Another honor killing, this time in Turkey. From Reuters, with thanks to Cathy J. Palmer:
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish police have arrested a man and a dozen of his relatives on suspicion of murdering his 14-year-old daughter, a rape victim, to salvage the family's "honour", according to newspaper reports.Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, is under pressure from Brussels and from human rights groups, to crack down harder on "honour killings", which involve the murder of women by male relatives for bringing shame on the family name.
Nuran Halitogullari was taken captive and raped late last month by a man while she was going to a market in Istanbul. He kept her prisoner in his home for four days, the papers said.
Police then arrested him and returned Nuran to her parents, but the family decided she must die for "soiling" their name. Her father and 17-year-old brother strangled her with a wire.
They buried her body in a forest and also tried to kill her rapist but he was already in police custody. ...
Experts estimate up to 70 women are murdered annually in honour killings in Turkey, mostly in the conservative [i.e., firmly Islamic], mainly ethnic Kurdish southeast region. Scores of other women take their own lives under pressure or fear of attack.
Turkey's parliament is preparing to strike from the penal code clauses used to reduce sentences for murders committed in the name of honour. It is part of a wider drive to clean up Turkey's human rights record and promote its EU bid.
In another recent case which drew strong Turkish media interest, a 22-year-old woman was shot dead by her two brothers as she lay in a hospital bed in Istanbul recovering from an earlier assassination bid.
Guldunya Toren was killed for having a child outside wedlock after being raped by a cousin in southeastern Turkey.
In a sign of the changing times, Turkey's Muslim preachers recently condemned honour killings and said all forms of murder were a sin in Islam and were forbidden.
That's great. I hope they convince everyone in Turkey. But there is much evidence that this practice is justified on Islamic grounds. Last year Jordan's Parliament rejected a law stiffening penalties for honor killings because Islamic hardliners, according to Al-Jazeera, "said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."
Turkey has long had two faces, like many Muslim countries. One face is modern, secular and tolerant. The other Turkey refuses to acknowledge its genocide of millions of Christian Armenians and Assyrians 90 years ago, continues to suppress its tiny Christian community, which includes the patriarch of patriarchs for the Orthodox Church and destroys Christian churches and shrines on the "Turkish" side of Cyprus, which it occupies illegally. News of honor killings in Turkey do not surprise me. Turkey has always been a wolf in sheep's clothing. I hope that they never get to join the EU.
In Cyprus, incidentally, Kofi Annan's take-it-or-leave-it "agreement" would have permitted 600 Turkish soldiers to remain on the island for 18 years. The refusal of the Greek Cypriots (whose churches on the part of the island now in Turksih hands have succumbed to much Muslim vandalism) has received universal condemnation, without anyone bothering to actually read the proposed agreement (which is, with all the side documents, some 9000 pages). Is it just possible that the Greek Cypriots, who admittedly have not been well served by the likes of some of its past leaders, such as Archbishop Makarios (who wanted to win Arab Muslim support in the most obvious way), have a point in rejecting the agreement? Might there be something, in the long history of their relations with Turks, that would cause them doubts about joining in a single state with the Turks on Cyprus, not all of whom are, judging by what has happened to Orthodox Churches, quite the tolerant Westernized Turks tourists are likely to meet in the bookstores and cafes of Istiqlal Caddesi?
As I read it, the worst part of the UN proposal was that it gave Turks an equal number of representatives in the legal body of the "reunified" country even though they only account for 25 percent of the population.
Not fair at all, and the Greeks were wise to reject it.
who cares. just get me a kebab turk. with friends like these who need palestinians....
TURKEY: HONOR KILLINGS EXPOSED AS MORE FAMILIES MOVE TO CITIES
"Murders, beatings and other violence against women within families-including suicides among girls and women - are occurring with increasing frequency in cities throughout Turkey, where massive migrations to urban areas have contributed to social pressures and clashes between traditional and modern lifestyles, the Washington Post reports.
The United Nations estimates that as many as 5,000 women and girls worldwide were killed last year by family members. Researchers say that at least 200 of these 'honor killings' are known to occur every year in Turkey, but add that the real number may be higher.
Turkey is one of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world, shifting from 75% of the population living in rural areas to the same proportion living in cities in less than 50 years. 'Honor crimes are happening all over Turkey,' said Pinar Ilkkaracan, director of a human rights group in Istanbul. 'Honor killings are the tip of the iceberg. What is under the surface is terrifying.' Turkey is expected to vote on significant changes to the county's civil code amid increasing calls from women's groups to amend criminal statutes that allow judges to consider local custom and tradition in levying penalties for a variety of crimes.
Although honor killings are frequently premeditated and the killing of a family member in Turkey is punishable by the death penalty or life in prison, honor is often ruled by judges to be an admissible provocation and the penalty can be reduced. In addition, if the defendant of an honor killing is a minor, the penalty is frequently cut to two years or less."
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Source: Women's International Network News, Autumn2001, Vol. 27 Issue 4, p46, 1p
TURKEY: HONOR KILLINGS STILL CONTINUE IN RURAL AREAS
THE NEW YORK TIMES, July 13, 2003
"Last month, a woman named Cemse Allak was buried in a corner of a municipal cemetery. Ms. Allak, unmarried and pregnant, had died from a stoning. Villagers and local lawyers said Ms. Allak - as well as the man who had made her pregnant - had been killed to restore the honor of their families.
For seven months after her stoning, Ms. Allak lay semi-conscious, her skull crushed, unable to move or speak. Still, according to the people who watched over her, Ms. Allak was capable of expressing a wide range of emotions with her eyes. Relatives visited once, in the beginning, to tell the hospital staff that they could not pay for her care. The fetus inside Ms. Allak died six weeks after the attack.
When Ms. Allak died on June 7, no one from her family claimed her body, and none of her relatives attended the funeral.
Just two days before Ms. Allak's funeral, the elected Parliament of this predominantly Muslim nation approved a sweeping human rights law that, abolished a provision that often reduced the prison terms for murders committed in the name of 'family honor.' The legislation is part of a broader effort to secure Turkey's long-hoped-for admission to the European Union and, more profoundly, to answer the centuries-old question of Turkey's place in the world: whether in Europe or the Middle East.
The death of Ms. Allak, 35, underscores the distance between legislative pronouncements emanating from Ankara, Turkey's modern capital, and the sometimes grim, medieval realities of everday life in other parts of the country...
By most accounts, Ms. Allak fell victim to the age-old honor rode that survives in the villages of southeastern Turkey, a system so unforgiving that some villagers here said they were relieved to learn of Ms. Allak's death.
If she had survived, the villagers said, the family of the man who had been killed with her would have been obliged to take revenge on Ms. Allak's family, since it was Ms. Allak's brother who was suspected of his murder. Mehmet, her brother as well as four other relatives, have been charged in the murder of the man, Hila Acil, who was stoned to death at the same time in a field outside town. Despite last month's legislative changes, Mr. Allak's lawyer said he was confident the local judges would understand.
Nearly everyone in this village agrees that Ms. Allak's problems began with Mr. Acil, age 55 and father of 11...
According to accounts the incident began when Mr. Acil dropped Ms. Allak's father off at work, and then returned to the Allak house where he apparently found Ms. Allak alone. What happened next is unclear, but Ms. Allak, whom neighbors described as quiet and unassuming, became pregnant.
Some members of Ms. Allak's family said she had been raped; others in the town suggested that the two had engaged in consensual sex, still she had brought shame upon her family. Mehmet Allak's lawyer, said his client had killed Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak...
The stoning of Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak appeared to follow tradition which, according to villagers here, is the religiously sanctioned trial and stoning of a dishonored woman or man by villagers.
For years, men - and occasionally women - accused of killing their spouses or family members could invoke Article 462 of the Turkish criminal code. That gave judges the discretion to reduce a murder defendant's potential sentence by more than 80 percent.
Emin Sirin, a member of Parliament who supported repealing the law, said he hoped the legislation would quickly bring the medieval practice to an end. 'To kill a woman. . is no longer acceptable,' Mr. Sirin said 'It is Murder.'
But abolishing the more pernicious local traditions will take a much longer time, and require far more effort, than merely passing laws.
Mr. Demirkesen, the lawyer for Mr. Allak, wondered why this case had generated such publicity. 'There are a lot more interesting honor killings than this one,' he said, and then proceeded to tell of four other such killings that he knew of in recent years .... In the months that Ms. Allak lay in the hospital, her neighbors in the village said they grew concerned that her survival would set off a vendetta between the Allaks and the Acils. If Mr. Allak had indeed killed Mr. Acil, and if Ms. Allak survived, then the Acil family would be obliged under local tradition to take vengeance... Hence the relief expressed by villagers when Ms. Allak finally died..."
Editor's Note: This horrendous report certainly confirms that Turkey is not fit to join the European Community (they were recently rejected after trying repeatedly to gain membership). Turkey has 'allowed' these and other brutal Islamic criminal attacks on helpless women in the name of 'tradition' The government has done nothing - until this case aroused adverse international publicity: It remains to be seen if they will now.
Source: Women's International Network News, Autumn2003, Vol. 29 Issue 4, p44, 1p
About the tourist comment. Turks do not have a history of viewing, say British tourists as dhimmis since thankfully the Ottoman Turkish invasion of Europe began to fail with the failed sieges of Vienna and never made it remotely close to Britain. But Turks do have a history of viewing Greeks as dhimmis which they have transmitted through time to this very day. While the British were ruling Cyprus, the Cypriot Turks did not mind, infact most of them collaborated with the British against EOKA fighting for independence from Britain. The 1960 Constitution of "independent" Cyprus which was put down Greek Cypriot throats with the British and Turkish bullying guranteed for the 18 percent Turkish minority 30 percent of all civil service posts and 40 percent in the miltiary and police, plus a Turkish vice president with veto powers, which he excercised arbitrarily because the Turkish leadership wanted Taksim or partition. This made the 1960 independence a joke, the Turkish community never fought for independence and their leadership fought for division and Turkish invasion, Britain on purpose helped craft a non-workable Constitution which led to the Turkish invasion.
A comment from Bat Ye'ors "The Dhimmis..." has stuck with me. In the back of the book in the documents section there was passage about Christians from powerful European countries being considered by the muslims as reconciled, and the dhimmis under Islamic jurisdiction as being reviled. Islamic countries like Turkey, would be nothing militarily without buying military equipment or getting it for free from the infidels. They have to reconcile the differences between dhimmis and powerful Christian nations or else who will they wage jihad?