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Shafia trial: not an honour killing, just a heinous murder

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Perpetrators (top) and the victims (bottom)

Ivana Davidovic
WVoN co-editor

Outside the county courthouse in Kingston, Ontario, the prosecutor in the Shafia murder trial, Gerard Laarhuis, described a normally quiet Sunday as “a good day for Canadian justice.”

And it certainly was.

Just moments earlier, on January 29, the jury’s verdict brought to an end a murder trial which shook Canada and the international community because of its horrendous “honour” motive.

Three members of an Afghan family living in Canada had been sentenced to life in prison for the murders of three teenage sisters and the first wife of one of the defendants, Muhammad Shafia.

Shafia, 58, his polygamous wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their 21-year-old son Hamed were convicted of four counts each of first degree murders of their respective daughters and sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with their stepmother Rona Amir Mohammad.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable and more honourless crime,” Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger said.

“The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameless murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your twisted notion of honour, a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilised society.”

The verdicts were a culmination of a tragedy which started to unfold on June 30 2009, when Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, together with their father’s first wife Rona, were found dead inside a car.

It was discovered underwater in the northernmost Kingston Mills lock of the Rideau Canal not far from Niagara Falls.

It soon became apparent that this was a premeditated murder.

While the couple’s sons were offered all the freedoms in the world, their daughters were granted no rights.

When the two eldest, Zainab and Sahar, started having boyfriends, Muhammed Shafia and his wife Tooba Yahya made a blood-chilling decision– to kill their own daughters.

According to witnesses, the youngest victim, Geeti, was too rebellious to control and too quick to talk about her home life at school and therefore had to be dealt with. The first wife Rona was treated as worthless collateral, as she could produce no children of her own and took the girls’ side.

The cold and calculated manner in which the parents decided to dispose of their “hard to control” daughters has been the subject of many debates in Canada and elsewhere.

Although the guilty verdicts brought a sense of relief that justice had been served, many questions remain about what the authorities could have done to prevent this terrible loss of life?

The children’s school and the girls themselves sought help from social services. However, a mixture of a perceived need for cultural sensitivity, a well-off and presentable family and children so frightened that they recanted, defeated the child-welfare system.

“Was this political correctness to a painful degree?” asked the Toronto-based activist and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad, Raheel Raza.

“It’s time to stop being so sensitive in the name of preserving multiculturalism”, she added.

“Immigrants bring this excess baggage with them and as a community, our biggest problem is that we remain in denial and we can’t address the issues,” said Pakistan-born Ms Raza.

During the trial, Montreal police detective Laurie-Ann Lefebvre, who investigated a 911 call, testified about her impression of Sahar:

“Well, I was surprised. She said she had no freedom, but she was well-dressed, wore jewellery, had nice makeup. She did not seem depressed.”

This serves as a stark warning that the oppression of girls and women has different faces, and some of them may not be what we expect – battered and outwardly abused.

Honour killing is a term which has been strongly associated with the trial, provoking criticism that it equates a murder with a ritual practiced in cultures far removed from the west.

However legal experts warn that could not be further from the truth. Women in Canada, just like in every country around the world, are killed just for being women.

“I think we’re fascinated right now with the concept of honour killings because that was the name given to it by the prosecution and the accused but that doesn’t change what the underlying activity is,” said Pearl Eliadis, a Montreal human rights lawyer.

“It’s a violent assault on women because they’re women.”

Although the Shafia murder case has been one of the most horrifying in Canadian history, there have been unfortunately many cases of men, angry with the behaviour of their wives and girlfriends, deciding to kill them or their children – or both.

In the Canadian province of Quebec in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available, nine of the 11 people killed in conjugal violence were women.

There were 27 attempted murders, 23 of which were committed on women.

Police reported 17,321 domestic offences, 14,242 of which were against women.

In 86 per cent of the cases, the perpetrator was either the woman’s husband or her ex partner.

The Kingston-based executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Alia Hogben, says she has trouble with the word “honour killing.”

She prefers to call it “customary killing” since it maintains patriarchal customs.

She points out that the Shafia case went above and beyond that to blatant, outright “femicide.”

“If you look deeper, that’s what this issue is. Why do men think, in this patriarchy, that they have the control and the power to kill somebody because…[they think] they are doing the wrong thing or are deviant?”

She believes these kinds of killings can happen in any culture which is dominated by men.

“Anywhere there’s patriarchy, which allows you to say ‘Men have to be the protectors and guardians of women’ is heading for trouble.”

  1. Cher Calusa says:

    Why on earth do we ever attempt to classify murder as a culturally motivated act? The Merriam Webster English dictionary lists the following words as synonyms for “culture”: accomplishment, civilization, couth, cultivation, polish, refinement. Conversely the list of antonyms includes: barbarianism, barbarism. A social practice is not necessarily a cultural practice. Murdering and oppression of women no matter what the technique is called, is practiced within every country on earth by persons who are pathologically egocentric or misogynistic. Cultural sensitivity is not a suggestion that we ignore murder and oppression. This idea reminds me of how the child abuse and spousal abuse laws came into effect in the USA. In the not too distant past, neighbors would never think of interfering in family violence because people felt it inappropriate to interfere in someone’s “personal family” business. Many children were emotionally scarred for life through beatings and sexual abuse and their mothers as well. This was tolerated in the name of “family privacy.” Our women, all women can be protected by members of society caring enough speak up and quit hiding behind the myth of cultural sensitivity. I hope all men who read this article will be inspired to cultivate true sensitivity and love towards the women who are their mothers, sisters and wives. Society will never be able to stay cohesive until we honor and love our women.

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