Wednesday, June 13, 2007

What "honor" is there in this killing?

TimesOnline reported A gentle kiss on a South London street captured on a mobile telephone camera sealed Banaz Mahmod’s fate. When the photograph, taken by a member of the Kurdish community, was shown to Miss Mahmod’s uncle, Ari Mahmod, a family meeting was called where it was decided that the 20-year-old woman and her boyfriend, Rahmat Sulemani, must be murdered.
What gives a father and an uncle the right to say a girl deserves to be murdered?
From the viewpoint of her uncle, a prominent figure among South London’s Kurds, and her father, Mahmod Mahmod, she had already walked out of an arranged marriage and was now bringing further shame on the family.... When Banaz Mahmod was 17 she was married to a Kurdish man in the Midlands. It was imperative that the arranged marriage worked because two of Mahmod’s other daughters had ended their marriages. But the relationship was disastrous; she tried to hang herself and later told police that her husband had raped her. Risking her father’s wrath, she fled her husband and returned to the family home in Mitcham, South London.
She should have left her husband, but should not have gone back to her father.
She later met Mr Sulemani, an Iranian Kurd, and the pair soon fell in love. Because Mr Sulemani was not a strict Muslim and not from the Mirawaldy region, Miss Mahmod’s father ruled that she would never marry him. To enforce this point, she was taken to a Kurdish home in Sheffield and beaten for two weeks. On her return, the couple continued to meet in secret.
What gives them the authority to say she can't marry who she wants.
... In January last year, Mohamad Hama, 30, along with other Kurdish men, attempted to bundle Mr Sulemani into a car. As Mr Sulemani escaped, Hama shouted after him: “We are Muslim and Kurdish. We are not like the English where you can be boyfriend and girlfriend.”
If you are in Egland, you should be subject English laws, and so should the people that beat and then murdered you.
But a few days later, Miss Mahmod was dead.

No comments: