Well, exotic examples aside (serial killer, popstar with issues..) culture and different cultural practices are a real issue and not one that is easily solved. Here (sorry for bringing up Germany all the time but it is sort of interesting to compare) so called honor-killings occur with an alarming frequency. Young muslim woman that grow up in western Europe and want to live a "normal" life with going out with friends, having a boyfriend etc. are sometimes killed by their own family because they sullied the families honour with their behaviour. There was a case in Munich where a man, I think he was an iraqi kurd, stabbed and burnt his wife on the street because she wanted a divorce.
In the Munich court room the mood was dead silence, as a 35-year old Iraqi described how and why he stabbed to death and set fire to his wife in the street. He regrets nothing, he said. He had to act in such a way. Because of culture. Because of religion. And because of German politics.
“No”, said the slightly-built man before the Munich criminal court, “I don’t regret that I killed my wife.” He would do it again. She would have earned it. And above all the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany are also guilty of her death. Why: “Because the women here have so many rights, they become immodest”.
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When he says this, it becomes dead quiet in the large, windowless court room that is hearing the spectacular Munich criminal case. The murderers of the folk actor Walter Sedlmayr once stood here before the court. Stricher killed Rudolph Moshammer in the “Samurai murder”, where the victim was divided in two with a sword. But the public sitting in the hard wood benches were never shocked before like they were on this Thursday morning.
Stabbed to death and poured over with gasoline
As he spoke, there was there no indication that he could excuse this as acting out of his mind from rage or passion. Calmly, as if he were discussing a vacation, Iraqi Kurd Kazim Mahmud Raschid, 35, described why he murdered Sazan Bajez Abdullah, 24, his wife, why he stabbed her with a knife and then poured gasoline over the dying woman and set her on fire. His “culture and religion” obligated him “to do what I wanted to do”. And also her father-in-law wanted Sazan, who had brought dishonor over the family, to die: “If you do not kill her, then I am killing you”, he claims he had said, although the father denies it. The crime of the young woman: she wanted to get a divorce.
Sazan Bajuez Abdullah had looked forward to this day. On 25 October 2006 she would become divorced from Kazim Mahmud, the man, whom their parents had intended for each other, but whom she did not love. He had beaten her again and again, so much that the police had obtained a restraining order against him. At 2:30 on this day the young woman was again free. `"The happiest day of my life", she said to a friend after the divorce was finalized.
“Now the time has come”
Three hours later Sazan Bajez Abdullah was dead. Dozens of people in the Maier Leibnitz street witnessed the killing. In the cafe at one end of the street the server had warned Sazan to run home and take her five year old son. The reason was that just a a few minutes before, Abdullah had been in the cafe. Before he left he said: “Now the time has come”. The waitress knew Sazan and Kazim, and told the young woman "he will kill you". But she did not take the threat seriously.
The attack happened in the middle of the road. The man stabbed the woman who had just divorced him 13 times. Then he ran to his car, took a can with gasoline, went to the mortally wounded but still living woman, poured it over, and set her on fire. From the balcony of the nearby houses residents threw down water and wet cloths. Passersby who tried to help the burning woman took the distraught child, who had seen everything, safely away. A criminal investigator, who heard the cries and lived in an adjoining house on that road, arrested the Iraqi.
“I wanted to kill her”
“I wanted to kill her”, he says now before court. And: “I do this if I am a man”. “For nine months already” he had planned the act. Everything was thought of. From the knife to kill her, to the gasoline for the fire, to burn her “because all windows of my life closed”, with her disobedience, the desire for a divorce, her refusal to return to Iraq and the prohibition against seeing his son. If nearby people came to assist the woman, he would have repelled them with two electric stun guns.
Kazim came to Germany ten years ago, an inconspicuous Kurd from Kala Diza in northeast Iraq. He requested asylum, but the application would be rejected. Kazim still acted “patient” but he was not allowed to leave Munich. However, the former mechanic who performed unskilled jobs there, did not abide by this rule. By secretive methods he traveled four times altogeher to his home country and again back to Munich. He told his family in Kurdistan that they should look for a woman for him.
Forciby taken into marriage
They found Sazan. A half hour later two men, who were strangers to Kazim up to that point, met with him for half an hour. Then, Kazim said before the court, the wedding was agreed on and that "Sazan was pleased". Sazan had obviously no other prospects. Their father, then entrusted her later to go to Munich with a friend, in order to be forced into marriage. Their son came into the world on 21 August 2001 in Munich. They gave him a name which means “tear” in Kurdish. Sazan was certainly not the kind of wife Kazim wished for. Sazans application for asylum was also rejected. But she was patient, learned German fast, made friends, laughed a lot, read books and dreamed of becoming a writer. There were conflicts between the two. In October 2005 they showed up for the first time. He tried to strangle her.
A physician actually diagnosed with the young woman with strangulation marks. A temporary restraining order was issued against Kazim, with no contact allowed. From now on he was not allowed to come within 300 meters of his wife or their home. Also he was not allowed to visit his son anymore. Sazan was afraid he might kidnap the child and take him to Iraq. But Kazim never abided by the terms of the restraining order. He stalked Sazan at the bus stop, beat her up there, broke into her mail box, entered her cellar, and on the window ledge left a tape cassette in which he discussed her. It said one could meet her in hell, and that a woman, who in Germany is called a “slut” is better than a woman who does not obey her husband. The police seemed to be powerless. If she came to them, Kazim was always somewhere else in town and contradicted all of her allegations. Only now, after the murder at the young woman, he was convicted to ten months in jail because of the various violations of the restraining order. Almost at the same time, the Administrative Court of Munich rejected a request to waive the court fees for Sazan’s asylum application, which she had filed while she was still alive. Reason of the court: Honor killings and “endangerments because of family honor" are a type of cultural tradition, that is to say: "the problems take root in the general rules of Iraq and their social customs and religious standards”. For the murder of his wife Kazim Mahmud Raschid now faces life imprisonment – without the possibility of parole after 15 years.
In other cases, judges have said that they can't really convict someone for murder if it would not be viewed in their own culture, I guess it is always possible to take tolerance too far.
