Nightcap at Dawn by J B. Walker

Author:J B. Walker [Walker, J. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620871706
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

Choice and Insubordination: Honor Killing and Self-Immolation

But there is also a sobering, more sinister reality that soldiers learned almost by accident: The violence against Kurdish women, the honor killings. And, strangest and most heartbreaking of all, self-immolation: Women burning themselves alive.

Honor killing is generally associated with sex and adultery, but as we understood it, whether among Kurdish, Sunni, or Shia families, it has little to do with either. In reality, honor killing is not about sex, adultery, or any of it. Rather it is an issue of choice.

A woman who is brave enough to exercise choice, in matters proscribed to her by family, by tradition, by religion or whatever—even if she exercises her choice by refusing—that choice is tantamount to insubordination. It is this insubordination that is defined as dishonor. Insubordination of women, in deeply patriarchic and conservative Muslim families, infused with local traditions, immediately becomes a matter of dishonor. That apparently makes it possible for some men with little spinning hamsters in their hearts and heads to tolerate hideous crimes against women, confounding the little spinning hamsters in the heart with honor! So, an angry little man can feel self-righteous in murdering some woman—a family member, most often trying to escape a forced marriage, sexual abuse, or domestic violence. And for some women, the only remaining choice she can impose on this gruesome reality is to kill herself with the only weapon she has at hand.

Most of these acts, given the conservative nature of the society, go unreported anyway. In Islam’s Sharia law, which most tribes follow in the absence of formal judicial process, one male witness is worth two female witnesses! Does it mean a woman is worth only half a man under Sharia and in Islam? Thankfully, many decent and educated people have a subtler interpretation, but there are nut-jobs who live by the Sharia code and take it literally, and soldiers have seen how it manifests itself on the ground.

That simple reality perhaps explains a lot. How can a woman living in a deeply traditional society, surrounded by people seeped in such thinking, manage to report anything at all (to either traditional authority or formal authority), if a man’s word is equal to the report of two women? (In the case of rape, absurdities multiply. The rape victim becomes twice a victim and faces stoning as due “punishment.”)

There are many educated Iraqis who disagree with this situation. Soldiers carrying guns are no experts on the issue of Iraqi women’s rights, but they did not miss this situation because they were willing to listen. A husband and wife, both doctors, pointed it out, and it was the beginning of a different education, another counterintuitive lesson in this counterinsurgency.

Many reports of women’s suffering trickle out of Kurdish areas, but it should not be concluded that women are in fact worst off in Kurdistan. On the contrary, those reports are the clearest sign that they are doing far better in Kurdistan than in other places. In Kurdistan, many formidable

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