel for the winter in large
quantities when they can get it cheap—providing
young women with inspiration and an easy weapon.
For now, the suicides are a phenomenon that is
seldom discussed openly in Kurdistan. Srood Tawfiq,
the surgeon at Sulaimaniyah's burn center, says he
has seen only five or six cases in which the
patients admitted to a suicide attempt. Rights
advocates told me that they're beginning to hold
conferences in local villages to educate teachers
and other community leaders about the problem. Yet
even Tawfiq acknowledges that he doesn't press his
patients too hard about their real motivations. "We
don't insist on the cause," he told me, as we talked
outside the burn unit. "We just ask once; we don't
push it." Even in relatively peaceful Kurdistan,
sometimes the truth is too merciless to speak.
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