Turkey struggles to cope with 'honour' killings
Ignoring the pleas of his 14-year-old daughter to spare her life, Mehmet Halitogullari garrotted her – to restore the family’s honour after she was kidnapped and raped.
Nuran Halitogullari, was buried in Istanbul today in a ceremony attended by women’s rights advocates.
She was the latest victim of a long history of “honour killing” which the Turkish government is struggling to curb.
Each year, dozens of girls are killed in Turkey by relatives for allegedly disgracing their families, some for merely being seen speaking to men.
Nuran was abducted in Istanbul on her way back from a trip to the supermarket and raped over six days.
She was rescued by police and returned to her family.
Her father told police that he and other relatives took the girl to an aunt’s home where he strangled her, ignoring her pleas and her cries.
“I decided to kill her because our honour was dirtied,” he said. “I didn’t listen to her pleas, I wrapped the wire around her neck and pulled at it until she died.”
He said he buried her beneath a chicken coop, which upset his other children, and later buried her in a forest.
Halitogullari also planned to kill his daughter’s rapist.
In another honour killing, Turkish authorities this week charged two brothers with murder after they shot their sister in the head in her hospital bed, as she was recovering from an earlier attack by them.
The 22-year-old mother was shot for having a child out of wedlock.
Last year, a pregnant woman who was stoned to death by her family after having an affair was buried in a pauper’s grave after they refused to bury her.
The European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, is pressing the country to take steps to curb the practice it says is a violation of women’s rights.
Parliament last year voted to raise the punishment for such crimes to 24 years in prison. But a loophole in the laws allows relatives to escape with reduced sentences as light as eight years if they can prove they were “provoked” into committing the crime.
Guldal Aksit, the minister in charge of women’s issues, said legal arrangements alone would not stop the killings.
“These are not problems that we can solve on paper by changing laws…we need to educate society,” she said.
Women’s groups believe that a number of suicides among young women in the south-east are in fact murders perpetrated by family members who believe they are saving the family honour.
Often the youngest member of the family is forced to carry out the killings in the belief that a youth would get a less stringent punishment.
