Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  * * *

  All her life, twenty-three-year-old Rania had been told by her parents that she would grow up to marry her cousin. But when she went to university, she met an Iraqi student named Khaled and they fell in love.

  In June 1997, unable to face marriage to her cousin, for whom she felt nothing except a normal familial bond, she ran away from home just a few days before their wedding and moved in with Khaled.

  A couple of months after fleeing her home, Jordanian Television broadcast a live programme about honour crimes. The presenter read out a heartbreaking letter Rania had sent to the station in which she asked for her family’s forgiveness and understanding.

  In the letter, Rania assured her family the man she fled with was not the reason why she did not want to marry her cousin. She did not love her cousin and thought of him as a brother. She wrote that she had tried to convince her uncle and cousin to drop the idea but they refused.

  Rania said her cousin told her that she had been meant to be his wife ever since they were children and that ‘When you marry me you will learn to love me.’

  ‘I do not love my cousin,’ she wrote. ‘You, my mother, father, brothers and sisters forced me to run away … you exerted every pressure possible to force me to marry my cousin, knowing that I do not want to be with him.’

  She appealed to her mother for help because she felt their bond was especially close:

  Dear Mom, I am lost in the dark with no one next to me. Please do not say goodbye. My beloved mother, extend your hand to me and save me from my ordeal … I love and miss you mother … I tell you this with tears in my eyes.

  Father, mother, brothers and sisters … you are all dear to me and I need you … I am ready to return home this moment but I want a promise from you that you will not force me to marry my cousin … kill me if you want because I do not care about my life.

  Her father called the television station, promising that they would not harm their daughter, that all they wanted was for her to return home, and that the wedding plans had been shelved. Her father spoke on the programme, saying, ‘I am urging you from a father’s heart that is bleeding tears and blood over your absence, come home and God and I will forgive you. I will do whatever you wish even if it costs me dear.’

  One of her aunts also called the programme and asked Rania to return home because ‘her parents were worried about her and had forgiven her.’

  A joyful Rania agreed to meet her family at a police station, where she was handed over to her father who had signed a JD5,000 (US $7,000) bond that guaranteed he would not harm his daughter. ‘Just hand her over to me and I will take good care of her … I will protect her,’ her father said.

  Two weeks later, Rania’s two aunts told her they’d taken pity on her and had arranged a secret meeting with Khaled. As they walked near some railway lines, the aunts suddenly ran off. Instead of finding Khaled, Rania saw her seventeen-year-old brother Rami waiting for her. He pulled out a pistol and shot her four times. After she fell, he fired a fifth bullet point-blank through her forehead.

  Medical examinations indicated that Rania was still a virgin. Rania, an innocent child, had been betrayed by the closest members of her family. As Rania’s brother was a minor, he was tried at a juvenile court. Her father, who was out of the country, dropped the charges. Rami was sentenced to six months.

  I was absolutely outraged by this story. I was also dumbfounded at the amount of criticism I received as a result; newspaper columnists writing for other papers said I was a sensationalist damaging Jordan’s reputation in the eyes of the world. I had a growing sense of frustration that I was not helping to change anything at all.

  A massive problem for women who felt their lives might be in danger was that they had nowhere safe to run. Once they left the family home they were on their own and were unlikely to receive help from other people, lest they be tarred with the same brush of dishonour. There was, however, (and still is) one extraordinary place I visited that did protect women – but in a way that was deeply and tragically flawed.

  In the summer of 1995, twenty-three-year-old Inas eloped with her lover, a talented musician with whom she had been in love for some time. They came from a remote rural area of Jordan, where Inas’s strictly conservative family had insisted that she marry her cousin – but she found him repellent.

  They decided to escape to Syria where they planned to marry and settle down. Before sunrise on the appointed day, the lovers sneaked quietly from their homes and headed for the border.

  Inas’s uncle was waiting for them. Levelling his gun, he fired repeatedly at his niece, reloading and firing a total of twenty-two rounds before border guards overpowered him.

  Inas was hit in her shoulders, arms, legs and chest; she was rushed to a government hospital where, thanks to her incredibly strong desire to live and the doctors’ great surgical skill, she pulled through. Five months later, after a series of lengthy and painful operations, the doctors proclaimed her recovered.

  Her lover, who was unharmed, was arrested, tried and imprisoned for two years for the crime of adultery.

  Her uncle was also sentenced to two years.

  And what of Inas, the would-be murder victim?

  After Inas had recovered, she was sent to prison. She would still be there long after her would-be murderer was released.

  I first met Inas when I visited Jweideh Correctional and Rehabilitation Centre for Women in 1997, two years after her uncle tried to murder her, when he was already a free man. Located about thirty kilometres south-east of Amman, the white, box-like fortress houses up to eight hundred female inmates.

  During this visit I was told that around twenty to twenty-five women were detained, many for indefinite periods and with no official charges, under what the government calls ‘protective custody’ or ‘administrative detention’. These women are kept in prison out of fear their families might kill them for violating their families’ honour.

  There are no accurate statistics on how many women live in prison in Jordan for their own protection. In July 2003, Hana Afgani, the police major in charge of the Jweideh Centre, told Human Rights Watch that ninety-seven inmates were administrative detainees.

  Many of these women have been in prison for over a decade. They have wasted their precious youth in tiny cells, mixing with real criminals, because they might be killed if released.

  The prison director told me that some had been involved in ‘adulterous and immoral’ relations; others became pregnant out of wedlock, failed virginity tests, had run away from home after discovering their families were plotting to kill them; and some had survived attempts on their lives by brothers, fathers and uncles.

  Inescapable as Colditz, there remain only two ways out of Jweideh for those women in ‘protective custody’:

  1. An immediate male relative visits the prison and asks for his sister/daughter to be freed. He has to sign a guarantee worth $7,000 that he will not harm her.

  2. A male bidder, typically an old man looking for companions, visits the prison and asks to marry any woman prepared to be released into his custody.

  To my amazement, I witnessed the second option during this, my first visit to Jweideh. A withered old man in his seventies joined me in the director’s office and informed her that he desired to marry any woman in protective custody if she was willing to take care of his children and land.

  The director summoned one of the female inmates and informed her of the deal. She agreed and was released.

  After this incident, a prison warden directed me to the special section where these women were housed. As we chatted, a typical comment was: ‘It does not matter if I am in or out of prison. I am dead either way.’ Many had lost all ambition; they no longer desired anything, not even their freedom. ‘My family never comes to visit me. They never discuss my affairs with anyone. I am dead to them.’

  Inas was different, however. The minute she entered the room dressed in the light blue prison uniform and walked confidently t
owards me, her eyes gleamed with hope, intelligence and determination. She told me she spent her nights dreaming of what she would do when she won her freedom; she did not and would not accept that she might never be freed. She showed me the pink and white lumpy bullet scars dotted on her arm and leg. I asked her whether her lover was hurt. Inas told me he escaped unharmed because her uncle fired only at her.

  Inas was serving an indefinite prison term with no official charge lodged against her. Every day she hoped that her family would forgive her; that it would be her last night in jail. Since the shooting, she had heard nothing. ‘They never tried to get in touch with me. To them I no longer existed.’ The only time Inas’s family visited her in prison was when they tried to convince her to drop the charges against her uncle so that he would get a reduced sentence. Inas agreed in the hope that her family would forgive her.

  Nonetheless, despite everything, Inas told me, to my amazement, that she still wanted to be reunited with her family. She had by then written several letters to the governor asking permission to leave the prison. Three of her uncles who had been determined to kill her had died and the remaining two had pledged to leave her alone.

  One year later, I returned to Jweideh and, hopeful that her dreams had come true, immediately asked about Inas. She was still there. We sat and chatted together like old friends.

  I told her that I would do my best to help her, that I would tell her story to all the journalists I met, that I would always refer journalists to her in the hope that her plight and the plight of other women would be heard and solved.

  This would prove to be a great deal harder than I imagined. The Jordanian government was apathetic and unwilling to change. A minister told me, ‘We cannot lock up an entire tribe or family. We really do not like or want to imprison women, but what can we do? The concept of [family] honour is socially imbedded in our society.’

  The last time I saw Inas was when I accompanied a Human Rights Watch representative to Jordan to write a report on the fate of imprisoned women. Incredibly, Inas was full of optimism. She had studied in prison to become a professional hairdresser. She took us to her ‘salon’, a corner in a basement room, and demonstrated her skills to us on a fellow prisoner.

  Inas’s father had recently died and she told me that she had requested again to be freed and reunited with her family. She told me excitedly that her sister and mother had visited her and promised to release her and to send her to the USA.

  At least that is what they told her.

  My heart sank. Bitter experience told me it was most likely that this would prove to be a ruse by the family to get her released so they could kill her. I had by then reported on almost two dozen cases whereby a father or a brother bailed their female relative only to have her murdered as soon as she got home – in some cases almost as soon as she was outside the prison walls. I told Inas to be wary of this sudden unrealistic development before making a decision that might cost her life, but she still remained optimistic as we said goodbye. She told me she would never give up.

  As I reported on Inas and Rania’s cases, and many more besides, I became more and more incensed at the injustice and suffering, and frustrated at the amount of criticism I received for reporting these stories that would have previously gone unnoticed. I now knew that reporting these crimes was no longer enough for me. I wasn’t changing anything. I had to do more.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bound by Honour

  The twenty-first of November 1999 is a day I’ll never forget. On that morning I met my friend and colleague at The Jordan Times, Dima Hamdan, and together we excitedly headed to Parliament, walking quickly even though we’d left especially early in order to reserve good seats on the terrace. The white building shone in the strong sunlight and, as we passed through the security gates, I wondered whether we were about to make history.

  We were, but not in the way we had intended.

  Back in 1998 I had achieved some notoriety; I was awarded the Reebok Human Rights Award for my reporting and activism. The award generated a great deal of media coverage, putting what was for many an unwelcome spotlight on so-called honour crimes in Jordan. This fired up a public debate, which became international when ABC and CNN interviewed me for documentaries.

  Then, in February 1999, a Jordanian pharmacist named Basil Burgan contacted me and proposed we start a grass roots movement in Jordan, not only to raise local awareness about these brutal murders but to fight to change Jordanian law, and to demand tougher punishments for the perpetrators of these crimes.

  Of course, I agreed, and together we emailed all our friends and anyone we could think of who might be prepared to devote some of their time to the cause. I was quite hopeful, as many people had contacted me over the years wanting to take an active role against so-called honour crimes. Twenty people showed up for the first meeting held at Burgan’s house.

  We decided to name ourselves the Jordanian National Committee to Eliminate So-Called Honour Crimes (I’m the first to admit that it’s not a very catchy title, but it was at least unambiguous). We continued to meet on a weekly basis to brainstorm on the best means to raise people’s awareness of these crimes and to lobby the government to abolish laws that discriminated against women. As we had no headquarters, we took turns meeting in each other’s houses. After a couple of months, the group settled at eleven core members: seven women and four men.

  In addition to Basil and myself, the committee included Asma Khader, our legal adviser and a lawyer and activist, Muna Darwazeh, a TV production company owner, Maha Abu Ayyash, sculptor and copyrighter, Najwa Ghannoum, an assistant manager, Muna Abu Rayyan, a PR and marketing specialist, Sultan Abu Mariam, an agricultural engineer, Khalid Kasih, a food factory owner, Samir Abdul Aziz, an engineer, as well as Ruba Dabis and Nisreen Hannoon, who were both university students at the time.

  We decided that one of the best means to fight the status quo was to organize a nation-wide campaign to collect people’s signatures and present it to Parliament. The aim was to collect fifty thousand signatures; if we could present this many signatures to Parliament, then the issue would have to be debated. This would be the first petition of its kind in the history of the Kingdom – it was not a popular thing to do. People who had tried collecting signatures for petitions before had found themselves harassed by the security forces.

  But we knew if we could show MPs that the people of Jordan wanted change, then maybe, just maybe, they would help to make it happen. We hoped to start a new movement that would bring the government more under control of the people. At least by doing this we would get people involved and interested in how the country was being governed – and it would show people that it was possible to make their voices heard.

  We prepared pamphlets that included information and statistics illustrating the problem, and held lectures in public and private institutions to raise people’s awareness about the issue and encouraged them to sign our petition. We created an archive that included everything that was written in the press about honour crimes. Several committee members appeared on TV and radio talk shows.

  Of course, we had to be very clear about which laws we wanted to change. In March, we met and had an animated discussion with Asma Khader in the chair. Asma suggested that we focus our campaign on the cancellation of Article 340, which dealt specifically with adultery, rather than Article 98, which was generally applied to several types of crime, not just so-called honour crimes, and would be much harder to change.

  Article 340 included two clauses of particular interest. One stipulated that ‘he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery (with a man) and kills, wounds, or injures one or both of them, is exempted from any penalty.’

  The other clause stated: ‘He who discovers his wife, or one of his female relatives with another in an adulterous situation, and kills, wounds or injures one or both of them, benefits from a reduction in penalty.’

  Article 98 said: ‘Any person who commits a crime in
a fit of fury caused by an unlawful and dangerous act on the part of the victim benefits from a reduction in penalty.’

  I was in favour of targeting Article 98 because I knew, from having witnessed dozens of court cases, that it was the one more commonly used in relation to so-called honour crimes. It was Article 98 that allowed the amending of charges of premeditated murder to misdemeanour.

  Khader argued that Article 340, which was a specific article, was the better target because it was so specific. Article 98 was general and it would be difficult to make amendments to it since it was applied in many other criminal matters.

  Her opinion was that amending Article 340 would be the first strategic move that would eventually lead to the elimination of all of the laws that discriminated against women in Jordan, including Article 98. When we voted, everyone, with the exception of myself, voted in favour of targeting Article 340. Of course, even though I would have preferred to tackle Article 98 first, I remained a hundred per cent dedicated to our objective.

  We called all of our contacts, including several government officials, to try and obtain the necessary approvals for our activities and put together a press conference. One of our first heavyweight supporters was the late Iyad Qatan, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Information. On 21 August 1999, he wrote to the police, stating that we would be gathering signatures in public places, hotels and government institutes and that we had his support. Qatan was a courageous man; he even helped free some of our petition-signature collectors who were held by the police for questioning, despite behaving properly and legally throughout the campaign.

  Qatan also sent similar notices to the newspapers and the governor to inform them that the Ministry supported our campaign and gave us approval to hold our first press conference.

  Despite this, our first request to hold a press conference in Amman was rejected by the mayor. It took a senior official at the Royal Palace to persuade him otherwise.