In Family Horror, Some Canadians See
Culture Clash.
by Charmaine
Noronha(AP and OfficialWire)TORONTO (CANADA)
Canada Killing for Honor
On a summer
morning in 2009, in canal locks east of Toronto, police made a grisly
discovery: In a submerged Nissan car were the bodies of three teenage
sisters and a 52-year-old woman.
A joyride
gone tragically wrong, claimed the father, Mohammad Shafia, 58, who
reported the disappearance. An "honor killing," prosecutors
allege. A murder trial is under way, heating up a national debate about
how to better absorb immigrants into the Canadian cultural mainstream.
The
prosecution accuses Afghan-born Shafia, his wife, and their 20-year-old
son of killing the daughters because they dishonored the family by defying
its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and going online.
The older victim was Shafia's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, who was
living with him and his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, in
Montreal. It was a polygamous relationship, the court has been told, and
if revealed, could have resulted in their deportation.
The parents
and son, Hamed, have pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder.
The family
had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai
before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married
Yahya because his first wife could not have children. The second marriage
produced seven children.
The months
leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, the
court has heard. Zainab, the oldest at 19, was forbidden to attend school
for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she
fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.
The jury
heard testimony that Zainab's sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were
hounded and trailed by their brothers because the parents suspected them
of dating boys; that Sahar repeatedly said her father would kill her if he
found out she had a boyfriend; that she had bruises on her arms; that
Mohammad, the first wife who was helping to raise the children, also was
brutally treated.
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Zainab ran
away from home for a couple of weeks and her sisters contacted
authorities, saying they wanted to be removed from the home because of
violence and their father's strict parenting, the prosecution said.
Prosecutor
Laurie Lacelle presented wire taps and cell phone records from the Shafia
family in court. In one phone conversation, the father says his daughters
"betrayed us immensely."
Fazil Javad,
Shafia's brother-in-law, said Shafia tried to enlist him in a plan to
drown Zainab.
"Even
if they hoist me up to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my
honor. There is nothing more valuable than our honor," Lacelle quoted
Shafia as saying in an intercept transcript.
Taking the
stand and speaking in his native Dari through an interpreter, Shafia
portrayed himself as a loving father with his daughters' best interests at
heart. He repeated his contention that the famil members were returning
from a Niagara Falls holiday, were in two cars, and were overnighting at a
motel when Zainab took one of the cars.
The
daughters met an accidental but "rightful" death for their
disobedience, he said.
"You
believe there's no value in life without honor, don't you?" asked
Lacelle in cross-examination.
"My
honor is important to me," Shafia replied. "But you can't regain
your honor with murder, respected lady, you must know that.
"I'm a
strict Muslim, but I'm not a killer."
Other
relatives — two of the children and a brother-in-law of Shafia —
testified in support of the joyride scenario and portrayed the family as
loving and caring.
The trial
then adjourned for the holidays and will resume on Jan. 9.
Canada takes
in 250,000 immigrants a year, more per capita than anywhere save
Australia, and in recent years a number of so-called honor killings have
prompted debate about absorbing immigrants into the mainstream and dealing
with culture clashes between immigrant parents and their children. Even
before the trial, Rona Ambrose, the women's affairs minister, had said the
federal government was considering making such killings a separate
category in the criminal code.
Her office
has not replied to recent questions about whether the change is going
through, and the debate continues about the larger issues the Shafia case
has raised about assimilating immigrants.
More than 80
Canadian Muslim organizations, imams and community leaders have signed a
call for action against "the reality of domestic violence within our
own communities, compounded by abhorrent and yet persistent pre-Islamic
practices rooted in the misguided notion of restoring family honor."
On the other
hand, statistically, nonimmigrant Canadians have a higher rate of
murdering spouses and children, in some instances, also over family
dishonor. Jeffrey Reitz, a sociology professor at the University of
Toronto who specializes in immigration issues, warns against using the
term honor killings and equating it with any specific culture.
"If you
label it an honor killing, the tendency is to say, 'Oh, what a terrible
culture that is,' and the problem (of domestic violence) stems across
cultural groups," he said.
The United
Nations reports 5,000 females a year are victims of honor killings around
the world. In Canada, social worker Aruna Papp says she has counted 15
cases since 2002, while psychiatrist Amin Muhammad, commissioned to write
a report for the government about honor killings in Canada, predicts there
will be more as immigrant communities grow, bringing in some newcomers
with militant cultural beliefs.
"Immigrants
who come here can't bring their own mindsets with them. They can't
practice their own cultural ideologies if they go against the grain,"
he said.
The
government must do more, and offer services that are more visible and
accessible, especially to non-English-speakers, he said.
Tarek Fatah,
the Pakistani-born founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, is a fierce
opponent of Islamic militancy. He says it is shocking that honor killings
are happening in Canada, calling them "a slap in the face of our
fundamental value of what it is to be a human being."
Papp, the
social worker who wrote a report on honor killings for the Frontier Centre
for Public Policy, a privately funded conservative think tank, worries
that domestic violence rooted in family honor has spread to
second-generation families. She argues for tougher background checks on
would-be immigrants, as well as teaching immigrants Canadian rights and
values.
Papp, who is of Indian descent, speaks from experience. "I came here when I was 21, with a third-grade education. I had children when I was young. I didn't know how to properly parent," she said. "I did and said things I didn't know at the time were wrong, things my parents did and said to me growing up that were acceptable within the Indian culture. It's a learning process. Parents, especially immigrant parents, need to be taught parenting skills and what's acceptable behavior here."
