Killing for honour

Where Money Talks

A 16-year-old dead Kurdish girl's farewell letter to her father is one of the most heart-rending commentaries I have come across on the immigrant condition. But it tells only half the story. It gives only a glimpse of the anguish that must provoked the 48-year-old father brutally to murder his daughter.

Like two million subcontinentals, the father and daughter were caught in the social and cultural challenge of life in Britain. Whatever justification such immigrants give for abandoning their native shores, most are economic refugees.

From tycoons to tailors, they go West to earn more. A few, like Abdalla Yones, who fled Iraq 10 years ago because of his involvement with Kurdish separatists, may also be political exiles. But they stay on when it is no longer politically necessary because life is more comfortable in the West.

Trouble arises when they want to stay on their own terms. Not everyone is fortunate like Lord Swraj Paul who once claimed to be "100 per cent Indian and 100 per cent British." Few can take pride, like Han Suyin, the novelist, in acknowledging that the Eurasian state is one of culture, not ethnicity.

Fewer still are cosmopolitan like Edward Said, the philosopher and activist who died the other day, who could not decide whether English or Arabic was his mother tongue. "Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is."

Lesser folk try to reconcile the several worlds they straddle uncomfortably. And cope with incipient hostility. When Sir Ludovic Kennedy, a well-known television personality, said the electronic media showed too many black faces, he was expressing a popular underlying sentiment.

The ethnic Pakistani Hanif Kureshi's novels portray the immigrant's dilemma. So did Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding and Gurinder Chadha's Bend it like Beckham. Each immigrant has his own strategy for survival.

Someone once said of a bunch of Indians who had been in London for decades that they still lived in India but went into Britain to work during weekday office hours. Chinese migrants live and work in Chinatown.

That was not attractive young Heshu Yones's way. She threw her lot in wholeheartedly with British norms, wore make-up, used a mobile and was described as bubbly and fun-loving. She also took a boyfriend, an 18-year-old youth from her class at college who was, horror of horrors for her Kurdish Muslim father, Lebanese and a Christian.

"Me and you will probably never understand each other," she wrote in a pathetic farewell letter to her father (she addressed him as "Hi Dad") when, tired of his beatings, she decided to run away. "I'm sorry I wasn't what you wanted, but there's some things you can't change."

The escape never happened. Yones caught his daughter in the bathroom, stabbed her 11 times with a kitchen knife, slit her throat, and then, while the girl was bleeding to death, slashed his own throat and tried to commit suicide by jumping from an upstairs window.

Like bride-burning in India, such "honour killings", as they are called, are becoming alarmingly frequent, especially among Muslim and Sikh immigrants. At least 12 are reported every year. Rita Rupal of the Asian Women's Project says there were 444 cases of domestic violence in 12 months, the aggressors being husbands, fathers, nephews and mothers-in-law.

The bone of contention is not money but morals or, rather, mores. The targets are girls who dress in a way their orthodox elders find offensive, refuse to do housework or to go to mosque or gurdwara, who go out with boys and "" worst of all "" reject arranged marriages.

They are often stabbed or strangled to death as Heshu Yones was. "There was nothing 'honourable' about her murder," was the stern view of the policeman handling the case, and he was not wrong either.

For though Yones felt his family honour had been smirched, especially when an anonymous letter at the Kurdish exiles group he attended called his daughter a prostitute and accused her of sleeping regularly with her Lebanese Christian boyfriend, the courage of his convictions failed him at one stage.

Lingering in hospital after his bungled suicide attempt, he tried to make out that his daughter and he had both been attacked by the Al Qaeda. Better sense prevailed at his trial when he pleaded with the court to be executed.

Since the law did not permit that, he was sentenced for life. "This is a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of Western society," was Judge Neil Denison's understanding view.

The tragedy of yet another life cut short highlights the differences but does not remove them. It warns Britain's police, judiciary and social and welfare authorities of the conflict of cultures and advises them to handle it with sympathy. But that is only half the problem "" and by far the less important half.

The real answer has to come from the immigrants themselves. They have been uprooted physically and emotionally; they find themselves in a society that is not always welcoming; they must eke out a living and try to remain true to themselves.

The ill-fated Heshu tried, albeit unknowingly which is the best way, to assimilate. Her no less ill-fated father has a lifetime of painful imprisonment to reflect on the consequences of trying to hold on to the ethics of his Kurdish mountains. If there is a harmonious middle way, it has yet to emerge.