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May 8th,
2007 - Honor Killings Fuel Tensions in Iraq’s Kurdish North |
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Honor Killings Fuel Tensions
in Iraq’s Kurdish North By Barry Newhouse Voice of America May 8, 2007 In Iraq's northern Kurdistan
region, government officials are trying to understand and stop a rise in honor
killings. The Kurdish government has overturned Iraqi laws that allowed
relatives to kill women who were perceived to have dishonored their families,
but officials say women are still dying nearly every day. VOA's Barry
Newhouse reports from Irbil that, in recent weeks, a widely distributed video
of one brutal killing has fueled more deaths and inflamed sectarian tensions. In the grainy video, a dozen
men surround a woman curled into a fetal position on the ground, and they
kick and punch her. Hundreds of onlookers fill the village square in Bashika,
just outside Iraq's northern city Mosul. The beating continues as
Do'a Khalil, 17, tries to protect her head from the blows. After several
minutes, a cinderblock is passed through the crowd and a man uses it to smash
her head. Khalil's death brings cheers
from the crowd. Do'a Khalil belonged to the
Yazidis, a religious minority concentrated in northern Iraq with a strict
caste system governing marriage. She was in love with a Muslim boy. Members of
her family disapproved. The video of her murder on
April 7 quickly spread from cell phone to cell phone across Kurdistan,
dominating news coverage and stoking tensions between Yazidis and Muslims. Ido Babasheikh, an advisor
on Yazidi affairs for Iraq's President Jalal Talabani, showed VOA printouts
from Islamist Web sites urging attacks against Yazidis. "The fundamentalists,
the Muslimists, they have taken this argument to kill the Yazidians," he
said. "They have written many articles and they said they must kill the
Yazidians because they killed a girl, this girl who wanted to change her
religion." Kurdish officials insist
that the girl did not want to convert to Islam and that her family was merely
upset because she wanted to marry outside her religion. But days after her death, 23
Yazidi laborers traveling together were shot dead in Mosul. An Islamic
militant group claimed responsibility and vowed to kill more Yazidis to
avenge her death. Do'a Khalil's public honor
killing was unusual because hundreds of people witnessed it and the video has
been seen by thousands. But honor killings are common in Kurdistan, where
tribal, cultural and religious traditions have long condoned the practice. "I think it takes place
daily, some are killed, some burn themselves, so there are many cases,"
said Aziz. Accurate figures on the
number of women killed are difficult to obtain because many deaths occur at
home and go unreported. Some women are distraught
over dishonoring their families and set themselves on fire using fuel. Their
deaths are frequently ruled an accident. Officials say hundreds of women are
dying each year, and the limited figures available show deaths are
increasing. In the latest United Nations
human-rights report on Iraq, U.N. officials urged the Kurdistan government to
do more to address the problem. Chilura Hardi, who runs a
center for women's issues in Irbil, says that as the cell phone video of Do'a
Khalil's killing spread, the number of honor killings increased. "Since the seventh of
April, so many women have been killed. So many women, it has just been
packed, packed with killing women," she said. "Because it just made
it okay. When people saw that, people who have got this idea about killing a
woman for whatever the reason: whether she did not listen to you, did not
obey your orders, did not want to get married to so and so. Well then, if
that happens then I can do the same thing." She says she believes the
government is sincere in its effort to solve the problem. Kurdish officials
have enacted laws that punish the practice and they are starting a community
education program they say reduced the number of honor killings in Pakistan. But the killing of Do'a
Khalil has brought renewed attention to the issue. Last week, nearly a month after
Khalil was killed, the Kurdish government released a statement condemning her
murder and urging calm. Hardi says women's groups have been alarmed by her
death. "We have been working
on the killings for a long time. All of us, all of the women's organizations.
We have been writing articles in the papers, on magazines. It just does not
seem to get somewhere. Now when this happened I think it woke us all up and
said, 'Look, if you do not do something, this is going to continue and it is
going to get worse," added Hardi. In recent weeks, Kurdish
officials have also focused on reducing religious tensions sparked by
Khalil's death. Human Rights Minister Yousif
Aziz says officials worry that Islamic militant groups are using her honor
killing to ignite the kind of sectarian violence that plagues the rest of
Iraq. "These are one of the
weak habits of the Kurdish community, and we have to take care about these
weak points," said Aziz. "We should not allow our enemy to take
advantage of these weak points and to make many problems for us." Do'a Khalil has been buried
in a Yazidi graveyard in a village north of Mosul, but the struggle over the
legacy of her death continues. External link: http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-05-08-voa58.cfm |