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WORLDVIEWS
In Kurdistan and Beyond, Honor
Killings Remind Women They Are
Worthless
by Johanna Higgs and Liga Rudzite May 6, 2014 WORLDVIEWS Email
This Post
A fully covered Kurdish woman in a market area of Erbil, Iraq, where
violence against women can be manifested as honor killings.
KURDISTAN, Iraq For many women in Kurdistan, life is
anything but honorable.
We have come to this autonomous region in northern Iraq as
social anthropologists to research violence against women
particularly, honor killings by interviewing local experts,
including United Nations personnel.
We were told by a Kurdish man here that women have no
value. The man, who in the past worked for a womens
empowerment center but now wishes to remain anonymous,
said that women are treated more or less as objects for men to
use for their own needs, which is why its all right to kill them
when they step out of line from their role as subordinates;
when they dare, say, to have a sexual relationship with a man
to whom they are not married.
We were told that it is a mans right to be free, to do as he
pleases, to go where he wants. And it is his right to control
women, because this is the religion the Koran says so.
We wanted to document why honor killings and honor
suicides are continuing in Kurdistan if not on the rise, some
people say. Honor killings are the killing of a relative, usually a
girl or a woman, who is perceived to have brought shame to
the family, often from breaking codes of morality regarding
her sexual behavior or more ordinary acts. Self-immolation is
mostly done through setting oneself on fire and is considered a
WORLDVIEWS
A cafe in Erbil, Iraq.
sacrifice for a wrongdoing.
The streets are prosperous here in Erbil, the Kurdish capital,
with upmarket cafes, good coffee and fast Internet. But there
are almost no women on the streets. In April, as we conducted
our research, the stories we were told and information we
learned revealed an extreme bias against women in Kurdistan.
In our first interviews with the heads of several womens
empowerment groups in this city, for example, we were told
that a woman could be killed by her own family just because
she fell in love or she wanted to go to school.
Women cannot have a boyfriend, but its an honor for a man
to have a girlfriend. A divorced woman is like a disease,
whereas a divorced man is just a man. A free woman is a bad
woman, but a free man is a righteous man.
Though there are new laws in Kurdistan promoting womens
rights, they are not accepted generally, said Suzan Aref, the
director of the Women Empowerment Organization, a 10-year-
old nonprofit group in Erbil that offers skill-building
workshops and other training on enhancing ones rights.
Its a patriarchal system and everything is run by men, Aref
said, adding that women have seats on the legislature, but
they are symbolic and that women are not represented in the
executive and the judiciary branches of the Kurdish
government, which is a self-ruling body separate from the
Iraqi government in Baghdad.
Despite honor killings having been declared illegal since 2008
in Kurdistan, Aref said that religious leaders claim that it is
against Islam. They say a father needs to be in control of his
children and a husband needs to be able to beat his wife, and
they ran a campaign against the law, she said of the religious
leaders.
Things can change with awareness and education with the
new generation, Aref added, noting that mothers need to be
taught, too, to educate their children not to discriminate
between boys and girls.
Even advancing womens rights can be lethal in Kurdistan.
One female activist whom we interviewed and leads an
organization advocating womens rights asked not to be
named because she has received death threats. Most honor
killings, she explained, occur outside Kurdistans big cities,
and they are not taken seriously by the police or the legal
system.
Tanya Darwesh, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
political party, manages the Rasan Organization in Erbil,
which was started in 2004 to offer legal advice to women. She
said that one of the biggest problems for women is that even
though there are laws to protect their rights, most women do
not know the laws exist. Ignorance about the laws extends to
the police, she added, most of whom are men.
Honor killings
are not
confined to
this region;
neighboring
Afghanistan is
notorious for
abrogating
womens
rights, as is
the rest of
Iraq. The UN
Population
Fund estimated in 2000, the most recent statistics available,
that there were 5,000 such killings every year worldwide. The
number of honor killings is routinely underestimated,
however, and most estimates are widely varying guesses.
Definitive or reliable global estimates of honor killing
incidences do not apparently exist.
The UN General Assembly has approved numerous resolutions
to condemn and put an end to honor killings and other honor-
related crimes, yet these acts still go on.
The majority of the killings occur in the Middle East and South
Asia; an increasing number of reports of honor killings have
been found in Western countries, mostly involving immigrant
families.
The worldwide average age of victims is 23, Phyllis Chesler, an
American feminist scholar, wrote in The Middle East
Quarterly. Just over half the victims were daughters and
sisters; a quarter of the victims were wives and girlfriends of
the perpetrators; the rest were mothers, aunts, nieces, cousins,
uncles or nonrelatives.
In the Muslim world, just under a quarter of the murders
involved more than one victim, such as the dead womans
children, boyfriend, fianc, husband, sister, brother or
parents. Honor killings are most often a family affair.
Internationally, more than half the victims were tortured
before they were killed, including being raped. Their deaths
occurred by strangling or bludgeoning, stabbing, stoning,
burning or beheading.
In Kurdistan, the UN estimates that the number of honor
killings might be as high as 50 each month, and that most of
the deaths go unreported. One reason that they continue to be
a leading cause of death for women may be the increasingly
oppressed position of women in Iraqi society. An Iraqi Kurdish
writer, Berivan Dosky, wrote in The Guardian that conditions
for women in post-war Iraq are a disaster, including in
Kurdistan. Dreams of equality and peace that emerged among
women after the fall of Saddam Husseins regime (and
complicated by the United States invasion) have diminished,
as many women still bear the burden of their families honor.
Experts at the UN who work in Kurdistan explained the
rationale for honor killings; that it boils down to one
simplification: Its the culture. Many people said that
violence against women escalated after 1991, when more
people began to keep guns in their homes and were reacting to
the violent politics of Hussein, the Iraqi president at the time,
whose repression against Kurds was deadly until a no-fly zone
was installed by Western powers at the end of the second Gulf
War in 1991.
In the 1980s, many rights activists said, women had been freer
in society. But those days are long over. Deviations from
societal expectations regarding a girls sexuality like falling
in love with a boy or a man are so unacceptable that the
only way to redeem a familys honor is to kill the girl.
We asked the male Kurdish activist who used to work for a
womens group to clarify this mind-set.
Everything that a woman or a girl does is a reflection of the
man in the home, he said. A girl is expected to do as she is told,
which means going to school until her family decides that she
has received enough education. Then it is time to get married
and produce children.
Her responsibilities become focused on her husband and her
About Johanna Higgs and Liga Rudzite
Johanna Higgs is from Perth, Australia. She is
working on her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology,
focused on the militarization of child soldiers in
Colombia. She has worked in the development sector
in various countries, including Philippines, Sri Lanka
and Uganda. Higgs is the director of Project MonMa, a
nonprofit group in West Africa focused on improving
women's lives. She speaks English and Spanish.
Liga Rudzite has an undergraduate degree in social
Related Posts:
children. She must cook, clean and take care of all the
husbands needs. Most important, she must be a virgin before
she gets married. Should she step out of line or do anything
that makes her husband suspicious that she is being
unfaithful, like talking with another man in the street, it is his
right to kill her.
Yet some honor killings are apparently occurring because
husbands are said to be cheating more, and when a wife gets
angry he attacks her. Darwesh said that there was a lot of
prostitution in the region, fed by an influx of foreigners
coming from Iran and Europe to work, as Kurdistan is
becoming an oil region. Refugees flow in from Syria as well,
so its very easy for a man to betray his wife, Darwesh said,
inciting many cases of a wife wanting a divorce.
She tells women who might want to get divorced that its not
the end of the world.




A Rape Accusation in
Northern Mali and
the UNs Awkward
Response

War Crimes Against
Women and Girls
Must Be Prosecuted

For Muslim Women,
a Careful Script to
Combat Violence

Easing Afghan
Womens Burdens
With a Hotline
Tags: Berivan Dosky, femicide, gender-based violence, honor killings, honor
suicides, Islamic women, Kurdistan women's rights, Muslim women, Muslim
women's rights, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Phyllis Chesler, Rasan
Organization, sexual violence against women, Suzan Aref, Tanya Darwesh, The
Middle East Quarterly, UN General Assembly resolution on honor killings,
UNFPA, violence against girls, violence against Kurdistan women, violence
against women, Women Empowerment Organization
pedagogy from the University of Latvia and is
studying for a master's degree in social anthropology
at Riga Stradins University in Latvia. Besides Latvian,
she speaks English, Norwegian and Russian.
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