Two young girls look on as a veiled woman passes by in Aleppo, August 2014. Syrian magazine Saiedet Souria wants to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Nov 15 2014 (IPS)

For most Syrian women, the war has been a disaster. For some, it has also been liberating.

For Yasmine Merei, managing editor of the Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria, the upset of traditional family roles and the shaking off of a culture of fear have wrought positive effects.

Many Syrian women have unfortunately been forced to become the breadwinners of their families, with their husbands missing, in jail, injured or killed, she told IPS, but while fending for themselves can be a terrifying experience, it can also free women from the traditional bonds placed on them.

Although it [Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria] does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly … [it] wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard
‘’If he [the husband] isn’t the one who pays for everything and has that specific role in society, he no longer has the right to tell you what to do’’, added Mohammad Mallak, the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine, which translates as ‘Syrian Women’, and was founded early this year.

Mallak also runs a partner magazine, Dawda (‘Noise’), from the same office in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep.

Few of the women in the magazine’s photos have their heads covered, and Merei took off her headscarf earlier this year, after wearing it ‘’for about twenty years’’ as part of her upbringing in a poor, conservative Sunni family.

Merei said that she started taking part in the 2011 protests due to the unjustness of Syrian law, especially as concerns women. As examples, she noted a longstanding law against Syrian women giving citizenship to their children and widespread, unpunished honour killings.

A former Master’s student in linguistics, Merei – like many Syrian women – has become responsible for providing for her immediate family, sending money to her mother and her brothers, both of whom were jailed for protesting and released only after large bribes were paid.

Her elderly father died shortly after he, too, had been imprisoned and the family forced to flee their home.

Telling women’s stories does not simply mean female victims recounting the horrors and hardships of their lives, however.

Although it does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly, Merei wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard.

A first-hand account from a woman who was tortured in Syrian regime prisons sits alongside a review of Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ and an interview with a female police officer in opposition-held areas in the pages of the magazine and on its Facebook page.

Articles on how forced economic dependence negatively affects both women and national economies overall, others discussing potential health problems found in refugee camps such as tuberculosis, a regular column by a female lawyer still in regime areas who previously spent 13 years in prison for political reasons and two translated articles from international media give breadth to the magazine’s roughly 50 pages per issue.

Saiedet Souria publishes sections of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – the ‘’international bill of rights for women’’ adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979 – in every issue, and will publish it in its entirety in the next, she said.

The magazine itself only has a print run of between 4,500 and 5,000 copies per issue (with roughly 3,500 distributed inside Syria through one of its four offices), bit its Facebook page where the articles are regularly posted is followed by over 40,000.

For a country where Facebook and Youtube were banned from 2007 until early February 2011, and where internet and electricity are scarce, this is a significant number. Syria has been on Reporters Without Borders’ Internet enemies list since the list was established in 2006.

In addition to offices in Daraa, Damascus, Suweida and Qamishli, another will soon be opened in Aleppo, Merei said.

‘’All of the ten women who work for us inside get a regular salary of 200 dollars,’’ she explained, ‘’and are responsible for distributing the copies as well as bringing women together for meetings and similar initiatives.’’

The copies are given out at markets and local councils, and in at least one location, noted Merei, the women have a system to recirculate the limited copies once they have finished with them.

Reporters Without Borders has held two workshops for the magazine, in April and September of this year, and offered to donate equipment to the magazine, but ‘’ we had basic equipment – regular printers, computers’’ from an initial investment made by Mallak,  she said.

‘’But what we really needed was paper and ink, to get the magazine to as many women as possible. And so RSF made an exception and offered us that, instead.’’

The goal, she said, is to ‘’help Syrian women regain confidence in themselves.’’

A confidence undermined by the war and by the use of ‘religion’ to control women in Islamist areas which, when she last went to them earlier this year, ‘’seemed like the country had gone back to the Stone Ages.”

‘’I am a Sunni Muslim but the Islam there is not like any I know.’’

‘’One of the major problems is that Syria’s intelligentsia are all either in jail, abroad or dead,’’ one Syrian, who has lived most of his life abroad but came back recently to help try to set up university classes in opposition-held Aleppo, told IPS. ‘’There is almost no one to structure anything, no one to put forward ideas.’’

This is what the magazine and it correlated activities are trying to address, as well, Merei said. ‘’We are trying to give Syrians the knowledge they are going to need in the future,’’ she said.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

As the region is rocked by violence against a backdrop of the rise of radical groups, Jordan’s lesbian gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community fears that new instability in the Hashemite kingdom could lead to increased intolerance towards the community. 

The Jabal Amman historical district, crisscrossed by quaint streets, cafés and art galleries has become a hub for the Jordanian capital’s LGBT community.

“Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences,” says Madian, a local activist. “Jordan does not have any laws against homosexuality; it does not, however, protect civil liberties for people facing discrimination on basis of their sexual preferences” - Madian, a Jordanian activist

Despite the absence of any article in Jordanian law that explicitly outlaws homosexual acts, there have been several crackdowns on members of the gay community. “The targeting of the LGBT community is not something that is systematic, but it still happens from time to time,” says George Azzi, head of the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality.

In October 2008, security forces in Amman “launched a campaign that targets ‘homosexuals’,” after security forces verified that they were gathering and meeting up at a park near a private hospital in Amman, according to a study on Law and Homosexuality: Survey and Analysis of Legislation Across the Arab World by Walid Ferchichit.

In the last few years, a few arrests have been made on the margin of private parties. Most of the arrests were made under the vaguely worded indecency law and the need to “respect the values of the Arab and Islamic nation”, although the arrests were rarely followed by formal charges.

The Hashemite Kingdom is an Islamic country, where homosexuality is considered as a sin. “Some members of the LGBT community have even been arrested for satanic worshipping,” notes Madian.

The basic form of social organisation in Jordan is heavily influenced by tribalism, which weighs on social norms and relations between people. “Members of the LGBT community fall prey to discrimination or violence not necessarily at the hand of the state but of society or their families,” says Azzi.

He recalls two members of the gay community who had to be smuggled out of Jordan to escape the wrath of their families who discovered their sexual preferences, and possible death.

Credit: LGBT Jordan on Twitter

“I know of four people at least who were killed in last few years for this reason,” says Madian.

He also says that while some victims have been the target of honour killings, others have been killed by gangs because they had to seek impoverished and dangerous areas for sexual favours to avoid the scrutiny of friends and families.

Nevertheless, despite such individual cases, the topic of homosexuality seems to be increasingly tolerated in Jordan. In 2012, a book called “Arous Amman” (Amman’s fiancée) by Fadi Zaghmout was published, featuring a homosexual character who was driven to marry a woman despite being gay.

Increasingly, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are advocating gay rights and the LGBT community in the country.

“The LGBT community has been able to carve a space for itself in society, while staying away from anything that could raise its profile,” says Adam Coogle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But, with social and cultural mores considering homosexuality a sin and unnatural, advocating rights remains a taboo in the Hashemite Kingdom, and LGBT activism a somewhat difficult task. “We tried organising a few years back by creating an NGO but our application was rejected by the Ministry of Social Affairs on the basis of the indecency law,” says Madian.

Gay activism has also become more challenging today due to the security situation prevailing in the region, worrying both activists and human rights organizations.

With Jordan home to thousands of Salafi Jihadists, it is directly concerned by possible rising numbers of home-grown members of the Islamic State. Members of the gay community fear that renewed insecurity could jeopardise their space in society.

“Nonetheless, members of the LGBT community are not alone in being concerned about Jihadist threats which also target secular people as well as religious minorities,” adds Coogle.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Nupur Basu
DOHA, Nov 30 2013 (IPS)

According to statistics from the United Nations, one in five cases a year of honour killings internationally comes from India. Of the 5000 cases reported internationally, 1000 are from India. Non-governmental organisations put the number at four times this figure. They claim it is around 20,000 cases globally every year.

While traditionally occurring in villages and smaller towns in India, honour killings have been on the rise and are reported sporadically in the media. The double murder of a 14-year-old school girl and a 50-year-old domestic in a New Delhi suburb with its honour killing subtext has received unprecedented attention, and is perhaps urban India’s most hyped alleged honour killing.

Although the Talwars, the parents of the girl, were charged with the murders of their daughter Aarushi and their domestic help Hemraj, the ‘motive’ for the murders was attributed to honour killing. Special Central Bureau Judge Shyam Lal, while convicting the parents earlier this week, said the dentist couple had found their daughter and the help in an “objectionable position”.

The judgement, based on circumstantial evidence, has however left many unconvinced. But irrespective of what the truth is, the Aarushi case has shone the spotlight on honour killings.

“The social moorings of this case and its ramifications on India’s middle class could not have been lost on anyone,” observed Anubha Bhonsle, an anchor for CNN-IBN, in one of her programmes.

However, if the judiciary, through this verdict, is trying to drive home the message that there will be zero tolerance for honour killings regardless of how powerful the perpetrators are, the question that will come up is whether the courts will apply the same rigour in some of the most gruesome cases of honour killings taking place in rural India, far from the gaze of television cameras.

Cases piling up

Some grisly cases that have been reported in the media in recent times from different regions in the country include that of 23-year-old Dharmender Barak and 18-year-old Nidhi Barak, who paid a heavy price for defying their families and falling in love.
The couple, from a village in Rohtak district in the northern state of Haryana, were tortured, mutilated and killed in public view by the girl’s father and their relatives when they tried to elope. A friend the couple had confided in leaked their plans to the girl’s parents, who lured them back with assurances, only to allegedly kill them in the cruelest manner. The police are treating the double murder as an honour crime.

In September 2013, the Haryana police arrested a police sub-inspector in connection with the killing of a 19-year-old girl from Panipat. Meenakshi had eloped with her boyfriend and the cop had tracked her down and handed her over to her family, who then allegedly murdered her.

On Oct. 24, 2013, in another case from Haryana, a 15-year-old Muslim girl from Muzaffarnagar was banished to her uncle’s house to prevent her from seeing the boy she was in love with. Her uncle allegedly murdered her and buried her in Panchkula District.

While cases of honour killings continue to pile up, convictions are few and far between.

In July 2013, Arun Bandu Irkal from Yerwada in the western state of Maharashtra was served with a life sentence. In 2002, the accused had reportedly stabbed his 17-year-old daughter Yashodha 48 times with a pair of scissors for having an affair with a boy from another caste. She did not survive the attack.

The accused surrendered, then skipped bail and was finally re-arrested in 2011. The court convicted him this year for murdering his daughter. The court said “honour” was the motive behind the murder.

On Nov. 1, 2013, in Bhopal in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, a lower court announced a life term for 10 men in a case of honour killing. The men were accused of killing Amar Singh, the elder brother of Sawar Singh, who had allegedly eloped with Hema, the wife of Balbir Singh, one of the accused men.

The men went to Amar Singh’s house, questioned him about the couple’s whereabouts and then poured kerosene on him and set him on fire. He died of the burns.

New discourse

All these cases have led to a new discourse on legislation. Does India acutely need separate legislation on honour killings? A proposal to that effect has been made by a study carried out for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) on gender laws.

Voices have also been raised to rein in the ‘khap panchayats’ or self-elected village councils made up of male village elders who perpetuate values that, in turn, covertly endorse these killings in the name of saving “the family’s honour”.

Like the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the khaps have attained notoriety by issuing diktats on dress code for women and demanding a ban on the use of cell phones by young girls and women.

In both rural and middle-class urban India, the onus for upholding family morality falls on the women in the family – the daughter, daughter-in-law, wife and mother. By daring to choose a life partner other than the one selected for her by her family, or by committing adultery, she violates the family’s honour. Both she and her lover can face death as a consequence.

Recently, a group of khap panchayats filed a document before the country’s highest court saying they had been wrongly charged for encouraging honour killings in rural India. Earlier, a women’s rights group, Shakti Vahini, had petitioned the Supreme Court to instruct the government to be more proactive when honour killings are carried out.

They blamed the khap panchayats for endorsing patriarchy, which they said reinforced the subjugation of women in society and the resultant honour killings.

Retribution for bringing shame

The court summoned 67 representatives of the khap panchayats to explain their role in honour killings. The representatives submitted a written reply, saying the responsibility for such killings did not lie with them but with the families who failed to prevent their daughters and sisters and wives from interacting with men, which resulted in shame and ostracism by the community.

They argued that women who feared their male relatives never committed such acts and therefore never had to face such consequences. In short, the khap panchayat representatives overtly defended honour killings.

But the problem of honour killings goes well beyond the shores of rural and urban India. They are common in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Bangladesh also has honour killings or assaults in the form of ‘acid attacks’.

Acid attacks, torture, abductions and mutilations all come under this category of crime.

The problem is that in most countries, there is confusion about the definition of what constitutes an honour killing. This confusion often results in the victim failing to get justice. Many families report these killings as suicides and escape punishment under the law, according to international human rights and women’s groups.

According to U.N. statistics, the United Kingdom has 12 cases of honour killings every year, the majority of them among the Asian diaspora. Will countries abroad also have to legislate on honour killings if South Asian and West Asian men carry their patriarchy to foreign shores and murder women who break so-called “cultural norms”?

This year’s Emmy award for best documentary went to a film on honour killings in the UK. Banaz: A Love Story, directed by Deeyah Khan, is about the honour killing in south London of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod who was murdered by her family in 2006.

‘Cancer of patriachy’

Mahmod’s Iraqi Kurd father and relatives felt she had brought shame to her family and community by leaving her husband, who was abusive and an alleged rapist. Mahmod had fallen in love with another man and ended up paying with her life. She was raped, strangled to death and her body was put in a suitcase.

Her father and uncle now face life sentences in UK jails. Two other men, who had to be extradited from Iraq by Scotland Yard, are also serving prison terms, for 20 years. By making these arrests and convictions test cases, the judiciary and law enforcement authorities hope they can deter families from such criminal acts against their female family members.

A case was recently reported where, after a long battle with the Australian immigration and refugee authorities, a couple, a Sikh and a backward caste Hindu who had married secretly in India in 2007, were granted asylum in the country. The couple had said their lives would be in danger if they had to return to India as they feared honour killing for having defied the caste system.

Even as the dust settles on the verdict for the Talwars in Delhi, it will be a while before Indian society really begins to digest the cancer of patriarchy manifested through honour killings. Like all social evils, unless society shuns these practices, the police and judiciary alone cannot save women who want to break free from arranged and abusive marriages.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Al Jazeera or IPS.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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