Honor Killing in Germany

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04berlin.html?pagewanted=all
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> December 4, 2005
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> The New Berlin Wall By PETER SCHNEIDER
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> On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu,
> 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in
> Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and
> upper body, fired at point-blank range. The
> investigation revealed that months before, she
> reported one of her brothers to the police for
> threatening her. Now three of her five brothers are
> on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor,
> the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the
> middle brother (24) lured his sister t! o the scene
> of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her. The
> trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest
> brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed
> that he had done it without any help. According to
> Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is
> generally the youngest who are chosen by the family
> council to carry out such murders - or to claim
> responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a
> maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for
> murder, and the offender has the prospect of being
> released after
> serving two-thirds of the sentence.
>
> Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter
> of Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade,
> her parents took her out of school. Shortly after
> that she was taken to Turkey and married to a
> cousin. Later she separated from her husband and
> returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave
> birth to a son, Can. She moved into a women's
> shelter and completed the work for her middle-school
> certificate. By 2004 she had f! inished a
> vocational-training program to become an
> electrician. The young mother who had escaped her
> family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put
> on makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and
> adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets.
> Then, just days before she was to receive her
> journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.
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> Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun
> Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany,
> she had begun living like a German. In a statement
> to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted
> that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that
> she refused to go back to her family and that she
> had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle
> of friends." It's still unclear whether anyone
> ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the
> father of the family who decides about the
> punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal
> practice cases in which the mother has a leading
> role: mothers who were fo! rced to marry forcing the
> same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a
> Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of
> women on this topic, explained, "The mothers are
> looking for solidarity by demanding that their
> daughters submit to the same hardship and
> suffering." By disobeying them, the daughter calls
> into question her mother's life - her silent
> submission to the
> ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two elder
> brothers have papered their cell with pictures of
> their dead sister.
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>
> here is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To
> cross this wall you have to go to the city's central
> and northern districts - to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and
> Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world
> unknown to the majority of Berliners. Until
> recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that
> living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants
> and children of immigrants was basically working.
> Take Neukö! lln. The district is proud of the fact
> that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40
> percent of these, by far the largest group, are
> Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists
> of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly
> in Brandenburg, the former East German state that
> surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2
> percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in
> Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from
> Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about "our
> Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although
> they are less friendly when it comes to
> Arabs, who arrived decades after the Turks and
> often illegally.
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> But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to
> change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel
> to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity"
> with Americans by the German majority, rallies of
> another sort were taking place in Neukölln and
> Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building
> courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse
> and joyful; two rockets here, three rockets there.
> Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting
> skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most
> Berliners were searching for words to express their
> horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and
> Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was
> the first time they stopped to wonder who their
> neighbors really were.
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> When a broader German public began concerning
> itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its
> midst, it was primarily thanks to three female
> authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates,
> who in addition to practicing law is the author of
> "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla Kelek ("The
> Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your
> Daughters, Not Your Honor"). About the same age, all
> three grew up in Germany; they speak German better
> than many Germans and are educated and successful.
> But they each had to risk much for their fre! edom;
> two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu's fate.
> Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a
> hatchet when she refused to greet him in a
> respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was
> lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's
> shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap
> Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to kill
> herself to escape her first forced marriage; later
> she was taken to Turkey and married against
> her will, then she returned to Germany with two
> children from this marriage and took refuge in a
> women's shelter to escape her father's violence.
> Taking off from their own experiences, the three
> women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim
> women in that model Western democracy known as
> Germany.
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> Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten
> scene from seven years ago. Every time my daughter,
> who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for
> a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at
> the door at 10 p! .m. to pick up their daughters. My
> wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn't
> like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening
> posture, either, but I was a long way from
> protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter
> told me that one or another girl in her class was
> not taking biology or physical education and no
> longer going on field trips.
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> For a German of my generation, one of the most
> holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance.
> We Germans in particular had no right to force our
> highly questionable customs onto other cultures.
> Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports
> and
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