Meeting at Amnesty International on Stoning in Kurdistan - 18/05/07
By George Shaw
About 100 people, the majority Iraqi and Iranian women packed a hall to hear the issues around the brutal stoning of a 17 year old girl by members of her family and clan in a village in the north of Kurdistan. The Supporting Panel. included Houzan Mahmood as main guest speaker. This followed a previous meeting in London in celebration of International Women’s Day, which discussed issues around the veiling of women.
Relatives of Du’a Khalil Aswad’s committed the ‘honour killing’, with other men allegedly From the Yezidi minority in the village of Bashika (the Yezidi religion predates Islam and is influenced by Suf’ism). Du’a was beaten, and then stoned to death as punishment for simply falling in love with a Muslim boy. The whole disgusting process was recorded on video film and subsequently widely shown on the Internet. Members of local security forces stood by, failing to intervene or arrest the perpetrators.
With the institutionalised barbarism of the most reactionary kind of human (female) repression there is also the ever-pervading climate of Sharia law. The situation in particular in Northern Iraq has some noteworthy features that are different from that of Iran. In northern Iraq the character of the repression is expressed in tribal/clan terms by people who reside in isolated mountain communities.
Another feature is that incidents such as the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad are not isolated but fairly prevalent in the entire region, in which people accept family retribution almost as the norm. Some people at the London meeting held that the incidents were not so much inspired from a religious point of view; but more a cultural phenomena of female repression. Also, as the Amnesty speaker pointed out, ‘honour killing’ was not a feature confined to Middle Eastern societies but was perpetrated in other societies as well.
In the discussion, from the platform it was announced that Houzan Mahmood, the campaigner from Kurdistan, has had a ‘fatwa’ issued to by the Al Queda inspired group known as Answar al Islam which has been involved in some of the incidents in the area. Of note is the fact that when the coalition forces came into Northern Iraq that is Kurdistan, Ansar al Islam was barely touched and left to continue to abet the repression and enforcement of Sharia Law. Their arbitrary sentencing tariffs were based on the levelof religious devotion of the parties and the amount of blood money that would be offered by one family to the other.
One of the speakers described how a clandestine network of ‘refuge houses’ which has been set up and with the help of outreach workers travelling in the mountains, has increased awareness of the issues. Resistance slowly is emerging with the help of those lucky to move abroad.
As previously stated, the security forces have stood by and done little to deal with the situation. As the organisation known as OWFI can verify, this starts from the top government officials and involves such incidents the security forces in Tal Aafar raping Wajida Muhamed, where it was fortunate that there were witnesses, so that the woman concerned could not be discredited. Essentially in areas of Kurdistan the rule of law is at best informal. Reprisals are mostly ignored, as in the Du’a’ Khalil Aswad’s case when a busload of Yezidis were savagely gunned down, it was claimed, by a group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq.
In a conversation I had with a senior family member of a group lucky enough to get to Europe recently, he said it was not so much only the repression of the female and the ‘dishonour’ but how it also affects profoundly the whole family with a far embracing stigma lasting for a long time. There were obviously many people at the meeting who were obviously traumatised and who related their individual experiences in Iranian, Kurdish and Arabic. Many women told me they did not know what normality meant as women in a ‘civil society’.
If Saddam Hussein was no emancipator of women at least in general they fared better under that regime. His departure however unleashes something quite different: the hordes of men holding mobile phone cameras aloft dancing with glee at the crumpled figure below them is almost an echo of Abu Ghraib with its demonstration of human bestiality. A horrifying genie has been let out of the bottle; a barbarism that must be met with not only solidarity with the repressed and those fighting on the inside but a vision of a new society. It is hoped from the meeting that the 95 odd women will build solidarity ties with their compatriots the thousands of Iraqi women who fled with some of their families to Jordan and Syria living in appalling deprivation that were not fortunate to reach Europe.
It can only be hoped that solidarity will be transformed concretely into something that will enable to those who are working in the ‘refuge houses’ to slowly set up an alternative to the theocracy that pervades the communities such as Bashika or Tal Aafar. That alternative is something far more than just rights, equality and freedom but a philosophy for our age.