Focus on honour killings

Nazire was barely fifteen when she was raped and made pregnant by the driver of the family she was working for. With nobody to talk to, and only half-conscious of what was happening to her, she waited six months before telling him. “He told me not to worry. He told me he would sort everything out,” she told IRIN in the northern governorate of Dahuk. “I was only a child and I believed him.” Instead, with a wife and children of his own, he abandoned her. Alone when she gave birth to her son Amar, she was separated from him the next day when policemen, tipped off by doctors, took her from hospital to prison. “My father had vowed to kill me, and the police told me they were only trying to protect me,” explained Nazire. “But it was three weeks before I saw Amar again.” After Jordan, northern Iraq is believed to have the highest levels of honour killing in the Middle East according to aid groups. Particularly in the conservative, tribal regions around Dahuk, women like Nazire are seen as having defiled their family’s reputation. Only their death can right the wrong they have done in this society. While there are no recent statistics on incidences of such violence against women in the north, a study by the Sulaymaniyah-based Rewan Women's Information and Cultural Centre (RWICC) recorded 3,979 cases of women killed as the result of domestic violence in the north in the 1980s. However, the NGO believes the number to be much higher, as many cases go unreported. The fact that Nazire is still alive today, and reunited with her son, is largely down to Diakonia, a Swedish NGO based in Dahuk since 1992. Specialised mainly in trauma work and the rehabilitation of the region’s hundreds of street children, Diakonia turned its full attention to honour killings five years ago, recognising the scale of the problem. “One of the many catalysts was the highly publicised honour killing of a Kurdish girl who had returned to Iraqi Kurdistan from Sweden,” Diakonia’s Middle East representative, Christian Lagerlof, told IRIN. “Local judges imprisoned her father for a year, only twice as much as he would have received for stealing a packet of cigarettes.” Diakonia’s first response was to call for stiffer sentences for such crimes. The lobbying campaign paid off in 2002, with a new law passed defining honour killings as straightforward murder. More immediately important for people like Nazire, though, was Diakonia’s funding for the building of a women’s shelter on the outskirts of Dahuk, opened in December 2000. “Behind high walls, and with guards at the front, the women here know they are safe,” the shelter’s director, Mariam Sheikmuhamad, told IRIN. “Their children are cared for, while they receive literacy training, vocational training, and counselling.” But the most vital aspect of the work done by Sheikmuhamad’s staff is to find a future for their charges. “There is no future for a single mother in Kurdistan”, she said bleakly. “So we have to be pragmatic.” Of the eight women who passed through the centre since it opened, two have been helped to find husbands willing to look after them and their children. Two more have been helped to move to relatives far away from Dahuk. Others have been reconciled with their families. Sheikmuhamed has been to visit Nazire’s father three times. The first time, he refused to speak with her. The second time, he allowed her in, but refused any compromise. The third time, in what appears a major concession, he agreed to defer a decision on his daughter’s fate to his tribal chief. Surprisingly, the rapist’s father responded more positively. Though his son continues to deny any relations with Nazire - despite being given a six-year jail sentence - he has said he would accept responsibility for Amar if DNA tests proved positive. “What we could be looking at here is the guilty man’s father paying money to Nazire’s family”, explained Halas Yousif, one of the shelter’s two lawyers. “That way at least, Amar will be legally recognized. At the moment, he is an invisible child,” she told IRIN. Like Yousif, though, Mariam Sheikmuhamed is concerned that a verbal agreement between the two family heads may not be enough to protect Nazire if she left the shelter. “There have been cases of fathers assuring their daughters that they have forgiven them, only to murder them once they are back in the family home,” she said. “What we are trying to do now is to persuade the authorities to give unofficial negotiations like these a proper legal basis,” she added. Treading the grey area between traditional codes and the law is just one of many difficulties facing staff at the centre. Their biggest obstacle is the conservative attitude of the Dahuk authorities. It took Sheikmuhamed nine months to persuade the governor to transfer Nazire to the shelter, and she knows there are nine other women - single mothers or adulteresses - still locked up in the city’s jails. “Mentalities change more slowly than laws,” she explained. “Women like Nazire are still seen as criminals.” Christian Lagerlof is optimistic a quick solution is in the air. He pointed out the role played by Diakonia’s former country representative in plans to transfer responsibility for foundations like the shelter from governors to a new department in the Ministry of Health. "With luck, the first department head will be a woman we have worked closely with in the past, and who we know is sympathetic to this project," he explained. Nazire, meanwhile, can only pray that her father will forgive her. “My family may be angry with me, but I feel no anger for them; I just miss them terribly,” she said. Aware that she will never be able to return to her village, even if the dispute is shelved, her greatest concern is for her son. “I just want him to have a father like any other child. Even though it makes me sad to say this, I often think it would be better for him if I gave him away.”