Return to Transcripts main page

INSIGHT

Turkish Honor Killings in Germany

Aired June 22, 2005 - 23:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR: Deadly sins. Among Germany's Turks, some women face the death penalty for betraying their families' honor.
Hello and welcome.

There are more than 2-1/2 million Turks and their descendants living in Germany. They are the country's largest ethnic minority and they have faced the kinds of familiar problems that minorities tend to. But there is a problem entirely inside the community whose scale is only beginning to emerge: women who are punished with death if the men in their families accuse them of bad morals.

Germans have been shocked to find a brutal system of justice operating quietly within their borders.

On our program today, the honor killings.

Chris Burns has this look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS BURNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This 25-year-old Turkish woman lives in the shadows, afraid to reveal her identity or whereabouts, fearing she could become the victim of what is called an honor killing. We will call her Aisha (ph).

She says she was forced into two marriages in Turkey by her father. As a teenager, Aisha (ph) says she attempted suicide during the first and in the second she says her husband brutalized her repeatedly for refusing sex.

AISHA, TURKISH VICTIM OF ABUSE (through translator): I ran out to the balcony. He came behind and said, "How can you do that? You must sleep with me," and he grabbed me by the throat and held me over the railing. I was helpless. He took me into bed and raped me.

BURNS: Aisha (ph) says it was the beginning of an increasingly violent ordeal that ended here in Germany. She lived to tell the story, but not Hatun Surucu.

(on camera): After leaving her husband from an arranged marriage, Hatun Surucu was shot dead at this bus stop in February, her three brothers arrested as suspects. It was Berlin's sixth suspected honor killing in five months. Worldwide, the United Nations puts the figure at about 5,000 a year.

(voice-over): Surucu's death, suspected of being done to restore her family's honor, sparked demonstrations from Germans and Turks alike. Some content the government, striving towards a multicultural society, is looking the other way.

But German police complain they're not getting enough cooperation from the Turkish community to solve the killings.

"The Turkish community often lives with its own laws, with their own justices of the peace, for instance. They don't want Western jurisprudence," he says.

After Hatun Surucu left her husband, she took her son with her and started a new life, training to be an electrician. Her instructor knew she had family troubles.

HEIDI KOSELOWSKY, SURUCU'S FMR. INSTRUCTOR (through translator): She just said she didn't want to have much to do with her family and didn't' want to talk more about it.

BURNS: Surucu's family declined an interview, but a counselor for them says Surucu's breakup with her husband angered her father enough to break off ties with her.

"The mother and sister led the efforts towards reconciliation, but unfortunately this happened."

What happened was the classic scenario of an honor killing, says Necla Kelek, author of one book on the practice.

NECLA KELEK, AUTHOR (through translator): Usually the youngest son does it so not to get such a big sentence. He does it because she destroyed the family pride.

BURNS: The three brothers await trial, denying any involvement in the slaying, but their family won't rule out the possibility one of the sons did pull the trigger.

"If one of us did it, we would kick him out," Wahid (ph) quotes the family as saying.

But Necla Kelek says the killers shouldn't be the only one held accountable.

KELEK (through translator): They should see a murderer. If the father called for the son to do it, it is the responsibility of the entire family.

BURNS: Honor killings are again stirring claims German's multicultural society isn't working, a contention by conservatives who may just topple leftist Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder this fall.

KELEK (through translator): The multicultural society as it is to be understood has failed.

BURNS: Kelek says it's producing victims like Aisha (ph), who says her father beat her when she refused to join her second husband in Germany, then forced her to fly here where Aisha (ph) says her husband beat and raped her repeatedly. One day, she says, he wouldn't stop.

AISHA (ph) (through translator): He held my head in the sink and choked me. I shook away. Then I fell down and he sat on me and started to beat my head on the floor. I couldn't see anymore. I thought I was blinded.

BURNS: After more beating, Aisha (ph) thought help from a Turkish neighbor who fearfully turned her away to face her husband again.

AISHA (ph) (through translator): he broke my nose. There was so much blood that it seemed like a river.

BURNS: She fled again and her brother-in-law took her to the hospital. She agreed to go to a woman's home and her husband was thrown into jail. Divorced now, Aisha (ph) has a child from a Turkish boyfriend.

AISHA (ph) (through translator): I lost my trust toward men. I live with my friend, but I can't trust him either. Since I was 17, they've played with my life and hurt me.

BURNS: No honor killings have been reported here since February, but Kelek says that doesn't mean things are better.

KELEK (through translator): The threats on women have increased inside the families. I know from one lawyer, in court the men say leave me alone, you saw what happened to Hatun Surucu. Maybe there are less murders, but the oppression inside the families is becoming more aggressive.

BURNS: Some here say tougher action is required to end the violence, action that would come too late to save Hatun Surucu.

Chris Burns, CNN, Berlin.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: We take a break. When we come back, one woman tries to explain the tragedies.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: "The whore lived like a German," the reported description that one teenager boy of Turkish descent offered of Hatun Surucu when he and his friends praised her murder in a classroom discussion, remarks that raised an alarm across the country.

Welcome back.

The German-Turkish community is too big for easy generalizations and it's not really well-understood by outsiders, but a few German-Turkish women have emerged to speak publicly about honor killings and their cause. One of them is attorney and author Seyran Ates, who spoke to us earlier.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SEYRAN ATES, AUTHOR: We have a very special definition of honor in Muslim community. You have to understand what means honor for a Muslim and what means Muslim for Christian or for Jewish people. There is a big difference.

Muslim people describe or define their honor not about themselves but about their women's and their society. So if their honor is disturbed, they have only the way to kill somebody to clean their honor.

MANN: I'm curious about your own experience. Did you feel pressures as a woman in that community?

ATES: I grew up in a Turkish family. My parents are Turkish. My father is Kurdish, my mother is Turkish, and I grew up in a very traditional family and I ran away when I was 17 years old because I can't stand this very hard traditional life and living in a very modern surrounding in Germany and living in a very traditional Turkish family was not so easy for me. So I grew up with this idea of women have to stay home, they have to marriage someone some time and they get children and live very traditional. You see, this is also the idea that also German people have or all over the world, we have this traditional structure that women have to live in the house and men live outside the house.

MANN: We hear about honor killings and they are terrible, but they are also relatively rare. At least officially we don't hear about all that many. How much violence, how much pressure, how many other kinds of coercion are associated with this idea of honor? How much more killing is going on, do you think?

ATES: When we have killings, the police are not going and saying this is honor killing and this is normal, if you can say that, normal killing. Therefore, we have a very dark count, and I think we have to search for the number and look if there are more killings which we can call honor killings and I think we don't have such a high number of honor killings because people who are living in the society where honor killings will be practiced, they don't go out of their living situation because they are fear of honor killings. So we would have more when the people who are in connection with the idea of honor killings, if they look for their own lifestyle, then we would have more honor killings.

And I think that more than 50 percent live in such a situation of fear of honor killings or to be killed. Many of my clients, I am working as a lawyer here in Berlin and I make family and criminal law, many of my clients, women, they say they are feared to divorce because their men say, "If you divorce, if you go to court to divorce, I will kill you."

So we have a very high number who are very silent, who stay home and don't go out, don't ask for divorce, because they are in fear of being killed because of honor.

MANN: How can this change? How can it be stopped?

ATES: We can change it with education. I think education is the main point. We can show the children who were born here in Germany and have grown up in Germany, we have to show them a modern life, a civil life, and we have to show them how women and men can live together and have another definition of honor, and this has to do with education.

I can say that in the fact of forced marriage, when people are well educated, we have less forced marriage and we have less honor killings or sharing this idea of honor killings, when we deal with families where people are well educated.

MANN: Is the German government doing enough?

ATES: I think the German government is not doing enough, because in Germany we had so long time of government saying Germany is not an immigration country. For more than 16 years Mr. Kohl (ph) said that, and in the last four years or something like two years, we have an official public discussion about immigrants here in Germany and a discussion, a debate, about integration policy. We didn't have a real integration policy here in Germany, so the government is not doing enough.

In the fact of forced marriage, now we have a discussion about take place in criminal law that we have a paragraph for forced marriage. This is after 40 years immigration. I think it's a bad thing that Germany don't realize what happens in Turkish community, in Muslim community, in reality. They are dreaming of multicultural society of some Germans and that means that we live not together, we live nearby the other culture. This is not my idea of multicultural. So the government has done not enough for their immigrants. Not only for Turkish, for every immigrant they don't do enough.

MANN: Seyran Ates, thank you so much for this.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

We take another break. When we come back, we look beyond Germany to talk more about women and Islam and honor.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: One of France's most infamous imams was thrown out of the country last year but a French judge ruled this week that he wasn't legally at fault. Abdul Khatar Bousian (ph) preached that a man is entitled to beat his wife for infidelity. He was deported to his native Algeria but tried in absentia for provocation to commit assault. The court ruled that Bousian (ph) was offering a religious judgment outside the scope of the law.

Welcome back.

Muslim women around the world are trying to find new ways to express their rights within their traditions. At the same time, Western governments have been grappling with what they should do to protect women.

Joining us now to talk about that is Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble with Islam Today."

Thanks so much for being with us.

We've been talking about Germany so far in this program, but when you look around the world, when you look around the Muslim world, how common is religiously or culturally sanctioned violence against women?

IRSHAD MANJI, AUTHOR: Well, let me first acknowledge, Jonathan, that violence against women exists everywhere regardless of culture, religion, economic and social class.

But the reality does remain that in too many Muslim societies today, honor-based crimes are legitimized by the political and religious elite. Amnesty International, a nonpartisan human rights agency, has documented that in Pakistan alone an average of two honor killings a day occurs. Even in moderate Muslim countries, such as Jordan, a couple of years ago you heard the justice minister say with cruel detachment, I might add, that women who are killed in cases of honor must be prostitutes and prostitutes deserve to die.

Secular Muslim countries, like Turkey, are even having a hard time cracking down on honor crimes, so we Muslims really have to come to terms with the fact that even if it has nothing to do with the Koran, Islam's holy book, nonetheless we have a huge problem called honor crimes.

MANN: Well, let me pick up on what you just said, because it's a crucial point. There is nothing in the Koran that commands men to murder women for these kinds of reasons, so why is it happening?

MANJI: I would argue that it has everything to do with tribal culture. Honor, you see, is a tradition in tribal cultures that requires women to give up their individuality in order to maintain the reputation of the men in their lives. This in effect turns women into property of the community so that their lives don't in fact belong to them, their lives belong to a wider group of people. Their families, their tribes, even their nations, so that when a Muslim woman to whom honor is applied is accused of dishonoring, of shaming, of breaking moral codes, the punishment against her, Jonathan, can be so much bigger than even the so-called crime that she's been accused of merits.

Why? Because under the logic of honor, she has not just shamed herself. She has shamed a wider group of people with the punishment having to cover them all.

Let me just quickly tell you the absurd lengths to which honor can be taken. You may remember that about a year-and-a-half ago Hamas in the occupied territories issued a statement saying that women will finally be eligible to become suicide bombers. But only one type of woman will be eligible, she who has dishonored. The idea being that by taking her life and that of innocent others with her, she'll be lifting the moral stain that she has left on a wider group of people.

MANN: Now, you say that this is a tribal idea of honor, and when I hear you say that I get the sense that you think it's something primitive. Is it dying out as Muslim communities move into the West and women have more opportunities? Or is it being reinforced, do you think, because of the reception that they're getting?

MANJI: I think both are happening at the same time. You will often hear Muslim men in Western societies argue that precisely because they are treated to so much humiliation at the hands of the host societies they become angry, they become resentful, and just as that Algerian psychotherapist, France Fernand (ph), pointed out, when a man believes he has nothing left to control in his life, he will cling to his family. That is the only thing he can control.

So many people will argue that if you, you know, give Muslim men the jobs that they deserve, then things will get better. Well, they might get better, but I doubt that they're going to cure the problem of honor killings and honor crimes. I think that at the end of the day, this requires a change in cultural attitudes and Muslims have to hold other Muslims to account for that.

MANN: Well, Seyran Ates, the attorney we just heard from, said education is what is required. You're essentially saying the same thing. But let me ask you, is it right, is it proper, for governments to try to educate Muslims away from their traditional ideas about marriage and morality and women? Is that racist? Is it patronizing?

MANJI: No. I mean, look, if ordinary Muslims themselves aren't going to step up to the plate and do that on behalf of the Muslim community, somebody has to.

You know, it's interesting. A French-Arab novelist by the name of Amin Maluf (ph) has said something beautiful in this regard. He says that traditions deserve respect only insofar as they themselves confer respect. In other words, traditions deserve respect only if they also respect the basic rights of women and men, and if you believe as I believe that human rights are universal, then, you know, whatever it takes in order to reinforce that will be necessary.

One other point to make about this, many Muslims go to the West precisely because they want better futures for their families. So if we don't, you know, improve the status of women, of Muslim women in these societies, quite frankly we are undermining the very things that attract so many Muslims to these societies.

MANN: Do you end up with your point of view in a situation like the French, where they have banned head scarves from schools, they have taken to deporting some of the fiery clerics who most object to French sensibilities, in effect protecting one set of rights and infringing on another.

MANJI: Well, I mean, that is the paradox of democracy. You know, what happens when women's rights, for example, bump up against these so- called rights of ethnic or religious or cultural minorities.

The real question we have to ask here, and this is one that nobody really has a great answer to, myself included, I might add. How do multicultural societies produce pluralists, by which I mean people who appreciate multiple perspectives and truths without producing relativists, people who can't or won't tell the difference between torture and culture.

MANN: Well, that debate for another day. Irshad Manji, author of " The Trouble With Islam Today," thank you so much for talking with us.

MANJI: My pleasure.

MANN: And that's INSIGHT. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.

END

TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com