WUNRN
SYRIA – WOMEN FEAR ABUSE IN MARRIAGE, BUT ALSO FEAR STIGMA OF DIVORCE
By Xanthe Ackerman – January 25, 2015
Meet "Nur", a Syrian refugee who has suffered
sexual exploitation at the hands of her Turkish husband. But was it rape, and
can she even escape?
The night after
their wedding, Eren stood over Nur in a dusky Mediterranean hotel, “You are old
enough! Get ready to fuck or I will send you back to the camp!”
A friend of
Eren’s married a Syrian woman last year who he said was pious and subservient.
Wanting the same, Eren pursued an arranged marriage with Nur, promising her
escape from the Kilis Camp on Turkey’s southern border. After he raped her
repeatedly on their honeymoon, Nur fled, taking shelter at her brother’s house.
But Nur says the stigma of divorce for Syrian women is unbearable, and so she
prepares to reconcile with Eren.
Having fled the
war, Syrian women and girls are vulnerable to exploitation
and increasing levels of abuse.
Some look to marriage for protection, others are victims of pimps or
matchmakers out for profit. Recently, a Turkish man in Gaziantep threw his 22 year-old Syrian
bride from a 5th story window. Still, the stigma of divorce is so
strong that some women, like Nur, a refugee living in a camp in southern
Turkey, would rather risk abuse.
TAKING SHELTER
It was 5:30am
on the 7th day of Ramadan, 2012 when Nur heard the helicopter
overhead. The rebels in Aleppo were taking government buildings and shooting
any bureaucrat that resisted. Out her window, she saw them for the first time.
In civilian clothes, a half dozen of them pointed an anti-aircraft machine gun
at the hovering bird.
Abdul, Nur’s
older brother, tried to push her inside so she wouldn’t see the gun. She
broke through his thick arms. DIDIDIDIDIDI, erupted from the barrel, and the
buildings shook. Even in military training in school, Abdul had never heard
fire like this. He found Nur cowering inside, crying.
Nur didn’t want
to leave the house. She was 26 and no longer receiving suitors when Abdul
bought it with savings from working in Saudi Arabia. He gave her a room facing
the mosque so she could hear the muezzins’ call to prayer.
But after the
helicopter and the shooting, tanks skirted the city. Nur’s neighbors filed out
like worker ants, and she followed.
While Nur and
her parents slept on the floor of a cousin’s dental clinic, Abdul crossed the
border and got a toehold teaching English in Gaziantep, Turkey. By March of
2013, he had enough money to send for them, but not to feed them.
When Nur
checked into Kilis Camp she thought she could survive it for a few months until
the rebels took Aleppo. The two-room metal container had a toilet and with
patience she could cook semolina pudding on the electric stove. The camp was
sterile and clean, and she got $41 a month from the Turkish government to buy
food.
By the summer,
when days peaked at over 100°, and with the windows closed for modesty, the
container became an oven. The water shortages went on for weeks during the
fasting month of Ramadan, and stir crazed residents suspected the authorities
were punishing them. Although Abdul long ago told Nur she could stop wearing
her long coat, in the camp other women called her a prostitute unless she was
covered in black, head to toe.
Four years into
the war, she no longer indulged thoughts of returning to Aleppo. A friend
showed her a picture of her house in Aleppo. Bombed and pocked with shrapnel,
it reminded her of the moon’s cold surface.
AN ARRANGEMENT
Back in Syria,
they used to call her Dr. Nur. That was after Abdul rescued her from the
demonic Jinn spirits that tormented her.
Once, she wrote
an exam for two hours and then handed in a blank form. She told Abdul that the Jinn
visited her, threatening her, forcing her to erase each of her responses,
one by one.
Afterwards,
Abdul watched her spiral out of reach. She pleaded to someone that he couldn’t
see, “Don’t touch me!” She punched the wall and yelled to the spirit, “Show me
where you are if you are a man!” Only reading the Koran gave her relief.
"Four years into the
war, she no longer indulged thoughts of returning to Aleppo"
After giving up
on doctors and sheiks, Abdul tried something radical. He got Nur a job as an
assistant in a dental office. Some mornings she ran the clinic in her boss’
absence, and when she took x-rays in her white coat, the patients called her
doctor.
But when the
war started, Nur stayed home again. Assad’s soldiers were everywhere, harassing
girls at checkpoints and kidnapping them.
Abdul, lonely
without his family in Gaziantep, talked often to the caretaker of his building.
He was a balding, potbellied Turkish man, common but good. His nephew, Eren,
wanted a subservient bride, and he said a Syrian woman would be suitable. With
this Muslim man, Abdul thought Nur could find a decent life away from war.
At the
engagement, Eren said he didn’t want Nur to work. He would pay for a year of
Turkish lessons after the wedding. Until then, they could make due with the
little Turkish she knew. In June, when Nur announced that she was engaged on
Facebook, her friends wished the beautiful bride a thousand congratulations and
the grace of Allah.
A BRIDE'S RIGHT
Nur didn’t want
dancing at the wedding with so many friends dead in Aleppo. She sat next to
Eren, holding hands under the table while picking at her kebab. Nur told him
she was afraid of consecrating the marriage. She knew nothing about sex. When
women gathered back in Syria to talk, she always excused herself, embarrassed.
Eren promised he could wait, even ten days if needed.
The dowry
wasn’t much to pay for Eren’s well-off family, just 30 grams of gold in bangles
worth $1200. Abdul wanted his father to ask for ten times that much. When
Eren’s father said, “I will treat her like my third daughter,” it cinched the
deal.
That night,
while Eren was in the shower, Nur padded through the rooms of the 15th
floor apartment, taking video on her phone of the view, the stainless steel
inset kitchen appliances, and the white furniture trimmed with gold.
Eren found her
in the bedroom and demanded, “Take off your clothes,” and then again, louder,
when she started shaking. He didn’t touch her, except to rip off each of the
fake nails that she wore. He mounted her and penetrated her. He looked for the
blood of her hymen on his prick, and checked her hands to make sure she didn’t
deny him by fingering herself. Then he thrust into her mouth.
Nur’s mother,
Muna, got married when she was fifteen, having never met her husband or seen
her future home. After a few years, she was unhappy and wanted a divorce; but
she was uneducated, orphaned, and a mother in a country with no enforced
alimony system.
A few weeks
before the wedding, Muna sat in Abdul’s apartment and reflected on a woman’s
rights in marriage. According to Muna, Islam says the man makes decisions in
the home, but a woman has a right to discuss matters. Divorce was the only
other right Muna could name. Years ago, her friends told her that her husband
would change. Now Muna still wants a divorce, and says, “After six children and
35 years, nothing has changed. If I had taken a decision then, I would have
been 18 years old.”
The day after
Nur’s wedding, Eren wanted sex again, but Nur was sore. Livid, he left her
alone in their hotel room for eight hours without money, food or water. She had
never stayed in a hotel and didn’t know how to get electricity in the room
without the key.
That night, he
returned. “You are old enough. You shouldn’t be sore,” he told her. After
cussing at her, and telling her he’d send her back to her container in Kilis
Camp for good, she submitted.
"She knew nothing
about sex"
For eight days,
Nur tried to please him by day. By night she asked herself if her husband was
raping her.
When I saw Nur,
she had fled to Abdul’s apartment, needing space to make sense of her jumbled,
disappointed new life. I passed Eren’s uncle in his caretaker’s booth, his
stomach resting on his thighs as he sat smoothing his comb over. He had told
Abdul that he heard of Eren’s abuses and pitied Nur.
Comfortable in
her brother’s apartment, Nur wore red slacks and a fitted sweater. When she got
up to make coffee, I saw that if we walked together, I’d have to look up at her
a foot. She showed me a picture of her husband just before they married. At 31,
Eren has the easy frame of a football player, and light eyes under blonde hair.
While I wrote,
Nur talked hurriedly, expelling the abuses onto my notebook, but when it was
done, she asked, “Should I stay with him?”
NO BETTER HOPE
In Syria,
divorce is a frightening prospect for women. Although citizens have equal
rights in civil law, family law and divorce falls within the realm of sharia.
Men, but not women, can unilaterally divorce with only a verbal decree. If a
woman divorces through court proceedings, she rarely gets alimony, and she
loses custody of young children if she remarries.
In Turkey,
divorce falls under civil law thanks to Ataturk-era reforms after World War I.
The separating parties have equal rights, except for a stipulation that women
cannot remarry for 300 days after divorce without permission from the court.
But Nur has not
looked into family law in Turkey. Her concern is a social one. Each Facebook
message she receives erases the hope of hiding her shame.
Back in Syria,
women buy plastic hymens
on the black market, afraid of being sent back to their families, or worse, if
there’s no blood on the wedding night. Without her virginity, Nur fears she has
little chance of remarrying. Even Abdul says, “Muna would never let me marry a
divorced woman.”
Three weeks
later, Nur decided the stigma would be unbearable, and that she would try
again. She said it was half her fault for texting her friends too often, which
made Eren mad. Abdul, full of hatred for Eren, with one arm around Nur, dialed
Eren’s parents to arrange a reconciliation meeting.