Bekhal Mahmod, older sister of the “honour killing” victim Banaz Mahmod,
stands very silently in the middle of the room and takes off the black veil
that covers her face to reveal jet-black hair and hazel-coloured
almond-shaped eyes which are lively yet so sad they are startling. You know
they belong to a young woman in fear of her life.
Suddenly, out pours a torrent of words, fierce, thoughtful and articulate and
all voiced in a south London accent that belies her Iraqi-Kurdish roots.
Bekhal has come from a strict Islamic upbringing but she is clearly now a
thoroughly modern young London woman. The transition, however, has been
rough and dangerous. At times she has contemplated suicide.
“Don’t get me wrong, I have come close to ending it,” she says. “I have been
very close. When the police told me my sister was dead, my heart was
shattered. I was praying that she was paralysed. Anything but be murdered.
The only reason I didn’t do something stupid was to have her living still in
my heart.”
Bekhal, 22, is speaking out because of the murder of her 20-year-old sister
Banaz in the name of family honour. Last week, her father Mahmod Mahmod, 52,
and uncle Ari Mahmod, 50, both of Mitcham, south London, were convicted of
her murder at the Old Bailey. Across Europe and increasingly, it seems, in
Britain, as Muslims become more conservative and religious funda-mentalism
strengthens its grip, growing numbers of women are being killed or mutilated
in the name of family honour.
In Banaz’s case it happened because in an extraordinary act of defiance
against her Kurdish family – welcomed into Britain in the 1990s as victims
of Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Kurds after the first Gulf war – she
had walked out of a miserable arranged marriage with an older cousin and
fallen in love with another man, thereby bringing “shame” on the family.
Her fate was sealed when she kissed her boyfriend in a Brixton street. The men
who had been tasked by her father and her uncle, who was the senior head of
the family, with following her photographed this small sign of affection
with a mobile telephone.
“It was a kiss on the lips. No, not a snog,” said Bekhal. “But they took a
picture of her and gave it to my uncle and that was it. It was all over for
Banaz just because she really loved that man.”
Still angry and grieving, Bekhal is trying to make sense of the crime and stay
alive herself as well. She knows that she, too, is at risk because she had
angered her family before Banaz’s revolt. In 2002, aged 17, she fled home
after being beaten and threatened by her father for refusing to accept a
marriage with a cousin twice her age. Since then she has insisted on leading
her own life.
A striking young woman, Bekhal would turn heads in the street if she could be
seen. But she does not dare. Being in fear of her life from her family, she
never goes out in public without covering her entire body and face, apart
from tiny slits for her eyes, in a long black cloak and veil.
Even now she is not sure that the veil and hiding – she has lived in more than
30 places in the past five years – will save her despite the conviction of
her father and uncle, who will be sentenced on July 28.
“Nothing can ever be the same again. All I can do is try and keep myself safe.
And that is the hardest part, because I cannot dare have many close friends
because I am afraid I will drag them down with me.
“If, for example, I am staying at my friend’s house they might come into the
house and try and kill me and harm them as well. It is hard, really hard, to
let myself get close to people.” Her sister was strangled with a boot-lace
and her body stuffed in a suitcase buried in a garden in Handsworth in
Birmingham. Her father and uncle ordered the deed. But the two men they had
hired from Iraqi Kurdistan to carry it out returned there afterwards,
boasting they had raped Banaz as well, and are unlikely ever to be arrested.
“They are the devil’s children. They are nothing made by God’s creation,”
Bekhal says.
“One of them is nicknamed ‘Soorer’, which means red, because his skin is red,
and his speciality is killing people. Quite recently I found out that my
uncle had wanted someone dead in Kurdistan and had got ‘Soorer’ to do it.
“I just can’t get it out of my head, especially the raping of my sister. It
has made things worse. I will never stop thinking about it. It will be on my
mind 24/7.
“It is not easy for me. I have nightmares. You hear noise at night and you
pick up anything and go to the door because you think someone is there. It
is terrifying.
“The way the family thinks is that I am dirty, just because I am not with
them. But all I ever wanted, really, was to be an ordinary person, just a
normal young woman.
“I wanted to have a life, holidays, travel the world, have a good job, have
kids, have a family, get married. But families like mine are very strong and
go back generations and generations. The family is all mixed blood of
cousins to cousins and nephews, and becomes so deep and so intimate and
incestuous that the members of it lose themselves.”
But still, how is it that such things happen in modern, liberal Britain?
Banaz’s murder is a headline-grabbing case but it is, in fact, one of many
of these distinct crimes that Aisha Gill, a senior lecturer in criminology
at Roe-hampton University and a Scotland Yard adviser on violence against
women, honour killings and forced marriages, says is one ghastly crime in a
worrying trend.
A study of the figures indicates that one woman a month is the victim of an
honour killing in Britain. Police across Europe have noticed a rising trend,
too, and prompted by activist groups have come to recognise it, as Scotland
Yard has, as a distinct crime.
In the past, cases were largely hidden from public view because they occurred
in minority groups, but in 2004 police announced new research into the
culture surrounding honour killings and a review of suspicious cases.
The review was opened after the conviction of Abdullah Yones, also a Kurdish
immigrant from Iraq, who had held his 16-year-old daughter Heshu over a
bathtub and slit her throat after discovering that she was writing and
receiving love letters from a boy in her class at their London school.
In court, Yones said his daughter had brought her death on herself. On the day
he was sentenced to life imprisonment, dozens of Kurdish men came to court
to show solidarity with him.
Gill said it was “disgusting” that Banaz’s father and uncle had shown no
remorse when they were convicted. What made it even more sad, she said, was
that there had been a “deafening silence” from the Kurdish community and
religious leaders about the case.
It could not be denied, she said, that there was a failure of the Metropolitan
police to act adequately in Banaz’s case – she went to them four times and
it was obvious that she was in a dangerous situation – but the Kurdish
community was not free of blame either. It needed to respond with conviction
to such crimes. The community needed to address the violence against women
in their midst, help bring the perpetrators to justice, not to protect them
or give them respect for such heinous crimes as honour killings.
Historically, Gill said, the authorities in Britain had hesitated about
interpreting the cultural norms in minority communities like the Kurds and
had assumed that conflicts could be resolved within the community itself.
The police and the courts had lacked understanding of the issues, even
sometimes blaming the victim in a violent and abusive relationship. As a
result, women did not have the confidence that the police would protect them
when they reported it.
A lot has changed, despite the tragic failure to keep Banaz alive, and the
police themselves have been at the forefront, particularly since the Yones
case, of making violence against women a priority.
But despite this improvement there has been no consistency in approach, and
how violence against women is dealt with by the police is often a lottery.
As well as being fearful for herself, Bekhal is also now concerned for the
safety of her mother and her other two sisters Giabame, 16, who is
traditionally the age to be married off to a cousin, and Payman, 20, who is
also unhappily in a forced marriage.
“God knows what will happen to them. But I seriously believe that because
there is no man around now they are in great danger, not from the immediate
family but from the men in the Kurdish community.
“They will look upon them as if there are no men around, to do whatever they
want to. So they will, I fear, be targeting them in a sexual way. They will
be harassing them and abusing them, looking upon them as unworthy and of no
value because of what has happened to Banaz and me.
“As for me, it does not stop me marrying. But it is hard when you know someone
might be following you.”
