WUNRN
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Author
Onal Found Remorse Among Turkish 'Honor' Killers |
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05/18/09 |
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By
Anna Louie Sussman |
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Journalist Ayse Onal's coverage of the Turkish men who murdered their sisters and mothers in "honor" killings finds they often feel betrayed by their families. Many killers also want to guide other men away from such crimes. |
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But what they all had in common, she discovered in the 2004 interviews, was a sense of having been duped by their community into their actions. In many cases, the murdered victim's autopsy showed she was still a virgin, dispelling the rumors about her "honor" that had caused the crime in the first place. After the killing, rather than being celebrated as a hero, the murderer was often shunned by his family and community. After Onal made a TV documentary based on these interviews with the prominent Turkish journalist Mehmet Altan, her late friend Mai Ghoussoub, the founder of Saqi publishing house, encouraged her to turn the material into a book. Since the book, "Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed," came out late last year, it has been translated into 19 languages and published in countries ranging from Japan to Norway. It has yet to find a Turkish publisher, however. Onal said that publishers--despite the record-setting TV viewership of her documentary in 2005--assume that because "this is a very ordinary issue for us," it won't sell. Sharing Victims'
"Diaries"
For the book, Onal returned to the villages and houses where the murders took place, and talked to family members, friends and neighbors in order to reconstruct each tragic event. She enriches these portraits with the victims' own thoughts, taken from bits and pieces of found writing, what she calls the victims' "diaries." "I would find the back of a book, or a tissue, where they had written something," she said. Once, in a house in Antep, a family whose daughter had been murdered offered Onal all of her belongings to rummage through. They hadn't been touched since the killing. "I couldn't believe it," she said. "The girl was dead and they had never even looked at her things." Onal says it was not because of grief, but rather that "they weren't at all interested in her story." Need for Cultural
Change
Legal measures, such as a 2004 amendment that toughened sentencing for honor crimes, aren't enough, Onal said. "The ministers have changed the law, but they haven't changed the cultural code," she said. And attention from the European Union, she said, has only pushed the issue underground. Whereas police once freely gave out details of "honor" killings to the press, now they are inclined to keep these types of crimes a secret. Onal hopes instead that what she calls "the two gods of perception," religion and media, will influence Turkey for the better. "Our religion feeds our cultural values," Onal said. "If Turkey wants to be part of the modern world, it will have to change. We don't have to pretend to be secular, because let's be honest, Turkey is not a secular country. But we can work with religious leaders," she said, to combat "honor" killings. A more grassroots approach was suggested by one of the men she interviewed, who gave in to community pressure to kill his sister. "It's easy for women's charities and the EU to say 'stop killing' from afar," he told Onal. "But people will not stop. If you live in our neighborhoods, you would kill. We have to change our neighborhoods, otherwise we will keep on killing." Murat, convicted of killing his mother, said he himself wanted to go into the neighborhoods--be they rural villages or Istanbul's growing informal housing settlements--where many of these crimes take place and root out their potential by holding workshops with local men. He could tell them his story as an example of the futility of preserving one's family honor. Onal said the men are regretful and ready to talk to other men. But the Ministry of Justice is "not interested" in these proposals, which she has suggested repeatedly over the past few years. Jenny White, a professor at Boston University who has written extensively on gender issues in modern Turkey, expects that Onal's ideas may eventually take root, but not overnight. Turkish society, White said in an e-mail interview, still sees women's welfare as a family and community issue that should not be breached by authorities or outsiders. Cat and Mouse
Game
Troubled convicts are nothing new to Onal. She worked as a psychological counselor at a juvenile prison in the early 1980s, but when the government discovered she was "kind of a leftist," as she puts it, they fired her. In 1984, she found work as a political reporter at the prestigious weekly news magazine Nokta. She was one of many women in the newsroom, but, she says, "I was different." She made her name covering conflicts and topics that many of her colleagues, male and female, shied away from: the Iran-Iraq war, Turkey's deep state apparatus, the Kurdish regions, Turkish-Armenian relations and Turkish Hizballah. When she suggested in a 1994 article that a referendum, rather than conflict, might be another solution to the issue of Kurdish separatism, the government let it be known that her name was no longer welcome in print. Undeterred, she continued writing under a pseudonym. "It's a funny game," she said, of the cat and mouse she played with government censors. Then there was the not-so-funny game, she and her son recall together, of hiding for three months in Cyprus from Turkish Hizballah, which had published a death threat against Onal in its weekly magazine in 1994. Since October of 1994, her name has been professionally blacklisted and she has turned to writing books. In 1996, she was awarded the International Women's Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism. She began to focus her attention on "honor" killings in 2004, after encountering a particularly terrible case in which a young pregnant woman and her lover were stoned by their townspeople. "Who are they (the perpetrators), how do they think, how can I understand their terrible motivations?" she said. "This was when I realized I have to look at the men's side. It was this that brought it to my attention."
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ISTANBUL,
Turkey (WOMENSENEWS)--In interviewing imprisoned men who have killed
daughters, sisters and mothers to clear their family reputations in
"honor killings," Ayse Onal often found an unexpected
vulnerability, while in other men she saw a disturbing disconnect between the
murderer and his emotions.
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